Page 12 of Indebted

Chapter Five – Luca

“Where the fuck is he?” Now that it’s just Jock and me, alone in a car, I don’t have to play nice and pretend I’ve got it all together right now. Instead, I slam the side of my fist against the door—not that it does any good.

“Respectfully, this is my car, purchased with my own money.”

“Do I look like I give a shit?”

Rather than answer me, he answers the voice now coming through his earpiece. “Tell me you’ve got good news,” he growls as we raced down yet another road. We’ve already been up and down so many, I don’t know where we are anymore. I strain my ears in hopes of catching something Beckett is saying, but there’s the little problem of my racing heart and the blood rushing in my ears.

I don’t know this feeling. I’ve never been here before. This absolute helplessness. Knowing something terrible must be happening and being unable to do a thing about it. It’s worse than when my family died. That happened all at once with very little warning beyond knowing Bernardi would be out for blood after what my brother did.

Now I have the experience of dreading. Imagining. Wanting to scream because damn it, anything could be happening to her right now while I sit in the passenger seat of this damn car, chasing a ghost.

“Thanks. Keep me posted.” Jock only shakes his head with a soft growl. “Same as with the others. After ten miles or so, the car doesn’t show up on any traffic cams.”

“He couldn’t have fucking disappeared!”

“No, but he could have taken her into the woods.” Right. There are miles of woodlands around here, dense enough in some places there have been reports of hunters getting lost and needing rescue, people who make it their business to be out there in camouflage every day they get a chance. And even they can’t find their way out sometimes.

What the fuck kind of hope do we have?

“I should never have left her. I never should have—”

“That’s not helping things,” Jock informs me. We come to a fork in the road and he chooses left seemingly at random. “Besides, that should have been one of the safest places imaginable. In the middle of the Giordano compound, for fuck’s sake.”

“And my parents and sister were in our goddamn driveway when the car blew up. What’s your point?” He takes a deep breath and his hands tighten around the wheel but he says nothing. It’s a smart move on his part, but then he’s usually pretty smart.

My phone rings and I jump on it like it’s a live grenade. “Yes?” I bark.

“Luca, it’s Paul Giordano. I wanted to reach out personally and let you know my guys ran that plate through the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s registered in Maryland to a Benedict Carollo. Do you know the name?”

“I’ve never heard it.” A glance at Jock tells me he’s in agreement.

“We’ll do some more work on this end to see if we can find out who he is. It could be stolen for all we know now.”

“Thank you for your help.” I know damn well if the kidnapping hadn’t taken place in his home, while his guards probably watched, he wouldn’t be bending over backward like he is to make things right. I can’t bring myself to care. If it helps, that’s all that matters.

And it has to.

“What if he does the same thing to her?”

“We can’t think about that now.” Easy for Jock to say. That’s all I can think about. Now I’m glad I never saw what happened to that nameless, faceless girl we lost. Though I doubt reality could be much worse than what’s going on in my imagination.

We’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Damn it, it never occurred to me to place some kind of tracker on her, somehow. I trusted her. She wasn’t the one I should have been worried about. What a shame hindsight is twenty-twenty.

We come to a stop in a four-way intersection. There’s a strip mall up ahead, a string of fast food restaurants across the street from it. “We’ve already been here,” I realize. We drove in a circle. “What the fuck are we doing?”

“Chasing our tails, it looks like.” He looks my way, and I know what he’s thinking. You don’t work as closely as we have all these years without developing sort of a telepathy.

“I’m not walking away from this. If you don’t fucking like it, get out of the car and I’ll drive. You can find your way home.”

“I didn’t suggest giving up. I’m wondering if you need to be the one out here searching. This isn’t the kind of work you do. This is the job of a foot soldier. Not of a boss.”

Like it matters. “She disappeared because I left her alone.”

“She disappeared because somebody took her away.”

“What are you now? A therapist? Don’t argue with me. Drive the fucking car.” I slam myself back in the seat and pretend I don’t hear the way he grumbles. Like I couldn’t buy him five of these damn cars.

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