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“Call your people,” he said as he tore through the landscape, heading straight for the road Murphy and I had driven in on. I must have hesitated because he added, “You’re a biker, right? Call your people.”
“There was no service,” I said even as I reached for my phone.
“There will be in fifty feet,” he said, turning the wheel hard to get onto the road.
Then, sure enough, bars appeared.
“You make it?” Slash asked, sounding half-distracted.
“He got her,” I said, the words tumbling over each other. “Cain got her.”
“What?” he hissed, snapping at someone, and then I heard the line get fuzzier as he put me on speaker. “What do you mean Cain got her?”
“We got to the range but Cohen wasn’t around so she told me to stay and wait for him while she tried out the guns. But Cohen was around. Beat and bound in his fucking shower. And he got her. He fucking got her.”
“Alright,” Slash said, worried, sure, but trying to hold it together for me. “Give me two minutes to go find Rook,” he said, and I heard him running, then the roar of his bike as he got on it, as he made the short ride into town. “Where is Cain Roth?” he demanded as, I imagined, he got to the back office in the karate place.
“What?” Rook asked, sounding like he had a mouth full of food.
“Cain got Murphy. Where is he taking her?”
“Oh, fuck,” Rook said, and I could hear the tapping.
“We’re out in…” I started, looking over at Cohen.
“Hathorne, Nevada,” he supplied.
“So, where would he be taking her from here? Back to California? Somewhere else? Where could he have rebuilt his underground torture cave?”
“I’ve been working on it,” Rook said. “And I think I’m owed compensation for fucking therapy for the shit I’ve had to see,” he added, making bile rise up in my stomach. I hadn’t considered what we were asking of Rook when we sent him on Cain Roth’s trail. “My best guess is narrowed down to a fifty-mile radius in Plumas County.”
“How the fuck did you do that?” I heard Cohen ask.
“Metadata,” Rook said, and I wasn’t even sure what that meant, so I had a feeling that the man without a TV in his house was even more in the dark.
“Wouldn’t someone like Cain Roth know how to remove the geolocation from his videos?” Cohen asked instead, making me turn to look at him.
“Best guess is he doesn’t do all the technical shit by himself anymore. When you’re as rich as he is, why would you? And someone he sourced the work to fucked up on one video. Just one. Out of thousands. But it’s enough. Now I just got to try to find something suspicious in the maps, or track down suspicious building. It’s… it’s going to take me a bit.”
“Listen, I know that’s not what you want to hear, but we can’t rush this,” Slash said, ever the calm, rational leader. “You have a long drive from where you are to there. Focus on that. Rook is gonna work better without us breathing down his neck. I will call you back as soon as I have a direction. In the meantime, I’m sending Riff, Raff, and Coach out in that direction too.”
He hung up, probably knowing I wouldn’t be able to do it myself, to accept that there was nothing I could do, that I would just have to ride passenger and make myself sick about what was happening to her.
“Use your head,” Cohen demanded. “They can’t travel with a woman in the backseat kicking and screaming and drawing attention to herself,” he said, a lot more rational than I could be right then. “She’s in a trunk. Bound, gagged, maybe even drugged. But alone. Not being abused. She will likely stay in that trunk for almost four hours while they drive back to their place. She’s… okay. For the time being, she’s okay.”
He was right.
There was no way she could be in the backseat, not even with a heavy tint. She was too volatile, too ready to fight her way out.
And no one was going to want to be trapped in a hot trunk with a furious woman for four hours either. He would never emerge from it alive.
Cain Roth was a vicious, sadistic son of a bitch, but if he was as obsessed with her as I believed he was, he knew her well enough to know how hard she would fight for her freedom.
He wasn’t going to take any chances now that he had her.
So I knew that for the next few hours, she was—for all intents and purposes—okay.
That gave us time to follow them to the area Rook had directed us to, and for him to narrow down a location.
It also gave my brothers time to get there as well as backup. Because, from the sound of things, Cain Roth ran a pretty sizable organization.
