45. Jace
Chapter 45
Jace
I peered at the dive bar through Benji’s windshield and sighed as another couple left, stumbling with their arms around each other. “This is a waste of time.”
“Maybe,” Wolf admitted, “but it’s one of the few things we’ve got.”
Staking out the dive bar with Wolf or Otis was one of the few times I got out of the house.
Being a fucking ghost sucked.
Wolf or Otis went with Daisy into town — we still had a tracker on her phone, but no way were we letting her out of our sight — while I paced the house, working on the punch list and wondering how my life had gotten so fucked that I couldn’t even show my face in the town where I’d been born and raised.
“Do we though?” I asked. “We’ve been doing this for weeks, and that doesn’t even count the time before I came back when you and Otis took turns.”
We’d found the mention of the dive bar on Calvin’s phone but had no way of knowing if it was important. It had just been a single meeting spot with the man named Mr. X in the weeks before Calvin had kidnapped Daisy.
“Everyone has their favorite spots,” Wolf said, idly tapping the steering wheel.
He wasn’t wrong. We had a handful of places we used to meet people in secret. Humans were creatures of habit, especially when they felt threatened, which ironically was the worst time to be a creature of habit.
“Still,” I said, shifting in the car. “This blows.”
“You could have stayed home. Otis would have come,” Wolf said.
“I’ve got fucking cabin fever. This just isn’t my favorite way of getting rid of it.”
Wolf turned to look at me. “You can come out of hiding anytime.”
“Not yet,” I said, looking back at the neon sign over the bar: Mo’s . “We’re not close enough yet.”
Derrick’s revelation at the Strike had rocked our world: Michael White had lived at the Blackwell Home for Boys with my dad.
And they’d been into some shit.
Except after the place burned down — I couldn’t think about it without smelling the fire at the Blades compound, couldn’t stop wondering if the two fires were connected — Mac and my dad had stayed in Blackwell Falls while Michael White had left to go to a fancy business school in Philly.
Pre-law no less.
That had been easy to find through the database used by employers to verify attendance and graduation at a university, but it had been the only thing we could find.
There was nothing else about Michael White except the date of his graduation. After that, he’d fallen off the grid: no social media, no LinkedIn profile.
“It’s weird, right?” I asked Wolf.
“What’s weird?”
“The Michael White thing,” I said. “He must have worked his ass off to get into Wharton, and you know he got scholarships or something.” White had been a foster kid. It wasn’t like he’d been bankrolled by a rich family. “So he goes to this fancy school, graduates, then disappears? The guy was pre-law, not some philosophy major who decided to ditch everything and travel the world with a backpack. He worked on the law review, for fuck’s sake.”
I didn’t know much about the law review, but from what I’d read online it was a big deal to work on it in any school.
“It’s definitely weird,” Wolf said. “I’m just not sure it matters.”
I frowned. “White is the only one besides Mac who can tell us what happened between them and my dad in high school, and that might be the key to figuring out what happened to make my dad sign me over to Mac like a fucking used car.”
“You’re right. I didn’t mean it that way. Sorry.” Wolf paused. “We could ask Mac.”
“And have him blow me off like when I asked him about Daisy’s mom?”
Mac had been a fucking blank wall when I’d asked about him and Eleanor Mercer. I’d had to dig through the old boxes on the compound — had to find pictures of them together — to know how tight they’d been.
To know they’d been in love.
Wolf sighed and I slumped down in my seat and looked out the window. In the distance, the neon sign glowed red like a warning.
Did I really want to dredge all this up? So my dad had left. I was the first kid in the world who’d been abandoned by a parent. Or two.
But I kept seeing those fucking guardianship papers, my dad’s name scrawled across the bottom. How fucked up did you have to be to make your own kid an orphan when you’d been one too?
Part of me wanted to leave it alone, but another part — either a really crazy part or the only sane part — wanted to know. That part of me thought maybe I wasn’t going to be able to move on from it, to move forward, until I did.
Until I knew.
And I did want to move forward. I wanted to move forward with Daisy. It was basically the only thing in my life I knew was still true.
I fucking loved her, even if I couldn’t say it out loud.
It was as true as the beat of my own fucking heart.
It was more complicated for Daisy. We’d killed Blake. She’d set it aside when she found out why, but life wouldn’t be easy for her if we stayed together. Not in a town where the Blackwell Beasts had been front-page news for weeks.
Not in a town that knew she’d be living with her brother’s murderers.
“Think we should take it to Aloha?” Wolf asked. “The Michael White thing?”
“I think Aloha is sick of our shit.” He’d done a ton of work for us because we were brothers in the Blades, but his patience was wearing thin.
“We could run it down ourselves,” Wolf asked. “It’d probably get us further than sitting outside this dump every night.”
“Run down the Wharton thing?” I asked.
Wolf nodded. “There’s that professor, the one who still oversees the law review. Maybe he’ll remember what happened to White.”
I rubbed my cheek, felt the scratch of my unshaved face. “It’s not a bad idea. At least we’ll be doing something.”
Wolf kept tapping. “You ever been to Philly?”