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The car’s silent as we head to the next place. In my head runs a babble of words I could use to fill the silence, but I get the feeling he’d find it annoying.
But he’s good, even I can see that. Diego can switch to Spanish easily . . . I already knew he spoke Portuguese because of his father, but I never knew him to know any other foreign language. In school he’d taken sign language for his required class. I always guessed he did this because of me, I was in the same class as well. I glance at him. The way he can blend or stand out, along with how he’s able to close in on the right people, impresses me.
Diego doesn’t want to hear that. He just wants to end the night. He doesn’t have to say it for me to know this to be true. It’s in the air around him. The tension vibrating from his direction. I suspect he’s ticked off I saw him take down the man with the knife. The coldness, the brutal efficiency they’re things I think he wants to protect me from, that aspect of him.
* * *
“Last stop.”
I frown. “RoadSide?”
“O Grady’s gone, and I want to poke around.” He shrugs and gets out of the car.
We head to the door when one of the bouncers hauls a screaming girl out. Diego pulls me to a stop as the bouncer, who’s been there about a million years, who lets people in, checks IDs, and keeps an eye on what goes on outside in the lot tries to comfort her.
The one who pulled her out goes in.
“Longstocking, do me a favor? Stay out here with Fred.”
“But—”
“I want to talk to someone I got a lead on, one of the guys with gold tooth’s friends. He’s meant to be here, and he’s got a tattoo. It’s to do with the Mexican cartel.”
I frown, but this is RoadSide. “It gets rough at times,” I say, “but it’s a local icon, it’s safe—”
“Owned by the fuckin’ head of the Lowlanders. And the less you’re in the mind of the fuckin’ El Cabeza cartel, the better.”
He leaves me with Fred, and he grunts acknowledgment as Diego slips inside. I lean against the wall, both annoyed and a little soft-centered over it.
“Let me go back in. I saw Manny with her. You did too.” The girl is still hysterical, but she’s calmed a bit.
Fred offers her a tissue, which makes me want to raise my eyebrows, but he cuts me a severe look as the girl takes it. I look away.
“Yo, Cindy, Manny runs with some bad peeps now. You can’t accuse. And your sister does what she wants. I thought she left with a clean-cut kinda guy. A little drunk, but she seemed coherent.”
“Manny knows her. You know her. She never came home.”
Now I straighten. “You okay?” I ask the girl, who has to be about eighteen, if she’s a day and this place shouldn’t be serving her.
Then again, I came here underage, and they looked the other way.
“No, I want to see Manny.”
“He left, Cindy, out the back when you went in. Oscar texted me,” Fred says. “Go home. She’ll be back.”
“Cindy, I’m Nadia. Your sister didn’t come home?”
“N-no, and that was three days ago. She’s always home by now, and she doesn’t get in cars with strangers.”
Behind her, Fred rolls his eyes, checks someone’s ID, and waves them in. “I got you a cab comin’, Cindy.”
My heart is clenching. This sounds like the other girls that went missing. The ones Diego mentioned.
I try and ask her some more things, but she’s clearly distraught, so I do the next best thing.
“I teach at Enders High. Look, if you want to talk, you can have my number.” I pull out my phone. “I’m a phone call or a text away. No pressure.”
She sighs and nods. Feeling like a heel, I ask for her number and put it in, calling her phone. “There, we have each other’s now.”
