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He grunted at that, accepting the truth of it, as we moved into the yard, getting into my car instead of a bike.
Quiet was going to work in our favor in this particular instance.
"Where we heading?" he asked as I backed out.
"Gotta make a stop," I answered vaguely, uncomfortable having him with me, knowing there were likely going to be questions, but pretty sure there wasn't a force on earth strong enough to get Edison out of my car right about then. And there was no getting around making the stop seeing as I needed to look into the fuck, find out where he was located, find out shit on his background. "Here," I said, tossing him a phone. "Go into my contacts and find the one marked Luce. Call it."
Edison gave me a look that said he was going to have some questions, but went ahead and hit the call button.
It wasn't a phone like he was likely thinking.
It was a fucking page.
Yes, as in a pager.
Luce was a bit old school and paranoid.
Given his, er, profession, that made sense.
Luce killed people for a living. There was no way to sugarcoat that. Sure, you could call him what he truly was- a vigilante. He only killed bad guys. He always did it for the greater good. But he was a killer, plain and simple.
So when you had that much literal fucking blood on your hands, you had to cover your tracks. Everything was done in code. Everything was careful to the point of paranoia.
Which was how he always, fucking always got away with it.
He wasn't even a blip on the cops' radar.
When Edison gave me a look, I shrugged. "Send a 122 then a couple zeroes, then put 62 and hit pound, and hang up."
"You've said his name before," Edison said, looking out the window as I drove. "And I've heard Jstorm and Alex talk."
Yeah, well, Janie and Alex were mildly obsessed with Luce. I guess them doing their own form of vigilante justice in the cyber realm made them feel like Luce was a kindred spirit. They had met him a couple times a while back while working on a case with Barrett and had looked into him. Once they found him, it was all history. They were fucking fangirls, plain and simple. And since Laz let it slip to them that I actually knew the bastard, they had been up my ass to tell them more.
Which, well, I fucking couldn't.
That was the reason Luce let me be on his list, let me have access to him. He trusted me. As much as I liked the girls, I wasn't losing that.
He was right too; I had made the mistake of talking about Luce in front of him and Laz back when Bethany had her shit going down. When we had to walk away from those pill mill fucks and I said Luce wouldn't let them get away with what they were doing.
Then about six weeks later, we found the good doctors were officially 'missing.'
Missing.
They would never be found.
Because they didn't exist anymore, not a single trace of them.
That was how good Luce was at what he did.
And while Laz and Edison had given me a look, I had shrugged it off.
From then on, I was careful not to use the name, not to flaunt that connection.
But, as they say, desperate times...
"Alright," I said as we pulled up out front of Barrett's office. "When he comes in, we're heading into the bathroom. You're going to have to hang with Barrett."
The inside of Barrett's office was a mess of paperwork in fucking Polish and code. Coffee cups were every goddamn where. The man himself was behind his desk, writing something furiously on a piece of paper.
His head raised, seeing Edison first, his brows going together, then landing on me. "Oh." That was all he said, knowing the drill.
Edison walked over toward the wall, looking at the paperwork plastered there, doing so with interest which made me think the fuck might have spoken Polish on top of Romanian. Though how he saw through the code was beyond me.
It was maybe five minutes later when he came in, black hoodie on with white hood pulls. I swear he owned fucking stock in whatever company made those damn things because it was all he wore and I knew he burned everything after each, ah, job. The hood was pulled up, his head lost within, always choosing to remain as anonymous as possible when he was going in and out of Barrett's, not wanting anyone to know who he actually was.
The hooded head jerked and kept walking toward the bathroom in the back.
"Be right out," I told Edison, and followed him in.
He reached up and pulled the hood off. "A 62?" he asked, brows drawn together. "You need information? Usually, you're the one coming to me with info."
