Page 114 of Merciless

In a few hours, there will be girls up on the bar top, wearing very little and encouraging all the dirty old men to spend every cent they have in the hopes of spending ten minutes in the bathroom with one of them. There will be a band playing, usually a couple of high school kids who have yet to realize that Harrow Creek doesn’t breed successful musicians or anyone who’s likely to get out and make something of their lives. We breed gangsters, dealers, druggies and hookers. That’s pretty much the limit.

Got to give it to them for trying, though. Shame no fucker is going to be listening, no matter how good they are.

I jerk my chin at the barman, silently ordering two beers before I turn my eyes on my old school friend.

Brody and I were tight growing up, but we've drifted apart over the past few years. We took different paths after graduating from Harrow Creek High, although we've been drawn back together just like everyone else in this town.

While I was the son of the high-ranking Hawk with the promise of following in his footsteps, Brody came from conservative parents who ended up here by accident and thought everything could be fixed with better laws and policing.

So while I was being trained to be a mini-me of my father, his parents were brainwashing him into believing that he could make a difference if he became a cop.

Such wishful thinking.

Here we are only a handful of years later, and while Brody might wear the badge, he’s as bent as every other cop in this town.

There isn’t a single one who isn’t under Victor’s control. You either get in line or find yourself hanging from the trees in the woods I caught Alana running through all those years ago.

I shake my head. It’s all he needs to see to know how I’m doing.

“Shit, man,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck as the barman delivers our beers. “Seriously, no sign of her?”

“Nothing. The only thing missing is her purse. I can’t pinpoint what she was wearing besides her sneakers.”

“And nothing on her tracker?”

I shake my head, swallowing several mouthfuls of the watered-down shitty beer that Otis thinks he can get away with. Well, I mean, he does. It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, and this place is already almost full.

“I’ve run another search on her,” he says. “Nothing.”

“Fuck. She can’t just have fucking disappeared, man.”

He looks at me with sympathetic eyes. I know what he thinks. It’s what everyone thinks.

My little housewife got bored and ran off into the sunset to find a better life.

Hell, I couldn’t really blame her if she has. But I know she hasn’t.

She had too many reasons to stick around here and get the revenge and the answers she craves.

“Yeah, well. She has. And I need to fucking find her.”

“Her old man is most likely to have intel,” he muses.

“That motherfucker hasn’t cared about her a day in her life. He’s unlikely to start now.”

“Where’s her mother? Has she gone running to her like her sister did?”

A bitter laugh almost spills from my lips at his innocent question.

For such a corrupt and toxic place, every fucker seems to believe all the bullshit they’re told. It should be obvious that anything that sounds nice, like a little girl going to live with her happy mother, is too good to be true.

Kristie didn’t go to start a new life in California like Kurt told everyone. But no fucker has questioned it.

Anger burns through me as I think about Alana, Kristie, and all the other kids that have come and gone in this town and whose hellish lives have been overlooked and ignored because of people’s ignorance and selfishness.

“She’s not with her mother.”

“I know you don’t want to hear it, bro. But she’s Alana Murray. There might be some stupid motherfuckers in this town, but none of them are dumb enough to hurt her.”

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