Page 7 of One Step After Another

3.

Luca

“EIGHTH floor.”

“You’re sure?” Luca asked.

“How much are you paying me again?”

Luca came up the stairs two at a time. “What does that have to do with—”

“Two grand,” Keys muttered on the phone. “You’re paying me two grand for—at most—an hour’s worth of work here. I’m doing said work while having a drink down the street. Easy work. You pay well, on time, the money’s good, and you don’t cause me problems otherwise. I tend to like clients who work with me the way you do. It makes for a good business relationship, you know what I mean? I’m not about to fuck that up, Luca. Your chick in the big black hat came off the elevator on the eighth floor. Anything else?”

“No cameras on the hallway on that floor?”

“Only outside the elevators. Not with a very wide view, either.”

“And she hasn’t come back—”

“Not to get on the elevators or to go in a different direction. She’s still there and from the floorplans I checked out ahead of time of the hotel, the direction she went only leads to a technical dead-end. A room. Eight-oh-one on that floor, to be precise. You want a text if she does get back in my line of sight on the cameras?”

“As soon as she does.”

“Got it.”

“Thanks, Keys.”

“Just doing my job, man,” the hacker replied.

Right.

A job that Luca would still have to pay for whether he managed to get the woman cornered this evening, or not. More money flushed down the toilet if the night didn’t end to his benefit. Not that he was ever clear on what he should do when—or if—he managed to catch Penny.

Bring her home, Naz had once told him.

I just want to know what happened, Roz said to Luca once when he asked his sister. I want to know if we did something ... or didn’t.

Penny Dunsworth wasn’t like every other search and find job Luca had taken on over the years. Even if it was her very disappearance from their lives a half of a decade earlier that had been the catalyst to bring him into his current profession. For one, because he didn’t usually work for friends and in this case, Naz was exactly that while calling all the shots regarding Penny ... and Luca’s work in finding her. But more importantly, because there was always a clear motive and objective once he found whatever it was that was missing.

Naz’s desire to bring Penny home to his wife and the rest of their people for the reasons why she just up and disappeared after her eighteenth birthday ... as if she would stay. Like five years hadn’t passed and who knew what happened in between?

If this was Penny he was chasing, Luca seriously doubted she was the person she had been before she left their lives. And at twenty-three now, it wasn’t like they could force her to remain with them or even get the answers some of them were so desperately seeking. That was before they factored in whatever else she was doing. Her work ... the connections she apparently had to a very dangerous organization.

None of it spelled good things.

But his friend asked.

His best friend.

So, what did it matter if Luca didn’t have a clear motive or objective once he got his hands on Penny? Who cared if he didn’t have the first clue what the plan was once he had her back? All Naz would care was that Penny was home—it would satisfy whatever compulsion he had to find her, and his wife’s sadness that hadn’t left the woman since she woke up to find the girl she loved and cared for was gone.

Right?

As for Luca ... well, shit.

He just wanted to make things right. Like he didn’t blame himself for missing something years ago when he thought he had started to make friends with a young woman who had clearly been planning to leave long before she ever came into his friends’ custody.

This was why Luca didn’t take jobs from friends or family. Emotions got in the way and clouded his judgment and rationale. Love made them all do stupid things because if in five years Penny hadn’t returned, not even bothered with a phone call, then clearly, she didn’t love them the way they had loved her.