Chapter 13 Rob
ROB
“I can’t believe you lost them!” I shouted at Derek, who was checking the tracking on his phone.
“Hey, I’m not the only one who lost them. Your woman is gone, too,” he snapped.
“She’s not my woman.”
“Well, she sure as shit isn’t mine.”
Sinner leaned back against the SUV with a huge grin on his face.
“What are you smiling about?” I snapped.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just nice that this has nothing to do with me for once. Or Maggie. Christ, could you imagine if Freckles was here and I had to call Cap and tell him his dearly beloved had been kidnapped?”
“Yeah, he’d freak out because he’d have no one to procreate with,” Derek laughed.
My eyes widened at the smile on his face. “How are you so calm? Your wife—the woman you love—has been kidnapped, and you’re smiling!”
His eyes turned lethal as he glared at me. “First of all, my Claire Bear knows how to handle herself. Second, if you think I’m totally fine with what happened, you’d be wrong. Trust me, there will be hell to pay when I find the fuckers who took her. And third…”
“Yeah?” I asked, waiting for whatever brilliant thing was about to come out of his mouth.
“I gotta pee.”
He turned on his heel and walked inside without a care in the world. His woman was gone, and he was going to pee.
I threw up my hands in frustration, pacing away from the vehicle as I tried to figure out my next move.
“You need to calm down.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Sure, I’ll calm down,” I muttered.
“I don’t get why you’ve got your panties in a twist. The girls are gonna be fine. We have the tracking.”
“If you have the tracking, why are we still in this parking lot?” I shouted.
Sinner walked over, rubbing my shoulders to calm me down. All it did was piss me off. “Dude, you’re so tense. This is Claire we’re talking about. And you saw the way your woman fought. She can handle herself.”
“Yes, but Clarissa doesn’t have tracking. What if they split them up?”
“Krista.”
“What?” I snapped.
“Dude, you have got to learn your woman’s name. It’s Krista.”
“It is?”
Rolling his eyes, he headed back for the SUV. “Get in.”
I was about to ask why when I saw Derek storming our way. Fucking finally, he looked like he was ready to kill someone.
“Did that pee set everything straight for you?” I asked sarcastically.
He climbed in, slamming the door behind him. “Two men, heavy set. Definitely enforcers of some kind. My guess is the mob.”
“The mob? Why the hell would the mob be after Carmen?”
“Krista!” Sinner snapped. “Jesus, if you tell Parker you lost his sister and can’t even remember her name, he’s gonna gut you like a fish.”
“Not if the mob does it first,” Derek surmised. “Tracking shows them about twenty minutes ahead of us.”
“If we hadn’t stood around here yapping, we might already be caught up to them!”
Derek turned in his seat and pinned me with a stare.
“Look, I get that you’re not in the field very often, and that must be hard for you to swallow right now.
But our women weren’t just taken. They were drugged, which means that if we get caught up in a high-speed chase, all we’ll accomplish is getting one or both of them killed in an accident.
They can’t escape on their own, so the safest bet is to follow them to wherever they stop, then kill the fuckers who took them. ”
“But you waited so fucking long!” I exclaimed. “You went inside to pee!”
“I went inside to get footage,” Derek argued, “which is your territory, and something you would have done right away if you weren’t freaking out about Krista.”
“Who the hell is Krista?” I snapped.
“Your woman!” they both shouted at me.
I ducked my head, rubbing my hand over my forehead and the growing headache that was eliminating all possibilities of thinking clearly.
The general pounding was no longer the worst part about all this.
Now, there was a growing pressure that seemed to be squeezing the very insides of my skull until it felt like my brains would ooze out through my ears.
Derek tossed a bottle over the seat to me, then turned and handed me water. “Drink. You look like shit, and you’re clearly not thinking straight.”
“What exactly did you do when you were out here?” Sinner asked.
I swallowed down the pills and went over it again and again in my mind, but the answers were still blank.
“I don’t remember seeing her until I woke up in her bed.”
“Nice,” Sinner grinned.
“No, I mean, I have no memory of running into her anywhere. I boarded a flight for California, and…that’s where things get fuzzy.
I don’t remember getting off the plane. I don’t remember anything at all.
Just waking up in her bed in Montana. And somewhere along the way, we apparently met half the people in town.
They all know about us, but we know nothing. ”
“So, she doesn’t remember anything either,” Sinner stated.
“Exactly. For days. What the hell would do that?”
“Electro-shock?” Derek asked.
“I remember every second of what happened in that room,” Sinner snorted. “Trust me, it’s not electro-shock.”
“And no burns,” I added.
“The simplest answer is drugs, but I don’t know of any date rape drugs that erase your memory for days,” Derek said.
“And you both remember the same things?” Sinner asked.
“If by the same things, you mean waking up at her house together. She doesn’t remember meeting me either.”
“There is someone you could get answers from,” Sinner said. “All you have to do is pick up the phone.”
He snatched the SAT phone off the console and handed it over to me. Taking it, I hesitated to call him. Not because I didn’t want to know, but because I was uneasy about what I would learn. What if I had done something horrible? What if I was involved in something horrific?
Still, answers were the only way forward. I pressed his name and waited for the line to connect.
“This is Cash.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but barely got a squeak out before my throat seized.
Sighing, he snapped, “What the fuck do you want?”
“It’s Rob.”
“Well, it’s about damn time you called me back. Do you know the shit storm I’ve had to deal with because of you?”
“Nope.”
“That’s it? You storm my operation and all you have to say for yourself is nope?”
I scratched the back of my head, feeling a little cornered. “Honestly, I don’t remember anything.”
The man sighed in frustration on the other end. “Fucking perfect.”
“I think there was a woman with me. Any chance you can tell me what happened?”
“Not much. I stormed a warehouse to rescue trafficking victims. You were there with a woman, but I only saw you escaping. I assumed at the time you were helping one of the women escape, but when you didn’t check in, I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.”
“Did I see you?”
“Not sure. You had to have heard the gunfire and took your chance.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Where was this warehouse located?”
“Off the strip.”
“Wait, I thought you said I was in California?”
“I never said that. We were in Vegas.”
Vegas. There it was again. Everyone seemed to know I was in Vegas but me. I still had no idea why I was there when I was supposed to be in California.
“And you didn’t see the woman or me again after that?”
“Nope. You just disappeared. I called Cap and yelled at him for interfering in our operations, but imagine his surprise when he said the tracking wasn’t working.”
“It was dug out,” I murmured, remembering how Cap asked me about it earlier.
“So, the question is, did you dig it out, or did someone else?”
“You said you were rescuing women. Who was holding them?”
“The Ratti Family.”
“I thought the Italians were against trafficking.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“And you don’t know if the woman I was with was part of the same group of women you were rescuing?”
“Like I said, I only saw you escaping. I assumed as much, but honestly, I can’t be sure.”
That wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start. “Hey, can you send Sinner the coordinates of the warehouse? Maybe checking it out will ring a few bells.”
“On it.”
The line went dead without another word. Snorting to myself, I handed the phone back. “Just like Cap. The fucker hung up on me without a goodbye.”
“What more was there to say?” Sinner asked. “So, what did he say?”
“Not much. He saw us running out. He assumed Cathy was part of the group of women he was rescuing.”
“Krista,” Sinner snapped. “Jesus, I’m gonna get her name tattooed on your forehead.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter if I remember her name or not,” I argued. “If we don’t get her back, Parker’s going to gut me and chop me into little pieces. Can we just forget about my faults and focus on the fact that they’re missing?”
It was silent for all of two minutes.
“Geez, someone’s cranky when he doesn’t get his Wheaties.”