hear the rumble of the bikes as the men came back, each of them going right inside to shower, tossing his clothes in the wash, then changing, and meeting me outside.
"It's done?" I asked McCoy when he moved to stand next to me as I stared down at the bottom of the pool.
"Yeah."
"You're sure?"
"Nothing for them to find to pin back to us. Once Seeley has a few, we can have him wash down the bikes, clean out the tire treads. Not that I'm worried about the cops looking that closely at this. With their connections, the cops are going to do a preliminary investigation, come up with nothing, and just let these cases go cold. No one is crying over a couple dead cartel members. Especially since the main one they're connected to just made the news a couple weeks ago for kidnapping a mayor's kids and cutting off their hands before finally killing them."
That was true. With all the crime going on in our area, no one was going to clock overtime trying to find the killers of shitheads. They probably figured whoever did them in did the world a service.
"Okay. Good."
"Hey," McCoy said, tone firm.
"Yeah?"
"You good?" he asked. "I get that you're in this. But you were bleeding all over a crime scene."
"If you're looking for an apology for something, McCoy, you are in the wrong profession."
"I don't want an apology. I want to keep my president. And my friend. I don't want to find Harmon, but have your ass carted off to jail for twenty-five-to-life. There are always risks, but you are taking unnecessary ones because you're too in this."
"I am in this," I agreed. "But I got my head more together now. I thought we did this to her. Guilt was mixed with the worry, the anger."
"Wait... what did Arty find out?"
"That Harmon has a stalker, and that is who took her. Been spying on her through her own fucking camera."
"As if she doesn't put enough of herself out there for them," McCoy growled, being allergic to social media himself, always having been intensely private, so not understanding why someone would broadcast themselves out there for others to watch, to pick apart. "Is that better or worse?" he asked after a minute.
"I don't know. At least no one wants to hurt her because they want to get back at us. I guess the best we can hope for is some rabid fan who maybe just wants to be close to her or something."
"And when he learns she doesn't want to be close to him?" McCoy said, not trying to be full of doom and gloom, just practical.
"We have to get there before that happens," I said, shrugging. "She's not stupid. I think she'll be careful if she gets the feeling that someone doesn't immediately want to hurt her. So that can buy us some time."
"And when we get there, what is our move?"
"Depends on what we find," I said, shrugging. "He hurts her, I get to have some fun with him."
"And if he didn't hurt her?"
"I dunno. I guess that's up to her. She can have the cops deal with it, or she can have us handle it in a more permanent way."
"Huck," Seeley called through an upstairs window. "You're not going to believe this shit," he added, shaking his head.
That meant Arty had a name.
I just hoped to fuck he had an address too
I had to go get my girl.
Chapter Fourteen
Harmon
My stomach felt like it was sloshing around even though I wasn't moving. In fact, I was starting to worry I wasn't capable of moving at all. My legs felt locked, my knees almost painfully straight. And while my hand was raised in my plan to grab the door, I wasn't sure it would respond to a command to actually grab it, shove it into the face of whomever was approaching.
I think people, as a whole, like to create scenarios in their heads, tell themselves how they will act if or when something bad happened to them. Maybe especially us women who knew our risk of kidnapping and worse was much greater.
We sometimes sat after watching some awful true crime documentary or some survival-style show and say to ourselves "If that ever happens to me, I will do this" or that, convincing ourselves that our bravery will win out over our fear, that all those videos we'd watched about self-defense would come back to us instead of getting Etch-A-Sketch'd out of our heads, that