Gift From The Bad Boy

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ben

I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when I clomped into the clubhouse the next morning. My body was a little sore from all the roughhousing with Carmen, but I’d never felt lighter on my feet. I felt downright giddy, like a fucking schoolgirl. But goddammit, I loved it.

My mood immediately took a down turn when I waltzed around the corner and into the hallway. Spark and Slick looked up at me from where they sat on the floor with half-empty boxes arranged messily around me. They blinked a couple times, looking like goddamn zombies, then turned back to the papers without saying a word. I frowned.

Stepping into my office, I saw Jay and Duncan hunched over the conference table. Judging by the frightening number of cigarettes smoked down to the butt and stubbed into the ashtray in the middle of the table, they’d already been there for hours.

As I walked in the door, Duncan roared “Argh!” and stood up suddenly, flinging his seat behind him and plunging a knife into the wooden tabletop. He was seething. I could almost see the steam rolling out of his ears. His eyes were bugging out of his head, rimmed with red, while his nose flared out like a bull in the ring.

He heard me clear my throat and raised his gaze to me, but it was like he could barely see me through the haze of fury clouding his vision. “This is fucking impossible!” he snarled. He picked up a sheath of papers and shook it in the air over his head. “It’s all fucking ruined! I can’t read a goddamn thing. We’ve been here for hours, fucking hours, and we’re not anywhere closer to finding this shit!”

“Calm down, Duncan,” said Jay. His voice was level and cool, as always, but I’d known him long enough to hear the exhaustion underpinning it. I guessed the night’s rest hadn’t helped restore their patience much. They both looked ready to eat a bullet rather than dig through one more pack of water-stained files.

Jay looked at me. “Not going well?” I asked.

He took a fresh cigarette from the almost-empty pack at his elbow and tucked it in between his lips, then retrieved the lighter out of his breast pocket. “Not exactly,” he growled while lighting it and taking a drag. “Just too much damage from the flood. Here, take a look. This is the best thing we’ve found.” He held out a browned piece of paper, turning up at the edges.

“That shit is useless, I’m telling you,” Duncan muttered as I walked over and took the paper from Jay’s hand.

“It’s all we got,” Jay replied.

I studied the page. It looked to be a newspaper clipping. If I squinted, I could make out the date. It was from a few weeks after Olaf and James’s wife were found dead. The headline read, With No End in Sight, Murder Investigation Called Off. The article was still damp, and most of the ink in the paragraphs below had run together. I didn’t think it mattered, though, because the first line said, “Lacking promising suspects and any substantial evidence, local police have temporarily suspended their investigation into the murders of…” before trailing off into blurry nonsense.

My eyes roved over the sheet, looking for anything else that might be useful. I felt Duncan watching me and nodding his head. “See?” he said. “Useless.”

Something caught my eye. “What’s this?” I asked.

Jay frowned. “What?”

I held out the page and pointed out something on the bottom edge. “What’s that look like to you?”

He brought it close to his face, wrinkling up his nose as he tried to get a good view. “Ain’t shit,” Duncan said from across the table. “I’ve looked at that thing a hundred times already.”

“Ben’s right,” Jay said. “It’s something.”

“Lemme see that again.” I laid the clipping flat on the table and hunched over. Duncan and Jay came to stand on either side of me and together, we all stared down at the handwritten scribble I’d noticed just below where the text of the article ran out.

“Looks like turnip,” Jay said.

“No, it’s turning,” Duncan countered. “That’s a g, not a p. See the little squiggle underneath?”

“That’s just a pen mark, not a g. C’mon, use your head. Didn’t they teach you kids how to read in school?”

“Joiner,” said a voice at the door behind us. “It’s a name. Joiner.”

All three of us whirled around immediately. “Sorry, boss,” Slick said, panting. “He insisted he had to see you. I was just gonna bash his face in, but he said you’d know what was going on.”

“That’s okay, Slick. Let him in.” Slick stepped aside and John Hunter came shuffling into the office. He looked like he was favoring a bad knee, and he was wearing a bathrobe and house slippers, but it was the folder clutched in his fist that really had my attention.