Page 342 of Romeo

Romeo

The burner dropped the call twice before I found the one spot at the end of the dock where the signal held. I leaned against a weathered post and stared out over the water while it rang again, watching sunlight flicker through the cypress branches and trying not to let a maybe become something bigger than it was.

The SUV had stayed behind us through enough turns to get my attention. That was all I actually knew. I had never seen the driver, never caught a plate, and once I changed routes enough times, the vehicle disappeared. Could have been following us. Could have been some poor bastard tourist lost in the bayou.

King answered with, “Tell me exactly what happened again.”

I did, keeping it stripped down to what I knew instead of what my instincts wanted to make of it. The SUV had been behind us for a while. I changed direction. It remained behind us. I changed direction again. Same thing. Eventually it was gone. No confrontation. No attempt to close the distance. Nothing that proved whoever sat behind that windshield gave a damn about Fiona or me.

When I finished, King stayed quiet long enough that I could hear voices somewhere on his end of the line. “So you don’t know it was following you.”

“No.”

“You think it was.”

“I thought it was worth noticin’.”

“That, I agree with.” King exhaled heavily. “But right now, that’s all we’ve got. Nobody around here sent anyone. Montclair says the same on his end. Gator already told you it wasn’t his people.”

“Yeah.”

“And Sal hasn’t heard anything.”

That got my attention even though it gave me exactly nothing. I already knew King had called Sal after Carly identified Fiona. He had told Wade that while I stood two feet away listening to the whole conversation. Sal having people in places the clubs didn’t was the reason King reached out in the first place. If somebody had started asking questions about Kaitlyn Ward or Fiona Mitchell, Sal was one of the men most likely to hear about it.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing’s moving that he can see. Nobody’s asking about a Ward girl. Nobody’s asking about Fiona. He made a few people aware there might be someone we needed eyes on, but he hasn’t got anything that points back at us.”

I rubbed my thumb along the edge of the phone. “So we got nothin’.”

“Pretty much.”

Normally, nothing irritated the shit out of me. Today it was almost a relief. Nothing meant we weren’t looking at proof that Sylvia had found Fiona. Nothing meant the SUV hadn’t suddenly become an army waiting beyond the tree line because my head decided to connect two things that might have nothing to do with each other.

King seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Don’t turn one weird vehicle into a fucking conspiracy, Romeo.”

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely fucking do that when it comes to her.”

I looked back toward the cabin through the trees. Fiona moved past one of the screened windows, her hair catching the light before she disappeared again. “Maybe.”

“Stay aware. That’s all. If something changes, call me. Until then, I’ve got people listening, Sal’s got people listening, and there isn’t a single fucking lead telling us anybody knows where you are.”

I nodded even though he couldn’t see me. “And Angel and Banshee?”

“They know nothing. I told you—it’s Fiona’s call.”

“Good.”

I ended the call and stayed on the dock for another minute, letting the quiet settle around me. My instincts still didn’t like the SUV, but instincts weren’t facts. I had spent enough years around club business to know the fastest way to make bad decisions was to fall in love with your own theory before you had evidence.

Fiona looked up when I came inside. She sat curled into the corner of the couch, one of the books we found on a shelf open across her lap, though I doubted she had read much of it. “Well?”

I dropped the burner onto the table and sat beside her. “We know absolutely fuckin’ nothin’.”

Her eyebrows rose. “That sounds promising.”