Four minutes go by.I check the clock, but I can hear the muffled sound of arguing.
“There’s just the one door, right, Clarke?” I ask.
Clarke nods. “Yeah.”
Right. I watch the seconds tick up, waiting for my timer to hit exactly five minutes.
“Well, there’s the delivery door, but?—”
For fuck’s sake…
I slam the door open before he even finishes talking. If Quinn gets pissed at me over a lost ten seconds, I’ll survive.
The garden looks totally normal. Sunshine. Plants. Trees. Flowers.
No Quinn or Sheila.
“Clarke! Get your ass in here!”
He shoves the door open, eyes wide. “What happened?”
“Where’s the delivery door? How do you open it?”
Clarke might not know why this is an emergency, but he runs to the far wall and pushes aside a bit of plant. He reaches up and hits a switch hidden on the back of a palm tree. Once you know where it is, the door is fairly obvious, but the way it’s painted makes it blend into the background as intended.
I rush in, pulling out my phone and putting it on speaker to call Sinner as I go. “I swear to fucking God, I’m not letting that girl out of my sight again. She could get kidnapped from a preschool.”
“What’s going on? Is Ms. Callahan okay?” Clarke asks.
“I hope so.”
“What’s going on?” Sinner’s voice asks.
The hallway behind the door doesn’t go very far before it opens to a delivery zone. There’s no sign of Quinn or Sheila, but I see the back end of a van pull away when I get there.
“They used Sheila for bait to get to Quinn. They’re gone.” At least I hope that’s how it went, because the alternative is that Sheila herself betrayed her own daughter.
“What the fuck? I’m heading down.” Sinner bursts into the lobby from the stairwell, breathing hard. He heads straight to me. “Anything?”
I shake my head. “Clarke? Report this.”
“But it’s her mother, right? There has to be a good explanation.”
Bless his good hearted soul. The man shouldn’t be working a job that includes being suspicious.
“Then all you’re doing is making sure they’re both safe. Call. It. In.” Normally, I’m the last person to tell anyone to call the cops, but in this case I want as much evidence against that bitch as possible because I’m not sure our usual tactic of putting down traitors will go over well with Quinn, even if she agrees in theory.
Me and Sinner book it out of the building, rushing for our bikes. We shoot out into the street, aiming for where I last saw the van and not giving a shit that we use a sidewalk to do it. The question is, can we be fast enough?
At the corner, we stop briefly to plan our approach. “They left from here, older model, black van.” I shout. “Criss-cross. You go right and we meet at the square unless one of us sees something. K?”
I get a thumbs up from Sinner.
With the wind in our hair and our engines roaring, we put years of training into use. This part of the city is divided into fairly even blocks, and we have different techniques for covering ground when needed. In this case, Sinner starts right, I start left, and we both zig zag through the surrounding blocks, searching. They’ve got a good lead, and for all I know they went the other way, but doing nothing isn’t an option.
All we need is a glimpse, and we’ll have them.
With every street, my hopes drop.
