Page 25 of Bristol

She melts into me and I slowly end the kiss, pulling her head into my chest.

“I needed this,” she whispers.

I don’t know what to say, so I just hold her closer and press a kiss to her forehead.

“I’ve got to go, but I’ll be back. I’ve got a few meetings and then we’ve got church this evening. If you need anything and can’t get in touch with me, it’s because I’m in church. We start at eight, but I’ll text you as soon as we get out.”

“I’ll be okay. But tomorrow I’m going to need to get out of these four walls. I’ve had enough of feeling caged in.”

“We will go do whatever you want, babe. Whatever you want.”

I kiss her one more time before I pull on my cutoff and hop on the bike. Mo texted me an address and I’m thirty minutes away. I’ll be pulling in right on time. It’s time to get some answers.

My phone dings with a text as soon as I get off the bike.

Bristol: Missing you already, hot stuff.

I smile down at my phone like an idiot at the selfie of her giving the peace sign with her eyes closed and tongue sticking out.

Sebastian: Ditto.

I slide my phone back into my pocket as I walk into a shady, sketchy mobile home on stilts. The covered porch is overcrowded with junk, mostly old computers, and electronic parts with a thick layer of dust covering everything.

The putrid smell coming from somewhere underneath the mobile home assaults my senses and I’m slightly relieved when Mo opens the door to greet me.

I give him a wide-eyed stare and he just covers up a laugh with a cough. Asshole.

“Come on in,” he says, holding the door open for me.

Inside, the smell isn’t much better. The floors are plywood and the living room where we enter is so overly cluttered it’s hard to see where one piece of furniture ends and the other begins.

“Bash, this is Clyde. Clyde, this is Bash.”

I reach out to shake the hand of the small, slim man sitting in the gaming chair in front of a desk that is stacked a little too high with McDonald’s wrappers and a mountain of miscellaneous papers. He’s got thick, dark black glasses sitting on his nose, his teeth are spaced out and he’s missing one molar on the right side. He’s got a large pair of headphones on and I’m not sure how he can hear anything with those huge things over his ears. I thought everyone in this generation had switched to air pods, but evidently there are a few… stragglers.

His black hair looks like it hasn’t been washed in weeks and I’m beginning to wonder if the smell isn’t coming from him.

“Hey, hey man,” he says, shaking my hand a little too enthusiastically.

I offer him a nod.

“What can you tell me about Patrick?” I ask, getting right down to business.

He seems unnerved by my questioning and averts his eyes before turning to his computer to click on a bunch of different icons before I can even tell where the mouse is.

“Last time I was in contact with him was two weeks ago. He wanted me to try and get him a new identity and was phishing for me to forge some paperwork for a property that had been abandoned for decades out in Magee, Mississippi.”

Clyde pulls up a map and zooms in on a piece of property in the middle of nowhere. It’s got a small creek on it and doesn’t appear to have any structures.

“Last records I could find on the place are from seventy-eight. No owners since then and its technically owned by the county but they don’t even know they own it. No one wants anything to do with it. So it just sits.”

“So what did you tell him?” Mo asks, quirking a brow.

“I told him to give me some time and I’d see what I could do, but he went radio silent on me and I haven’t heard from him since.”

About the time the words come out of his mouth, his phone vibrates amongst the clutter on his desk with Patrick’s name flashing across the screen.

“Answer and put it on speaker,” Mo demands.

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