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When they pulled up, the backseat door to the first one opened and I climbed up to find myself sitting next to not Lo, but a very young, slight, black-haired, tattoo-covered slip of a girl with a laptop on her lap and an energy drink in her hand, typing impossibly fast with one hand.
"Ryan," a female voice came from the passenger seat as she turned back to face me. And there she was in all of her gorgeous blonde-haired, brown-eyed, badassness. Lo. "So, here's the sitch, Jstorm got in touch with Ross and he gave her the plates off the car and she ran them. They came back to some lowlife named Ray Cleaver who has a rap sheet as long as my right arm. Aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, three possession charges, one charge with intent to distribute. Oh, and he likes to get locked up for fucking prostitutes too. From the looks of the mugshots of the prostitutes he got hauled in with, though, he gets off on making it even more unpleasant for them as an already unpleasant job is bound to be."
"Fuck," I growled, finding myself almost unnecessarily annoyed by the sound of the girl next to me tapping furiously, even if it was on the case.
"The good news here would be, from what Jstorm can tell in the video, Ray was the one driving, not the one in the back with her."
"Who was the one in back with her then?"
"The picture is grainy," Jstorm supplied, not bothering to look up from what she was doing. "But my best bet would be Dom's secondhand man who is actually his brother, Albert." With that, she swiveled the laptop in my direction to show me a quick picture of the man in question then a rewind of the clip from hotel security.
My stomach clenched hard, watching Dusty explode out of the building, frantic. Something had her freaked. Something happened to make her leave the apartment. And for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what that might be. She couldn't leave her own apartment with alarms warning her she would die if she stayed.
It made no sense.
But when she passed the car, the door swung open, and a man who did in fact look like the Albert guy pulled her in and they sped off.
"This is a good thing why?"
Jstorm turned the screen away and resumed her tap tap tapping as Lo gave me an understanding look. "Albert seems to have a cooler head in situations. He has no rap sheet. His only arrest was for driving without a license... when he was seventeen. Nothing since. But he works in the organization. So I'm thinking he's the one to keep things calm and rational. He's not going to pull over the car to let shit happen to your girl when they know he knows they're working on a clock because Dom already told Bry about the abduction. So, for the next hour and a half, she is probably okay. And you need your head in the game."
I took a deep breath, nodding. "Okay. What do you need from me?"
"Your phone," Jstorm said, doing gimme fingers at me without looking up, so I dropped it in her palm. "I need to talk to this friggen Bry guy before he does something stupid."
"Good luck with that," I said, looking out the side window. "He's in love with her. He's not likely to listen to reason right now."
Lo gave me a look I didn't exactly understand until about three seconds later, Jstorm's rapid-fire, no-nonsense, profanity-filled voice blasted into the quiet cab of the car.
"Shut up and listen to me. I'm Janie from Hailstorm and I need you to get your head out of your fucking ass for two minutes and listen to the plan..."
So then she told him and me and, apparently, Lo because I was pretty sure no one in that car knew what the plan was until Jstorm laid it out for us.
But even I had to admit that it just might work.SIXTEENDustyOf course I wasn't on Bry's emergency contact list in his phone.
It was easy when faced with what you thought was a life or death situation to not really think things through clearly.
Maybe, three years before, that would have made sense. We used to be that tight. Along with my uncle, he was in my emergency contacts in my phone as well as my work forms. But Bry had gone through at least three phones since then and had to reprogram those numbers. He wouldn't have put me in because he would think it was an unnecessary pressure to put on me.
His loser brother was probably his emergency contact.
I realized my mistake all of ten seconds after bursting out of the building and onto the street.
