Page 151 of Guarding Grace
“But we don’t have Elliot,” I pointed out. The fifty grand I could swing.
“He doesn’t know that.”
“So what did you tell him?” Winston asked.
“That it would take some time to get the money together. Have they located Marku yet?”
We’d heard from LAPD that the Marku gang had left their previous location, and nobody knew where the new hideout was yet.
“Not as of yesterday, but I’ll double-check,” Winston answered as he left the room, phone in hand.
“We could try the exchange without Elliot,” I suggested.
Lucas stood and shook his head. “Not a good play. We need their location to arrive unannounced and catch them unprepared. At an exchange, they’ll have all their soldiers and be on alert.”
“The phone is a burner,” Jordy yelled from his office. “Can’t get a location on it.”
“Fuck.” I felt like slamming my fist into something. The situation couldn’t get much worse. My woman was being held by a sicko. We only had one half of the ransom he wanted, and we had no way of knowing where she was being held.
“Lock that down, Marine,” Lucas scolded. “We’ll get her back.”
Grace’s last message haunted me—find me.
Winston reappeared. “LAPD doesn’t have a twenty on them yet.”
Failure was not an option. We had to find my woman. I marched back into Jordy’s lair—checking more video was all we had left.
“It’s quite a distance, but here’s another one,” Jordy said as he put another video up on the screen.
“Not her,” I said dejectedly. She wasn’t even close.
Less than a minute later, Jordy broke out laughing.
“What?”
“Check this out.” He put up a video showing a woman walking down the street with a baby in a front pack. “Ten to one it gets away and she loses it?”
“What are you talking about?”
He zoomed in. “The cat. Who the hell takes a cat on a walk?”
As he zoomed, I saw it—it wasn’t a baby in the carrier, but a fur baby, an orange tabby, a fucking cat.
Then, it hit me. “The cat tracker.”
Jordy spun around. “What?”
“I changed the battery on one of Grace’s cat trackers and put it in her purse. If she didn’t take it out?—”
“What brand is it?”
I wracked my brain. “It was tacky. Kitty something, I think.”
His fingers flew across the keyboard. “HereKittyKitty, maybe?”
“It sounds right, but I can’t be sure.”
“I don’t suppose you know what the serial number is?”
