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We turned back to him to see him pound on the desk angrily.
And he was shouting again when he said, “Get the fuck outta here! I mean it!”
One thing I knew about this, Sergio Duzek was in on the missing women.
The other thing I knew about it, Mr. Shithead was terrified of him.
The last thing I knew about it, I was terrified of him too.
With nothing for it, I had to channel my inner Rolex-extorting badass.
This was what I did.
I circled my finger in the air and said, “Let’s roll.”
We walked out to the car, and as we did, I caught Duzek’s eyes and called, “Hey.”
I was trying to play it cool.
Duzek wasn’t in the mood to play it cool.
Instead of saying hey back, he asked, “How’s it feel to be watched?”
Yikes!
They’d noticed me in Tweety.
Totally.
I gave him my best confused look. He openly didn’t buy it. I looked away and stopped trying to sell it. And we all got in the car.
I pulled on to Roosevelt, and no one said a word.
We were nearing The Parking Spot when Luna noted, “I know you’re fired up, Raye. But that was not good. I think we need to give ‘We’ Duzek and not be seen anywhere near Roosevelt and Van Buren betweenSixteenth and Twenty-fourthuntil, maybe, my fortieth birthday.”
“Those women are somewhere, Luna, maybe somewhere close,” Jess said.
“Yeah, and my birthday is tomorrow, and I’d like to see my next one, not to mention all of yours, so my vote is, we feed this to ‘We,’ encouraging them to push the powers that be to look hard at Duzek and talk to that night clerk, then go back to our normal crazy.”
No one said anything.
So Luna pressed, “Anyone else gonna vote?”
“It’s hard to leave them hanging high and dry when we now have a prime suspect,” Jess replied. “Some of them have been gone for years.”
“I don’t want to leave them high and dry either,” Luna returned. “I hate the idea. It’s fucked up. But we, in fact, arenotCharlie’s Angels, so until you can go hand-to-hand with four assailants without messing up your hair, maybe we should dial it back.”
“It’s my fuckup,” I put in. “It got us something, but it was smack in ground zero. I was cocky. Now, I’ll email ‘We,’ give them what we got and tell them we feel the danger level has elevated significantly, so we’re dialing it back.”
“Raye—” Jessie began.
“Jess, love you, babe, but I think you missed it. That was a direct threat from that guy. He sees me, or any of us again, he’s not going to stay leaning against his car. And I already lost two people I love in my life due to shit like this. I’m not going to lose anymore.”
Thatended the discussion.
So we drove back to The Parking Spot in silence, and we did it feeling shit.
I was used to feeling shit like this.
