Chapter Thirty-Seven
Jules is still breathless as she bites into the Double Decker in the dim light of the Taco Bell. They ran nearly a mile without stopping.
Lucy sits across from her, not eating anything, picking at an empty hot sauce packet, her eyes still blazing.
Jules startles at the sound of a siren outside.
“Relax,” Lucy says.
“What if someone saw us?” Jules says. “What if—”
“These guys don’t report. They don’t want cops anywhere near them. He probably has a stack of kiddie porn in that shitbox he lives in.”
“You say this like you know. Like you’ve done this before.”
Lucy offers a sly grin. “How do you feel?”
Jules is still catching her breath, still in shock. She takes another bite of the Double Decker. She knows exactly how she feels. The same way she felt the night she punched the rapist photographer in the face in Milan. Exhilarated. But more important, not afraid.
“I’ll tell you how I feel,” she says. She plucks the sexual predator list from Lucy’s bag. “Let’s do it again.”
The second time wasn’t a charm. The guy—the list said his name is Ray Warren and that he’d raped a seventy-eight-year-old woman when he was a teenager and spent most of his life in prison—was a big man.
The pepper spray barely fazed him. He punched Lucy in the eye, bringing her down quickly. Then backhanded Jules in the mouth.
“You gals picked the wrong house,” he said in a calm and terrifying voice.
He dragged them both inside. He would have surely assaulted them if Lucy hadn’t gotten to her handgun in her purse. She didn’t shoot, just held it pointed at his chest. The man did an air kiss as they backed out of his mangy home.
Now they face Jack and his team, who were waiting in the hotel lobby when they returned. Madison and the male agent must’ve discovered they’d slipped out. Both agents look at their shoes now.
“Oh my god,” Jack says, examining Lucy’s black eye, Jules’s fat lip.
“Did he … Did the Subject…” Jack can’t say the words: Did May Day take them again? Hurt them again?
“No,” Jules says. “It wasn’t him. Or anything like that.”
“Then what happened? What—”
“Nothing,” Lucy says. “We ran into a door.”
Jack looks at Jules, then back to Lucy, whose eye continues to swell.
“We just want to go to bed,” Jules says. “I promise, we’re fine.”
“No you’re not,” Jack says.
“What are you—?”
“It’s your sister.”
Jules’s heart crashes to the floor. “Clare? What about her?”
Jack swallows. “She’s missing.”