expand it; bring the whole community into it. And what better place to start than with the young people? A nudge here, a bug in an ear there. Someone close to the kids, with some influence, talking shit about the Dogs. And then a girl disappeared, under nefarious circumstances…
Walsh’s expression didn’t change, save the subtle flexing of his jaw as he clenched it.
Ghost nodded and turned back to Dave. “Whatever happened to Allie, I can promise you the Lean Dogs had nothing to do with it.” He stood. “Make sure your son and his friends stop vandalizing private property, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”
Dave nodded. “Yeah.”
But when they were at the door, he said, “Ghost.”
Ghost glanced back over his shoulder and met Dave’s troubled expression.
“I appreciate your guy stepping in last night. That was good of him. But…can you honestly tell me your club makes this city a safer place? That it doesn’t make it more dangerous?”
Ghost offered him a wide, toothy grin. “Come on, man. Who loves Knoxville more than the Dogs?”
Fox and Mercy were waiting for them at the bikes, having a cigarette. Mercy dropped his to the pavement and ground it out beneath his boot. “Anything?”
“It was the son – Jimmy Connors – and a friend last night that our guys spooked. Not a big surprise. But Dave Connors said the high school kids are starting to feel distinctly unfriendly toward us.”
“A girl disappeared two weeks ago.” Walsh had the article pulled up still, and passed his phone to Mercy.
At least, he tried to. Fox snatched it away, earning a glare from his brother.
Ghost didn’t smile, because he tried not to encourage sibling rivalry. But. It was hilarious to see the always unflappable Walsh make faces at people.
“No leads?” Fox asked, lifting his head. He had that look on his face: the faint crimp that meant his mind was already racing, spinning a half-dozen possibilities.
Walsh held out his hand for the phone. Fox looked at it, then looked at his face, and continued to hold the phone.
“They found her car,” Ghost said. “A hunter called it in, off the old mill road. But no hide nor hair of her since the night of the party.”
“She was snatched,” Mercy said, frowning. “By who?”
“Not to jump to conclusions…” Fox said.
“Give me the bloody phone,” Walsh hissed.
Fox held Ghost’s gaze, a sideways smile breaking across his face, and set the phone in his brother’s palm, pinched delicately between two fingers. A delicate grip that he maintained, though. “What’s the word?”
“Piss off.”
Fox released the phone, and his expression grew serious again. “This is exactly the sort of thing Eden wants shuttled her way: missing girl, no signs. That’s what was happening out west. American girls being snatched and sold into the sex slave trade. Three of those are still missing.”
“This girl disappeared two weeks ago,” Ghost said. “It’s not connected to what happened in Texas.”
“Luis got away,” Fox reminded, and the wind picked that exact moment to come funneling in hard off the water, still chilled by the last fingers of winter, despite the spring sunshine beating down on their heads. “And then he called Candy to gloat. We’d be hearing from him again, he said.”
“What are the odds it’s him? Already? Snatching one high school girl here in Knoxville?” Ghost asked. But he’d been alive, and in the life, too long to dismiss ideas just because they seemed too far-fetched. According to Fox, in the debriefing they’d held in the chapel after his return from Amarillo, the FBI – if they could be trusted, which was doubtful – believed Luis might have been reaching out to a crime syndicate that was rapidly forming in New York.
Which wouldn’t have been their problem if not for their New York chapter. And Luis’s avowal that they would be seeing him again.
“It’s probably just your garden variety kidnapping,” Mercy said.
And what kinda world was it when a kidnapping was “garden-variety”?
Walsh and Fox looked two varying shades of unconvinced.
“Mind if I throw it Eden’s way?” Fox asked. “This is right up her alley, and she can approach it as a PI, and not as the club.”
Ghost nodded. “Tell her to have at it.”
“Our graffiti problem, though. It was kids last night, but I don’t think it was at first.”
“We’ll keep digging,” Walsh said.
Ghost nodded, and swung a leg over his bike. Internally, he felt an uncurling of disquiet in the pit of his stomach. Why, oh why, could things never stay calm?
~*~
“He’s damn lucky