“She didn’t admit to anything in the note, so I don’t know her culpability. But she did explain how the drops are made, with fairly specific details.” There’s a long pause, and then I sense the air in my office shift. “How much did you know, Cain?” Dan asks slowly. “Did you know what she was doing when you brought her with you to my home? To my wife and unborn child and—”
“No!” I temper my tone quickly, because I have no right to yell at Dan. He, on the other hand, has every right to punch me. Repeatedly. “I didn’t know.” I sigh. “I started suspecting it the day before she left. And then last night—” I stop, deciding whether I want to share all of this with Dan. After what he’s shared with me, though, I owe him this much. “There’s a guy by the name of Ronald Sullivan who may be of help to you. With enough pressure, he’ll talk. I have his address.” It took a dozen hits and a few broken ribs to get him to tell me what happened the night I ran into Charlie in the café. How some ass**le named Manny held a gun to her head, threatening to kill her, and how Ronald told her to run because she was going to get herself killed. Even thinking about it now sets fire to my blood.
“So, she’s really gone? She never mentioned where she was going?”
I throw down the stacks of paper, hearing the accusation between his words. “I’m not hiding her, Dan! I wish I could find her, but she’s gone. And do you blame her for running? She’s probably given you all that she knows and you’re looking to drag her in to interrogate her.”
“Hey!” Dan barks as he jumps off the couch. “I’m on your side here. I haven’t said a word about Charlie to anyone. No one knows she was working here, that she was dating you. If I had said anything, your life would be a circus right now.” Clearing his throat, he adds, “I could lose my job over withholding this kind of information.”
“Sorry,” I mutter, pushing my hands through my hair. “I just can’t believe she was doing this the entire time I was with her.”
“You’re not the only one. I can’t believe I had a drug trafficker in my own home and I didn’t have a damn clue.” He exhales. “Who uses their sweet little eighteen-year-old daughter like that? And who knows how long he’s been doing it! Things go wrong all the time with these transactions. Throw in a girl who looks like Charlie and it’s guaranteed that they end up raped or dead. Or both.”
Cold dread slides through my body. Had Charlie ever been raped?
“I wish I could help her, Cain,” Dan says with genuine concern in his voice, his righteous anger fading. “But I can’t if she’s gone. If I don’t know how much she really has on him. And if it’s enough.”
I tap the stack of information. “And if it is? Is there really any protecting her against someone like this? If he’s what you say he is, if he likely killed his own best friend, what’s to stop him from killing her? He obviously doesn’t value her life. As long as this guy is in the picture, she’s never going to be safe, is she?”
“Look, Cain, I know you haven’t had the best experience with it, but you have to trust in the justice system. We don’t know—”
“If it were Storm instead of Charlie, would you say the same thing?”
Dan hangs his head in response. That’s all the answer I need.
And Charlie knows how much danger she’s in. She’s known all along, from the first day we met to the night she left.
I’m probably never going to see her again.
“This is serious shit, Cain. If this is the guy we’ve been hearing about around the city, he’s moving some major quantities and he’s pissing the cartel off. Anyone willing to do that is either really stupid or really dangerous. We already know he isn’t stupid. You need to keep an eye out,” Dan warns. “I don’t know what she told him about you. I hope to God nothing.”
Maybe not. But I did. I gave him my f**king name. And that “uncle” of hers got a pretty good description of me. For all I know, he also got a picture.
I’m not stupid enough to think they can’t find me.
Or that they won’t.
Chapter forty-four
CHARLIE
“Love, do you mind bringing table seven an extra order of gravy on your way by?” Berta asks in that heavy southern accent of hers that I could listen to all afternoon. Especially when she addresses me with one of a myriad of pet names. My shift just started an hour ago and I’ve already been called “Honey,” “Darling,” “Sugar,” and “Sweetie.”
Some people might find it annoying, but I absorb each one of them like a flower yearning for sunshine.
Because none of them sounds anything like my old pet name.
“Sure thing!” I wink at Herald the cook as I scoop up the food-laden plates from the counter.
“Oh, Katie, you’re such an angel,” the heavyset brunette croons, patting my shoulder as she grabs three plates. “I knew my instincts about you were right.”
Flashing my stage-perfect smile, I saunter over to the tables to deliver their orders. It was only two weeks ago that I sat at one of these very tables for hours, reading through paper after paper, hungry for any news coming out of Miami, wondering all kinds of things.
Was Sam there?
Was he looking for me?
Was he looking for Cain?
I hoped that the information I left for Dan on his doorstep, just hours before I got on the bus, was enough. It wasn’t much, but it was really all that I had. If I had been smarter, if I had ever believed that I’d be stabbing Sam in the back, I would have saved the pictures of Bob and Eddie before they vanished from the draft folder.
After my third cup of coffee, the middle-aged waitress with a long braid reaching down to her ass and a name tag labeling her as “Berta” had asked me what a pretty girl like me was doing all alone.
I wasn’t in the mood for idle chitchat or making up lies, so I very bluntly announced that I needed a job and a place to live. She asked where I was staying and, when I told her, her face pinched up with disgust. “Oh, that just won’t do.”
Now here I am, serving tables at Becker’s Diner and renting out a room above Berta’s garage, one block away.
It was almost too easy.
The room is small, but it’s clean and safe and comfortable. Most of all, it’s private enough that no one hears me cry myself to sleep every night.
Berta is sweet. She’s a thirty-eight-year-old single woman who inherited the family diner and has been struggling to find good evening-shift help after a string of disastrous attempts. I don’t completely trust her not to snoop, but my gun and my knapsack are hidden inside a vent, so I figure I’m fine.
And now I’m twenty-one-year-old Katie Ford from Ohio. I have a golden-brown chin-length bob, violet eyes, and I wear only light makeup. I have an ordinary family back home who is proud of me for graduating with a Humanities degree from Ohio State and who fully supports me while I experience life in the South. And I had my wallet stolen. That’s why I have no social security number or other identification. Temporarily, of course.
I even went to church with Berta last Sunday morning.
I’m a new person. A good person who does good things.
Who hides her silent agony well.
“Here’s your Philly steak sandwich, Stanley. Careful, it’s hot.” I set the plate down on the table in front of the regular—a forty-something-year-old hog farmer with orange hair and green suspenders who comes in at six forty-five every night and orders the exact same thing. I think he has a thing for Berta.