Chapter 14 #2
The guy nodded, and without a word, he turned on his heel and headed back inside.
I fueled up the truck, then followed the path of the attendant and went inside for that cup of “jamocha,” as Abby likes to call it. She’d started slinging that one around a few weeks before we came to Montana.
Walking to the door, I smirked. She’d thought she was so clever combining “java” and “mocha” to form a word that was fun to say.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Arby’s had been offering a shake with that name for at least fifty years.
Possibly longer. My mom used to get them as a summer treat when I was little.
Abby did that a lot, actually—inventing combinations of words to use as everyday slang.
I’d learned that that was yet another common trait among the neurodivergent.
They loved to invent words based on the sensory stimulation they got when they said the word out loud.
It’s why Edgar avoided certain sounds. She’d once told me she disliked words like “wreck,” “rural,” and “prescription” because of how they felt in her mouth.
And don’t get me started on her annoyance with February.
When forced to say it, she overenunciates the first R out of principle.
And she’d change other words that were softer. Like changing “really” to “rilly” and “very” to “vera.” My favorite was the time she and Oscar were working a case over in Hill Country—the area west of Austin—and Abs had traded “hillbilly” for “hillybubba.” Oscar’d had a field day with that one.
Walking inside, I stifled a chuckle. After pouring myself a cup of jamocha, I paused in the snack aisle to grab two packages of powdered doughnuts and made my way to the register.
The attendant had pulled the hood of his sweatshirt away from his head and stared at me curiously while I laid out the goodies.
“You okay to drive?” he asked.
“Me?”
He nodded.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged and motioned with his chin toward the truck. “If you’re tired, you can park around back and catch some z’s. I just can’t let you park at the pump longer than it takes you to pump some gas.”
I grimaced. The guy looked like he felt bad for knocking on my window.
“I appreciate it, but I wasn’t sleeping. I was…” A wave of emotion caught me off guard. “I was missing my wife, and I just needed a minute to get it together.”
It was his turn to grimace. “Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know you’re just doing your job. It’s cool.”
As I reached for my wallet, he asked, “Was it cancer?”
I took a deep breath. Part of me didn’t want to get into it with him, and simply saying yes would avoid any further discussion, but I bit back that reply and told him the truth. “No. She was abducted six months ago, and I’ve been looking for her ever since.”
His jaw dropped, and his eyes grew round and wide. “For real?”
I nodded and laid three twenties on the counter. And then I took out my phone and pulled up the screen saver with my favorite photo of her in the Adirondack chair.
He stared at the photo for a long couple of seconds.
Too long.
A jolt went through me. “You’ve seen her,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
He licked his lips, and his gaze darted from the screen to me and then back again. “Nah,” he said unconvincingly. “I mean, I thought for a second she looked familiar, but I don’t know her.”
I didn’t move either the phone or my gaze, even after he placed my change on the counter. “Have a nice day,” he muttered.
Behind me, the bell above the door jangled, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught someone come in and step up behind me in line.
The attendant glanced nervously at me again. “I gotta help the next person,” he said.
“That’s unfortunate because I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where you’ve seen my wife.”
The guy audibly gulped. My gaze narrowed, hoping he saw how intent I was to slap it out of him if he continued to stonewall me.
“You said she was abducted six months ago?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then, yeah. Maybe I saw her. She was…with another guy.”
“What guy?”
He shrugged. “I dunno, man. Just some random guy.”
Behind me, the person who’d come in cleared their throat. I turned, seeing a man with a pot belly, salt-and-pepper beard, and greasy hair staring at me in annoyance.
“How much?” I asked him.
“How much what?” he replied.
“How much gas did you put in your car?”
He blinked for a few seconds, then said, “I haven’t yet. I’m here to prepay.”
I glanced out the window and saw his SUV parked at the pump on the other side of mine. I then turned back to the attendant and stripped off three more twenties, laying them on the counter. “For the gray SUV out there.”
Werewolf packs, rejected mates, and a second chance that was never part of the plan.
There are more stories like that on Lokepub.
The attendant took my twenties and rang up a sale. “Sixty on number three,” he said.
The guy who’d come into the station muttered, “Uh, thanks, mister. Appreciate it.” Then he hustled out quickly, before I could change my mind.
I stared levelly at the attendant. I’d pay for every customer who came in for the rest of the goddamn day, if needed. This guy was gonna tell me what I wanted to know.
“Description of the guy you saw my wife with.” It wasn’t a question. It was an order.
Sweat dotted the skin above the attendant’s brow. “White guy. Tall. Brown hair.”
“How tall?”
“Uh…around our height.”
“Weight?”
He shrugged. “Maybe two-twenty?”
A steel fist clenched around my stomach. The guy was big. My wife, although not tiny and in no way weak, was physically no match for a guy over six feet and two-twenty.
“Did you hear him speak?”
The attendant nodded. “He wanted to know where the bathroom was.”
“She was with him?”
Another nod.
Bile lit the back of my throat. “She was with him when he went to the bathroom?”
Another nod. And a grimace.
“Willingly?”
Another shrug. “She was out of it, dude. Like, drunk or really high.”
“Why did you think that?”
“She just seemed out of it. You know, her eyes were rolling around and her eyelids were droopy.”
“And it never occurred to you that she might’ve been roofied? Or in trouble?”
Another shrug. “They could’ve been together. How was I supposed to know?”
“But something seemed off to you, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe. She smelled nice. She was pretty. He smelled like he’d been camping for a week or two, and he was dog ugly.”
“Any discernable tattoos or scars on him?” I was gonna have a sketch artist work with this idiot, but I needed to confirm the tiger tattoo that Gwen had seen.
To my surprise, the idiot nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Sweeping a finger across the top of his hand, he added, “He had a couple of tattoos across his knuckles.”
That was news. Gwen mentioned only the tiger. “Describe them.”
Idiot scratched at his cheek, hesitating. I knew he remembered this guy, and I knew that he was afraid of him for some reason. The reason became a little clearer when he said, “On his right hand, he had DTOM across his knuckles.”
I squinted, working through the acronym. “Don’t Tread On Me from the Gadsden flag.”
“Yeah. And he had the snake coiled around his wrist.”
“Got it. Anything else? Maybe a tattoo on the inside of his forearm?”
Idiot nodded. I was relieved he was opening up, like giving a confession “He had a tiger on his forearm that was…licking a lady.”
I nodded like that didn’t affect me. “And? Any others?”
He lifted his right index finger to trail across the knuckles on his left hand, slowly ticking off the other tattoos he’d noticed. “I-I-I, the percent sign, and a bunch of stars across the top of his hand.”
Fuck. Me.
“He’s part of the Three Percenters,” I said, trying to swallow past the gigantic lump in my throat.
Idiot nodded again.
It was my worst fear. Maybe even worse than my worst fear, if my worst fear was that Abby was dead; the only thing worse that I could possibly imagine was that she’d been taken by a domestic terrorist organization like the Three Percenters.
If they knew or discovered that she worked for the FBI…
I shut my eyes while my mind scrolled its way through crime-scene photos of what domestic terrorists did to their enemies.
“Hey,” the attendant said. “Dude, you, okay?”
I opened my eyes, realizing that I was swaying on my feet. “No,” I told him, because it was the truth.
After taking a couple of deep breaths, I pulled out my phone, opened my contacts app, and slid it toward him. “I need your info. I’m gonna have a sketch artist contact you to get a better description of this guy.”