Page 27 of Justice for Radar

“It’s just been a lot,” Mariposa said with a moan, keeling over and putting her head on my shoulder.

“Take it from the beginning,mi corazon.What’s happening?”

She sighed and said, “He’s just this boy – a freshman, and I don’t know he’s a little weird. He asked me out and I said ‘no’ and he just, I don’t know – he keeps likeshowing upplaces and I mean the first few times maybe were a coincidence but like seven, eight times a day? Then I got this…” She opened her phone and showed an email she’d received.

You only have a few more times to give the right answer and the right answer is ‘yes.’

It wasn’t signed, the email address that it came from was generic… but none of that mattered.

“Come on,” I said, towing her to her feet. “Let’s get this up on my systems.”

She sighed in defeat and said, “Okay, but if you’re gonna hurt him you better put the fear ofGodinto him, Papá… because if you don’t? I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse. I think he’s crazy.”

“You don’t get to worry about what I’m going to do,” I said, and I gestured for her to step out into the hall.

“Things all good?” Lucia demanded from her bedroom doorway.

“Yeah,” Mariposa said glumly.

“Go back to bed,” I told her a little more tersely than I intended.

“Tell you in the morning,” Mariposa said, and her sister gave her a chin lift and went back into her bedroom shutting the door.

I had my eldest daughter follow me into my den where I dropped into my seat at the controls. I opened the email service she used and ordered her to log in, sliding the keyboard and mouse over for her.

She sighed and did as she was told, logging in so I could retrieve the email.

“What’s this kid’s name?” I demanded.

“Levi Baumgartner,” she said with derision.

“Sounds like an entitled white boy,” I said.

“Nailed it,” she said, pursing her lips and handing the controls back to me.

“Alright, off you fuck to bed. I’ll take it from here,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m the only girl he’s doing this to,” she said.

I looked back over my shoulder at her and told her, “He’s not your problem anymore.” I put as much finality into my voice as I could, but Mariposa knew. She’d grown up in and around the life and I straddled the line – a foot in each world.

I shot a mass text to the club’s burners and settled in to do some digging. Church had gone well, and I’d tried getting Justice to come down to The Plank a little later, but she had opted to ‘stay in her bubble’ as she’d called it and to get more covers done.

There’d be another short Church sometime tomorrow to decide a course of action when it came to this, but for tonight I would do some digging and find out just how deep this dipshit’s rabbit hole went. Atlas pinged me back almost immediately online withlet’s fucking do this,and I had to grin. He lived for this kind of cyber bullshit far more than I did but I wasn’t no slouch, either.

I sighed. It would be a long night, but there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for one of my girls.

I glanced at the legal pad withBilly’sinfo on it and yeah, that was seriously chapping my ass, too.

I shot it over to Atlas,when we’re done with this, I want to dig on the dude that left Justice behind.

Atlas came back the only way Atlas would,you got it.

I nodded slowly and sighed.

She would be leaving in a couple of days, and I wasn’t really all that surprised to find that it didn’t sit right with me.

I thought about that, long and hard in the background while I went through the motions on Mariposa’s problem, shifting into a sort of work-mode on it.

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