The deep timbre of his voice was soft but full of promise.
He could keep himself hidden.
At least, he thought he could.
SIXTEEN
Wake up, sluts. It’s time to sin.
—Text from Thumper to Denver
DENVER
All avenues led to dead ends.
Every last one of them.
“It’s gotta be that she fell down that mountain.”
I looked over at Tack, then to Brute.
Tack and Brute had been traveling with each other for the last couple of hours, looking for any sign of Holly.
The rest of the club that wasn’t pivotal at work or was actually in town had been in pairs looking for Holly, too.
Bells, the one prospect that I actually liked, had been with me.
Thumper, the other prospect that I didn’t necessarily like, had been paired with a veteran of the club, Brogue.
“She didn’t fall down the fuckin’ mountain,” Thumper said, for once something I agreed with.
Thumper was a prospect and had been for almost a year and a half now.
Several other prospects had started after him and had already been patched in.
But there was just something about Thumper that rubbed me the wrong way.
He was brash, reactive, and always seemed to have something to say that usually was the exact opposite of what you were talking about. He couldn’t agree to disagree, and the man played devil’s advocate better than anyone I knew.
It’d taken me some time to figure out that that was what he was doing.
He could never agree with anyone, and I knew that he liked watching everyone else lose their shit when he came in spouting off information that directly contradicted what they were saying.
He reminded me a lot of Odin. Consequently, Odin and Thumper got along really, really well. It was like both of their antagonistic souls just kind of took a hike when they were around each other.
“You can see her shit down the mountain,” Brute pointed out. “Why couldn’t she be down there?”
“Holly grew up here. She would know not to park there. That’s a bad area, and everyone from around here knows it. Our parents taught us not to take that road from the moment we were old enough to listen. Not even to save twenty minutes would a local take that road.”
He had a point.
I’d grown up here, and I told my girls when they could listen why we didn’t take that road.
Honestly, the only people who took it were tourists and out-of-towners passing through.
It was one rockslide away from being totally and completely fucked.
But the county kept it open because it helped traffic flow.
