Page 121 of Blue Moon

TULSA

“Don’t go in hard,” Emmy Black said. “Just knock on the door.”

Was she actually serious? It sure seemed like she was, although sometimes it was hard to tell from a distance. She was still on the jet with Ryder, and her irritation at being sidelined came through loud and clear.

“If she’s colluding with Mark Antony, knocking would give her time to warn him.”

“She isn’t colluding. The hotel staff say she was a devoted mom? Fifty bucks says he took the kid.”

“You mean as leverage?”

“Easiest way to get her to cooperate.”

“We ran the probabilities on that and concluded it was a less likely scenario than bribery.”

It was too much of a risk. The police might be lackadaisical when it came to tracking down missing women, but a kid was different. News stories, AMBER alerts, the works.

“Oh, really? Probabilities? You mean you shoehorned the parameters from this case into some program based on a CIA war game simulation, and it suggested bribery was the best option? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption.”

“For your team, maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have guardrails. Not many, and they’re pretty loose, but they’re there. You still work for Uncle Sam. The powers that be will give you as many planes, trains, and automobiles as you want, plus enough slush-fund cash to buy a small country, but there’s no way they’d ever sanction you taking a child as a bargaining chip, especially on American soil. Put your computer away, go out to the street, and ask a mom what she’d do if someone took her kid. The answer will be ‘anything.’”

And this was why I wasn’t sure if I liked her. Emmy Black lacked tact. Then again, so did I, so I doubted she was fond of me either.

“If you’re wrong, that could jeopardise Luna’s safety.”

“And if you go in hard and Mark Antony’s close by with the kid, that puts everyone in danger.”

Curiosity got the better of me. “If you needed leverage, would you take the kid?”

She pondered for a moment. “Probably not. But I have a contractor with the morals of a street rat, and she definitely would.”

“And you’d condone it?”

“Not entirely.”

“So you don’t have control over your own team?”

“I’m results-driven, and I prefer not to micromanage.”

“And yet here you are…”

A shrug. “Here I am telling you that you’ll make a bad situation worse by scaring an already traumatised woman.”

Ryder opened his mouth to say something, and Emmy must have kicked him under the table because he closed it again. Beside me, Priest chuckled.

“What’s it to be, Miss Teen Tulsa?”

Ryder wasn’t the only one getting kicked. “Don’t call me that.”

And it was Miss Teen Splendor Tulsa. Miss Teen was a whole other pageant. And it wasn’t as if I’d wanted to prance around a stage in swimwear—my dad had recruited me to help with a sting operation because the FBI was a little short of twelve-year-old girls and I was a late developer.

What would my dad have said today?

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