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“Why? What’s going on?”
“It’s Blake.”
“Who?”
“Coaltar.” I backed up from the door a step. “Call him. Make sure he stays with Wil. Make sure Coaltar doesn’t show up.”
The handle shook on the bathroom door. I leapt backward, shoving the pants up and then turned around to face the shower as I tried to find the opening of the shirt to put it on.
The door opened behind me before I managed to even thread the arms through the T-shirt. I leapt again, drawing the shirt toward my body to cover my bare breasts.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Raven asked. His eyes were shooting lightning at me. His shoulders seemed to swell and his massive body appeared to take up the entire opening of the door. “What’s wrong with Wil? Is someone after him?”
“Raven!” Brandon barked, though his voice wavered. He looked in from behind Raven’s shoulder. When he saw I wasn’t fully dressed, he turned on Raven. “You can’t barge in on her.”
“I couldn’t hear what she was saying,” Raven said. He turned to me, unflinching, as if the sight of a half-naked girl was as ordinary as the sight of the bar of soap on the sink. He was way too focused to think anything of it.
“Coaltar,” I said, uncaring about this right now. Raven was listening to me, and seemed to understand this was more important. I had the shirt shoved up against my chest so it didn’t really matter. “He may be looking for me. You need to call Axel and tell him to stay there. I don’t think he knows I live there, but just in case.”
Raven fished his phone out and started pushing buttons. He shoved the phone to his shoulder, holding it with his ear pressed against it, his neck scrunched up. He shuffled the bathroom door half closed so he could access the closet door that was behind it.
At the same time, Brandon angled himself inside the bathroom. He yanked my shirt from my arms, and readjusted it. “Don’t just stand there. Put your shirt on,” he said, using an older brother tone I imagined he used on Corey a hundred times a day. He swooped the shirt down over my body, covering me. I shoved my arms through the sleeves. Brandon wrapped his arms around my body rubbing along my back to warm me up.
“Axel,” Raven said into the phone. He selected a towel from inside the bathroom closet and passed it to Brandon. Brandon collected it without a word, and wrapped my hair in it, massaging my scalp to dry. I slipped my arms through the sleeves of Raven’s shirt again to cover them up and shove them against my body to warm up. Raven took the phone from his hunched shoulder and talked into it. “No, go back. Stay with Wil. Coaltar might be looking for her after all. She wants someone to keep an eye out for him.”
“Why is he after you?” Brandon asked.
I shivered, but his warming hands drying my hair was helping. “I know,” I said. “I know what he’s hiding. He ... the drugs. The kid...”
“Kayli!” Marc’s voice called from the living room.
“She’s in here!” Raven called back.
Marc materialized in the door. Corey was behind him. Corey took one look at me and then settled back with a relieved smile, as if he didn’t believe I’d come back until just now.
Marc, however, clenched his fists, his eyes narrowing on me. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where the hell have you been?”
I grunted. Now that I’d warmed a little, I found a little bit of strength. “Coaltar’s been buying a new synthetic drug called JH-14 from all of the local dealers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Fitzgerald’s kid, Jason. He brought it into the city. Only the drugs are defective. They kill people. Coaltar made a deal with Fitzgerald to get the drugs back so the local Mexican hired guns wouldn’t go after his son and their family for killing off their market, and drawing unwanted attention to their operation. From what I understand, it’s another drug gang from somewhere else, who wanted in on the territory, so they were sending defective drugs to shake up the market. Only they swindled this kid to do it.”
Marc’s jaw fell open, the two-toned eyes glided back and forth as if calculating. “Coaltar’s been paid to cover up for someone else.”
“Yeah. Only he’s not planning to just get rid of the drugs. He’s looking for the source. He may have found it. He wants to dump the drugs into the local well in the village — wherever it is. He wants to poison the locals there to let them know they know. There’s a cartel that contacted him that wants him to do it.”
“How do you know all this?”
I swallowed, tugging my head away from Brandon’s soothing hands. My eyes lingered on the wall, avoiding everyone’s eyes. I felt they weren’t going to like this. “I’ve been hanging out with Coaltar for the past couple of days, since I left.”
The silence was so heavy after that, and I felt the weight of it as if it could sink me into the floor, dragging me under. I clenched my jaw, waiting. I had run to the only person they had told me to stay away from. It was probably why they never found me if they were searching. They presumed I would stay away.
“That’s impossible,” Corey said. “How?”
“What?” I asked.
“We’ve been watching him while you were gone. We’ve been monitoring phone calls and...” He checked with Marc and the others, waiting for permission to reveal whatever he wanted to say.
“You weren’t on the video feeds,” Brandon said.
“What video feeds?” I asked. Did they not believe me? “You have his house under video surveillance?”
Marc held his hands up and toward me. “How can you say you’ve been there? We checked there. I thought you might show up there, but he’s been at home for two days. He even called Mr. Fitzgerald saying he was going to lay low.”
“He left home two nights ago to go downtown, and talk to those drug dealers,” I said. “And we’ve been walking in and out of his place all day yesterday. If you were watching, you’d have seen me.”
Raven’s fists clenched hard. In a flash, he swiped at the counter, knocking soap and other bathroom items to the floor. He punched at the counter top and then pointed at Marc. “I told you.”
“We were watching!” Marc barked at him. His eyes widened and they squared their shoulders off at each other. “He must have cut the feeds. I didn’t want to waste time there if she wasn’t—”
“He got tipped off because we broke into his office,” Raven said. “The motherfucker’s had her? What kind of shit...”
“We don’t need this right now,” Marc said.
Raven took a swing at Marc. Marc ducked. “Don’t tell me what I need! I told you we should have looked there first. I knew she w
as there.” Raven bellowed.
“Guys!” Brandon said, stepping between them. Corey swept around me, cutting in front of Raven, and putting a hand on his chest, pushing Raven to step back. Raven kept his eyes on Marc, his mouth tight and his jaw firm. His gaze slowly slid down to Corey.
“This isn’t the time,” Corey said. “Coaltar must have known for a while. He’s been biding his time, letting us watch him when he wants. He probably just looped old video.”
Raven grunted.
I had backed up against the wall, my hand pushed up against my heart. “He’s got a guy,” I said. Everyone turned to me. “Doyle. Some guy out in Hanahan. He’s got a farmhouse and a front lawn filled with satellite dishes and a big computer mess inside. A hacker of some kind. He’s able to listen in on phone calls and...”
Axel’s voice coming from the phone spooked me, until I realized that Raven had put the phone on speaker. “Marc,” he barked from the phone, “I need you to call Kevin. Have him replace me here. Get everyone on new lines.”
“We need to get her out of here.” Marc said.
“His first move is going to be to try to cover up what he’s doing. Does he have the last of this synthetic?”
Everyone looked at me expectantly, waiting.
“He’s supposed to get the last of it tonight,” I said. I was wondering if Doyle was listening to this now. If he was, could I stop him? How could I tell the guys without him knowing? He could have the walls bugged as they’d done to Coaltar. “He’s getting it delivered to his yacht at City Marina. I don’t know what time. He didn’t seem to need to be there for it to get delivered and when I left him, he was still at his house.”
“Raven,” Axel said through the phone. “Find a trainee who isn’t busy to go with you to the docks. I want twenty-four-seven monitoring. Try Silas Korba. He knows a few things about boats. He should be able to help.”
