me against his chest, flattening my cheek to his pecs and rubbing my hair. I suspect he feels bad for the little girl who didn’t have her own crayons. Finally, he kisses the top of my head and then pulls out a chair for me. “I have some things I need to take care of in my office this morning. Will you be okay coloring for a while?”
“Yes, Sir.” I’ll be okay coloring for hours if he lets me. And if I finally decide to use the crayons. As he leaves the room, I open the box and run my thumb over each and every pointed tip. These aren’t rejected crayons someone had last year. They’re a new box. Mine. All the colors are inside.
It takes me a while to break the seal, so to speak, but I finally remove a pink crayon from the box and open the coloring book to the first page. A princess of course, and she shall have a pink dress like mine.
Chapter 15
Master Davis
I shut my office door and pray Britney won’t come in while I’m on the phone, and then I place my first call to Lazinski.
He answers on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“Jacobs here. Checking in.”
“Ah, Brock. Whatcha got for me?”
I run a hand through my hair and school my voice. I need to keep the façade up every time I talk to him. “I went to Ms. Heath’s apartment, but your men had already turned it into a tornado. It was hard to pick through the mess. What the fuck did they do that for, are they stupid?” I ask, trying to sound pissed, as if his first henchmen were making my job difficult.
“They were trying to find contact information. Family. Friends. Someplace she might have gone.”
“Yeah? Well, I tried to do the same thing except the place was ransacked, which makes my job harder. If you want me to help you, call your damn goons off. They’re making things worse.”
“Not a problem. Consider it done. Did it look like she’d been there?”
“No. Not a sign. Since her mattress wasn’t even on the frame, I seriously doubt she’s been sleeping there.” I’m exaggerating, but I need to drive home my point.
“Fuck,” Lazinski muttered.
“Why do I get the feeling there’re things you aren’t telling me?”
“Because you’re on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know every damn detail.”
I seethed, but continued the show. “Listen, there’s no way one of your girls just up and left town without a good reason, and it’s pretty damn hard for me to locate someone when I don’t have all the details.”
Lazinski sighs and I picture him trying to decide how much to divulge. “Fine. She has something valuable of mine, and I want it back.”
I cringe, fighting the urge to strangle this piece of shit through the phone. But I’m trained to keep my cool, so I find the will. “You lend her some fucking diamonds or something?”
“Something like that.”
“What makes you think she didn’t already sell the commodity and use the proceeds to get the hell out of town?”
“She would never sell this item. Not in a million years. Of this I’m certain. Which means she’s stolen it and skipped town. And I need you to fucking find her and bring her to me.”
“Well, now we’re getting somewhere.”
Lazinski clears his throat. “I learned something from the other girls that might help.”
“What’s that?” I hold my breath, praying his girls have not a single clue what’s going on. If they have even an inkling, their lives are in danger too.
“One of my girls was pretty good friends with her. The one you met the other night. Licorice. She said Britney had mentioned working in the morning at some kind of no-kill animal shelter. I have no clue how many of those are in the area, but it’s worth checking them out.”
“On it,” I respond. “That certainly narrows things down. See if you can get more details out of your other employees. No one lives in a vacuum.”
“Just fucking find her, got it?”
“I’m doing my best, but you didn’t make it seem like it was going to be as difficult as it’s proving. These situations take time. Might need to renegotiate that figure if you want me to devote all my time on finding your girl. I have other paying jobs to do too.”
“Fine. Whatever. We can talk. You concentrate on finding Britney. If that part doesn’t happen, nothing else matters.”