was there last night when Tenny almost” – Carter drew a finger across his throat. “I don’t think he’ll want to talk to me.”
“Well, he has to talk to someone, and you’re, I dunno, good at making people feel relaxed. Just drive him around.” He offered his own truck keys, the shiny, black Ram waiting behind him in the parking lot. “Fox and the boys will tail you, and they’ll go in if there’s any place that needs to be searched. Okay?”
Carter took the keys, nodding, feeling a bump that wasn’t excitement, but was a sort of gladness to have been trusted like this, especially so soon after last night’s near-disaster. “Yes, sir.”
Twenty minutes later, Jimmy Connors climbed into the passenger seat at Flash Customs, pale with no small amount of trepidation.
His father stood at the open driver’s side window, glaring at Carter. “If you think you’re gonna abduct my son–”
“I’m gonna drive your son around and try to jog his memory, which is a better deal than he’d get from the police,” Carter said, flatly. “He’s involved enough in Allie Henderson’s disappearance, and possible murder, to be arrested. Maybe you should calm the hell down and be grateful this is the worst that’s happening to him.”
The man’s face purpled, but he stepped back, and didn’t comment further.
Carter put the truck in drive and pulled out of the lot, Fox, Tenny, and Reese behind them on their bikes.
Jimmy shifted in his seat. “I can’t help you,” he said, voice petulant and young. “They didn’t tell me shit. I have no idea what happened to Allie.”
Carter sighed as he braked at the first red light. “But you cared about her, yeah?” A glance proved that Jimmy’s face paled further, and he gulped, audibly. “You wanted to go out with her, so that means you actually liked her, didn’t it? Or were you just trying to get your dick wet?”
Jimmy spluttered a protest. “No! I didn’t – we never – I cared about her, okay? I like liked her, man.”
Like like. Carter felt horribly old, suddenly.
He nodded. “Okay, so, if you care, then you should want us to find her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re the last one – besides your drug dealer friends – who saw her alive. So cooperating saves your skin, and hopefully saves hers, too.” He didn’t mention Nicole, too afraid that Jimmy would feel like he was being accused and clam up like he had last night. “Where did you meet them aside from the shop?”
Jimmy fidgeted again, toying with his seatbelt, but he said, “A house, sometimes. Take a left at the next light.”
Carter turned on his blinker.
As they headed down the next street, Jimmy muttered, “You guys are drug dealers, too.”
“What was that?”
Jimmy hitched up straighter in his seat and turned to face him, feeling brave, apparently. “You guys deal drugs, too.” An accusation, petulant and pouting.
Carter didn’t deny it, but he said, “What the Dogs don’t do is trick high school kids into dealing for us, threaten to kill their families, and kidnap underage girls.” He bit back a satisfied smirk when he glimpsed Jimmy’s chastened expression. “You made a dumbass mistake, Jimmy, and you’re paying for it – Allie may have paid for it with her life. You don’t get to pawn that off on us. Our sins have nothing to do with yours. Man up and take some responsibility for once in your shitty life.”
He heard the boy swallow again, but he didn’t talk back this time.
“Take the next right,” he murmured as they approached another intersection.
They proceeded in silence, save for Jimmy’s occasional directions, and they ended up in an alarmingly familiar neighborhood. Carter felt the old prickling of anxiety sweat between his shoulder blades as they passed modest, run-down houses with chain link fences and crowded carports; weed-choked lawns and Beware of Dog signs. The windows were rolled up tight, but he swore he could smell cigarette smoke, charcoal, and garbage left out in the sun.
His skin was buzzing, faintly, when Jimmy directed to a house only a few mailboxes down from the one where Carter had grown up; where his father still lived, presumably. He’d never bothered to keep up with the man after he came home from school, and didn’t plan to start now.
He took a deep breath, cleared his mind of the past, and refocused.
The house was small, probably a two-bedroom, chipped blue-painted siding, a carport, broken blinds in the windows and big flakes of rust on the iron porch