I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m so f**ked.
That mean guy with Bobby already said he was looking for me. Bomb. That’s me. And the mean one was the one grabbing Ashleigh and Kate. Blackbird and Duchess, he said, but I’m pretty sure Duchess is a name Ford calls the baby.
And then I hear her. The loud, incessant crying of a very distressed Kate.
Chapter Thirty-Two
SPENCER
Ford storms into my office and takes a swing at me. I duck and swing back. He lands a fist on my jaw, spinning my head a little, and then I see red. I throw him down on the ground and land on top of him. He locks an arm around my neck and I get him in an armbar, ready to crack that shit if he doesn’t let go.
Ryan and Ronin pull us apart.
“I told you,” Ford says as Ronin pulls him off to a corner. “I f**king told you if she got hurt, I’d f**k you up, Spencer.”
“She’s not the only one missing, ass**le! Rook is gone and so is Veronica, so don’t f**king pin this shit on me! Besides, what the f**k happened to that security team you had on her? Huh? How’s their failure my fault?”
“It’s your motherfucking job!” he snarls back. “My job is hacking. Ronin’s job is lying. Your f**king job is security! I did my job and you f**ked it up again!”
Ryan extends his hand and I let him pull me up. Ronin offers the same courtesy to Ford.
We all look over at Ryan and he shakes his head. “I’m out, I get it.” He backs out, closing the door behind him.
“My security is gone,” Ford finally admits.
“Gone? How?”
“Like they were never there. Someone infiltrated my f**king team.”
I feel little vindication over this admission. The facts don’t change. It doesn’t matter who’s at fault, the girls are still missing.
Ford paces one side of the office while I pace the other. Ronin stands in the middle, calm. Calmer than he should be since Rook is missing. “What?” I ask him as I pass by. “Why the f**k are you so calm?”
He huffs some air at me. “Because one of us has to think clearly, Spencer. Look, I don’t have all the info here, OK? You two know something I don’t. What the f**k is going on with this Drake guy, Spencer?”
“I f**king told you, Ronin, he’s the f**king son of that Boulder bastard. He was about to get cuffed back there by the little blonde cop he knocked over yesterday and I said, Paybacks are a bitch. And then he said, Yeah, or You better remember that, or some shit like that. Meaning I’m the one getting paid back.” I point to my own chest to emphasize.
“By who?”
Ford makes for the door and I grab him by the arm. “Where the f**k are you going?”
He glares at me and shakes his arm free. “We have the bot. We’re gonna find out right the f**k now who’s behind this shit. And then, I swear to f**king God, whoever took my girls will be dead by tonight.” He stops and looks at Ronin, then me. “I’m not f**king around.”
And then he’s gone.
Ronin looks over at me and swallows. “What the f**k is going on, Spencer?”
“Dude, I swear, I have no f**king idea. But Veronica’s phone has been disconnected.”
“Maybe she’s just tired of you bugging her, maybe she just got it changed?”
“No, I was with her last night, OK? We had a really good night. I told her to be patient, this shit was almost over. She was good, we were good. And now she’s missing too.”
“This just makes no sense, Spencer. Rook’s testimony, Ford’s daughter, your girlfriend. None of these things are related beyond the fact that they’re all our girls.”
I swallow and inhale deeply. “Yeah.” That hurts. So f**king bad. Because all these years I’ve been trying to protect Ronnie and now look. She might be killed because of me.
Ford comes back in, slams the bot down on my stainless steel desk, then opens his laptop and takes a seat in my chair. He types and then pulls up the bot’s memory card via Bluetooth.
We wait as the footage loads. Ford drums his fingers on the desk, refusing to look at anyone. Ronin peeks out the window facing the street. I’m frozen in place, my worst nightmare coming true.
“Here it is,” Ford finally says after many long silent minutes. “Drake came in two days ago, bitching about the theft?”
“Yeah,” I say as I go around the desk and squat down so I can see the monitor. Ronin flanks Ford’s other side, and we watch the footage run in fast-forward. It’s not the best spot for the bot to be parked—it’s got a fifty-five-gallon drum on one side of the bench it’s parked under and the guys in the garage pile shit up on the other side for a lot of the day. But every night, the shop is picked up and the camera has a clean shot of the bay that houses Drake’s bike. His schedule is annoyingly consistent, and the bot’s camera goes into sleep mode after eight minutes of no motion detection. It stays dark all night, every night until…
“Two nights ago,” Ford mumbles as his fingers type on the keyboard. “That’s after he says the bikes went missing. No f**king bikes went missing. Everything goes quiet around eight, like usual, but it comes back to life at ten thirty.” We watch the monitor as he slows it to real time. There’s three sets of feet walking by, but they are too close to the bot to see faces.
“Come on, come on,” Ronin says impatiently. “Fucking fast-forward until they move back, Ford.”