Page 23 of Warped

The staff in the Italian restaurant were less friendly than the coffee shop.

“Who’s asking?” the owner—a man in his forties wearing an expensive suit which felt out of place in the small restaurant—snapped at me.

“Just a friend,” I replied, keeping my cool.

He jerked his chin at me. “If you’re a friend, shouldn’t you know where she is? What you going around asking me for?”

I could tell I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

“Forget I asked,” I said, backing out of the place.

Fuck. Did the owner of the restaurant know something? I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he just didn’t like having strangers asking questions.

Feeling like I was wasting my time, I walked past the barbers, figuring it was unlikely she’d been getting a shave, and a short back and sides, and stopped outside of a hotdog place. Would she eat somewhere like this? I didn’t know, but I figured it was worth a shot. I waited my turn at the counter and then asked the same questions of the guy serving that I’d asked of the girl in the coffee shop.

A slight frown marked the young man’s brow, but instead of shaking his head, he nodded. “You know what, that description does ring a bell. She was here yesterday, right, with two mean-looking guys. They looked like a couple of bodyguards. I remember them because they ordered and then sat over there.” He nodded to the stools up against the counter, which looked out of the window and onto the street. “They were just sitting there, and all of a sudden they both leapt up, leaving their food, and raced out onto the street. They came back a few minutes later with the girl you described.”

Anger rose inside of me at the idea of her possibly being hurt by two men.

“Was she all right?”

The young man shrugged. “She seemed to be. Maybe a little shocked, but she sat and ate her hotdog with the two men. Drank some coffee, too, if I remember right.”

“Can you think of anything else? Anything that might let me find her?”

He frowned again. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“Yeah, I think she might be.”

“Shouldn’t you call the cops?”

“No,” I said. “No cops. Hey, can you remember what she ate?”

“Yeah, they all had our simple dog—spicy brown mustard and sauerkraut.”

“I’ll take one of them,” I said. “Sorry, I’ve only got my card.”

“No problem.”

I tapped my card to pay, thankful I didn’t need to remember a PIN. I sat in the same spot the server had told me Verity had sat in the previous day. I took a bite of my hotdog, not because I was hungry, but because I wanted to experience the same taste she had in the same place, standing in her shoes and wondering where I could find her.

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