Dark Secret - Avelyn Paige Page 0,27
for what we’re doing now. We have to let him go. Catching a charge isn’t an option.
“No. Cut him loose.”
The kid pushes through Twat Knot and GP, running straight out the door. GP shoots a look over at me.
“You’re just letting him go?”
“I am. We have her phone. We’ll check out where he said he found it and see where it leads us.”
“And if he lied to you?”
Shifting the phone down, I reveal the ID card I took. “I snagged this out of his bag. We got his name, photo, and address. Tracking him down won’t be hard.”
Twat Knot smiles. “Sneaky, man. I like it.”
“What’s next?”
“Let’s head down to the park. We’ll look for her bag.”
I wave to the owner as we leave, but the look on his face tells me the second we step out the door, he’s picking up the phone and reporting us to the police for talking to that kid the way we did. Just what we need, the fuzz up our ass. But hey, I could be wrong.
We make tracks toward our bikes, just as the familiar sound of sirens sound in the distance. I guess I wasn’t wrong. I hate it when I’m right sometimes.
“You two lead the police on a wild goose chase. I’m going to head down to that park to check it out. Call Judge and let him know the situation.”
“You got it, Hash.”
The two of them take off south, away from the strip mall, when a cruiser comes speeding around the corner, taking off after them. The coast is clear. Firing up my bike, I head north, around the back of the strip mall toward the only park in the area I know is still down here—Garfield Park.
It only takes me five minutes before I reach the parking area near the side entrance of the park. At this time of day, it’s filled with kids running around the playground while their nannies, or parents, sit glued to their phones on one of the nearby benches. A little girl with dark pigtails comes zooming by me as I walk down the sidewalk.
“’Cuse me,” she giggles.
I wonder what Hayden was like at her age. The thought makes me realize how much of her life I’ve missed, like her birth, her first steps, first words, first day at school. All of her firsts. Things I never knew I missed, and now so desperately wish I’d been there to witness. I can never get that time back.
A big blue rubber ball goes flying through the air, nearly missing my nose, landing near a large trash barrel on the other side of the walkway. Two little boys freeze when I look over to them. I stalk over to retrieve their ball when something pink peeking out from behind it catches my eye. Could it be? I quicken my pace and charge toward the barrel, finding a bright pink backpack with Hayden stitched across the front of it.
The kid wasn’t lying. Clutching the bag, I unzip it with shaking hands. Inside, I find a couple of notebooks, a set of keys, and a little black wallet with Iron Man’s logo stitched along the side of it. My stomach drops. There’s nothing that’ll point me in the direction of where to find her.
Fuck. Another dead end. She’d been here. Or, at least, near here. How had no one seen anything? Everyone has their cameras out these days to capture every single moment on their cell phones. How did they miss this?
Cameras. That’s it! I spin around, looking at all the businesses nearby. They’ll have cameras. One of them may have been able to capture Hayden’s abduction. Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket, I pull up GP in my contacts and hit his number.
He answers on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“You lose the cops?”
“We did. Pulled into a big parking garage and hid behind some box trucks. What’s up?”
“Meet me at Garfield Park. I think I may have found a way to see when she was taken.”
Shelby
I shove my way through the front door of the clubhouse, my anxiety clawing its way up my throat. “Where is she?” I ask when Wyatt comes into view.
“I don’t know yet.” He skirts around the table, moving through the group of very large, leather-clad men. “I found this, though.” There, dangling from his finger, is Hayden’s pink backpack.
I gape at it, looking it over, internally pleading for it to tell me where my baby girl is. “Where did you find