Sparrow - L.J. Shen Page 0,98

him if I realized who he was, that I would never have given him a job. My mercy, hospitability and love for Catalina had some hard limits, even back then. Shit, if I’d known Brock was Kavanagh’s son, I’d have sent him back where he came from. His dad was no innocent victim. He sold us stuff, stole our stuff. Ratted on us. He did a lot of damage, was responsible for the loss of a couple of lives, too.

Brock Greystone was not a Greystone, and he wasn’t a West Coast outsider either. He was David Kavanagh’s son, one of us. An Irish kid from Boston who pretended to be someone else. He even had that smooth Cali accent to accompany his thick hair and Hollywood smile. No trace of Boston in his voice.

How could I not have known Brock was one of us?

I let him into my life without even checking who he was first. My mind was so messed up over losing Cat, over her betrayal, over her pregnancy, and how her baby-daddy needed a job on the East Coast, I got sloppy. Before I knew it, Brock had access to my business, to my secrets, to my father.

My fist on tightened on my list. I took out a pen and smoothed the paper on my knee. I crossed out the last question with a strikethrough and adding the missing name.

1 – Billy Crupti

2 – Father McGregor

3 – The asshole who hired Billy?

3– Brock Kavanagh

Excusing myself, I nodded politely to the two men as I stood up, buttoning my suit jacket and walking out of the church in the middle of the service. People frowned and followed me with their eyes as I strode to the wooden double doors and disappeared between them, heading to my car.

After I fired up the engine, I dialed Brock’s number. He didn’t pick up.

Somehow, that didn’t surprise me.

I tried Red right after. The last thing I wanted was for her to somehow fall into his clutches. She didn’t answer either.

I tried her again, and again, unsettling tension gripping me by the balls. My throat burned, and heat spread in my stomach. She was supposed to be home, or at the very least, available to take a call. She didn’t have a shift that day, was supposed to come back from her morning run and if she wasn’t home, she should have been with Lucy, Daisy or her dad.

Her dad was at the funeral. It left me with two more sensible, reasonable options.

Cursing Brock under my breath, I managed to get her friends’ numbers and call them. Daisy said she hadn’t heard from her in two days and Lucy claimed Sparrow had texted her before her morning run. They planned to hang out later. Sparrow never showed up at their usual spot.

Don’t fucking panic.

I called Maria, and gathered from her broken English that Sparrow wasn’t home. Feeling the blood freezing in my veins, I quickly used the GPS app I’d installed on my wife’s phone when I snatched her, before we even got married. The location finder showed she was in central Boston.

Phew.

Fucking Red had me thinking irrationally. I was going to yell my lungs out when I got to her for pulling this kind of shit.

Once I got to the location, I called her number again and again, trying to reach her. I called maybe thirty times before I heard the faint sound of a ringtone and found her cell in a dumpster among cardboard, junk food leftovers and cigarette butts.

Desperation and distress coursed through my veins. I kicked the dumpster so hard, I left a dent.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yelled, not caring about people around me watching my very public meltdown.

She hadn’t run away. Wouldn’t run away. I knew my lovebird—she was the fighting kind. The only running she’d ever do was to get her cardio fix.

No, this was not her trying to break free. This was him trying to get even.

It was the moment I realized that, for the first time, Brock was one step ahead of me.

And it was also the moment I knew that I would burn down the city and stop at nothing to find my wife. Not because she was mine, I never believed that for a second, anyway.

Because I was so busy telling Sparrow how much she wanted me, I forgot a small little detail—I wanted her back. More.

SPARROW

EXT. WILD FOREST – DAY

THIS WAS IT. The end. The final scene in my very short script.

Brock