Crazy Eights (Stacked Deck #8) - Emilia Finn Page 0,44

watch your step. Oh, I see you.” She snickers under her breath as computer keys click in the background. “Look at you, hiding away from the big, bad ballerina.”

“I’m not hiding,” I murmur as Will and Cam stand at their open front door.

They speak for a moment; smiles, and then frowns.

“No?” Soph laughs. “That’s not what I see.”

“I’m observing,” I breathe out. “She’s got a bad shoulder. Can you see that?”

“No, kid. I can’t see from here. But that’s cute, no? You guys have matching injuries. Gonna make for some interesting fucking.”

“Can you stop saying shit like that? Jesus.”

“Why? You mad because you can’t have? Or because you’re horny, and have no way to deal with that right now?”

“Little bit of A,” I grunt out. “Little bit of B. Now hush. Will’s leaving. Where’s he going?”

Soph replies with a garbled, “I don’t know,” which sounds more like, ‘erdno.’

“Maybe to work,” she ponders. “They might be running from the law, but they still have to put food on the table.”

“Where does he work? Do you know?”

“Mm. Down at the dockyard – which is ironic, considering that’s where he worked before. I guess the docks don’t believe in snitching either. That, or they like hard workers and aren’t willing to lose him.”

“The docks are where the guy he supposedly killed went missing, right?”

“No, the docks are where that guy worked, and where Will met him. But he didn’t go missing there. Police reports say he went missing weeks after their meeting. He had checked in for work – not on the same shift as Will – then later, he checked out, spoke to his girl on the phone, was on the road, and bam. Gone. He didn’t arrive where he was going.”

“So they got him in transit. Who is the guy, Soph? Rich? Powerful? Related to someone rich or powerful?”

“Negative, Ghost Rider. He’s neither rich, nor powerful. He has no influence, and he didn’t party. He had a steady girlfriend, a shitty apartment, and a ficus plant that was doing just fine. He worked his shifts, drove a beat-up car, lived a happy life with his girl, and he got by. Then he just…”

“Disappeared.”

“Yup. And we both know folks don’t just disappear for no reason. Oh, and speaking of, I’ve been running some searches and looking for a couple missing kids. I’ve kept my net wide open, I’ve been pretty loose with the ages and dates, but either Cam and Will had no one that cared for them, and therefore no one to report them missing, or I haven’t looked wide enough.”

“Cam said her mom was a junkie. She said she was born premature because of her mother’s substance abuse, so that probably means they just weren’t reported missing.”

“Possibly.” Soph hums under her breath as she works. “Schools tend to report missing kids too. Which means they went missing without having started school.”

“So when they were barely toddlers?” I lean into the shadows as Will continues speaking to Cam on the doorstep. “I don’t know, Soph.”

“Not necessarily toddlers. He’s several years older than she is. So he was definitely school-aged when they bolted. That means their folks just didn’t care enough to enroll them?”

She works through her thoughts, and phrases her sentences like questions. Like she wants me to answer, though she gives me no time to do so.

“I’m gonna lean toward deadbeat parents,” she decides, “no school enrollments. Will is older, responsible. He would have helped smooth things over.”

“Why?” I frown. “Why would he smooth?”

“Because when kids go into the foster system, it’s not guaranteed that siblings will stay together. I bet he took care of everything to keep CPS off their backs. If the system had snatched them up, some upper-class family in Connecticut would have loved a baby ballerina. But they’d have left the older boy there to rot. No way was he running the risk of them being separated.”

“So it’s like…” I bring a hand up to rub at my temple. “Jesus. This shit is complicated.”

“Yup.”

“Multiple name changes? They ran from their folks when they were younger. They ran from the cops after the dude went missing. And now they’re running again. That’s at least three sets of names.”

“Right.”

“What are the chances of a couple kids needing to make themselves invisible once, let alone three times?”

“Slim to none,” Soph murmurs. “Shitty luck, for sure. They wanted out of the domestic situation they were born into, and I mean, loads of kids would do the same to get away