"We have to get out of here. Now."
She nodded at his urgent tone and ran with him, wasting no precious time on questions. He would explain everything to her, but first, he needed to contact the Order in Boston. Lucan and the others needed to know what he'd discovered here, and just how far his mission had veered off course. Zach Tucker knocked the carbide handle of his state-issued Maglite against the rickety doorjamb a few more times and waited, not with any kind of patience, on the back steps of Skeeter Arnold's run-down apartment.
Since the asshole had been ignoring his cell calls and text messages for the past twenty-four hours, Zach saw little choice but to make an in-person inquiry at the house Skeeter shared with his mother. Five minutes standing in the cold, freezing his balls off while he banged on the door with no reply, but he wasn't going anywhere until he got some answers out of the cocky piece of shit.
Answers, and the five hundred dollars cash that Skeeter owed him from their most recent deal. If Skeeter thought he could walk away without giving Zach his cut, he was sorely mistaken. And if he'd somehow gotten it into his fool head that he no longer needed Zach--that maybe he'd found himself another source of procurement in the area and suddenly had ideas about severing their association--then Skeeter Arnold might just discover that he was deadly mistaken.
Zach rapped on the door again, hard enough it was a wonder the frozen wood didn't shatter under the repeated blows of his flashlight handle.
Finally, a muffled voice sounded from somewhere inside--not Skeeter, but Ida Arnold, his offensive bitch of a mother. Zach despised the old woman, though not as much as Skeeter must have, being subjected to her piss and venom every day.
"Goddamn it, I'm coming! I'm coming!" she hollered, the heavy shuffle of her footsteps punctuating every syllable. The porch light went on over his head, then the door was yanked open on another coarse grumble.
"Evening, Ida," Zach said pleasantly as she scowled at him.
"What do you want?" She crossed her arms over her breasts, tugging at the edges of her old housecoat. "You come to tell me he's in trouble again?"
"No, ma'am."
She grunted. "He dead?"
"No, ma'am. Nothing like that." He cocked his head. "Why would you think that?"
"Wouldn't surprise me, is all. I heard what happened to Big Dave and Lanny Ham today." At Zach's grim nod, she huffed out a breath and shrugged. "Never did care much for either one of them, tell you the truth."
"Yes, well," Zach replied idly. He cleared his throat, adopting his cop voice, the one that Jenna said made him sound like a self-righteous prick. All he knew was, it generally got results. "I actually came by to talk to Stanley."
The fact that he'd used her son's given name and not the nickname that all the rest of Harmony had called him from the time he was a skinny, snot-nosed kid made Ida Arnold's scowl burrow a bit deeper on her forehead.
"Is he here, ma'am?"
"No, he ain't. Haven't seen hide nor hair since early this morning."
"He hasn't called or anything to let you know where he might be, ma'am?" She barked out a cutting laugh. "He don't tell me nothin', just like his no-good father before him. Thinks I'm blind and dumb, that boy," she muttered. "I know what he's up to, though."
"Oh? And what's that, Ida?" Zach asked carefully, narrowing his eyes under the glare of the overhead light as he watched the old woman's expression harden.
"He's dealing again, drugs, for sure. My guess is he's also bootlegging to some of the dry Native settlements up-river."
Zach felt his brows rise, even as his gut clenched into a tight ball. "What makes you suspect Skeet-Stanley--is involved in something like that?" She tapped the center of her chest with her finger. "I raised him, for better or worse. I don't need proof to know when he's up to no good. I'm not sure what he's gotten himself into lately, but he's starting to scare me. I think he has it in him to hurt me one day. In fact, after the way he treated me when he was here last, I don't doubt it for a second. Never seen him act so nasty and arrogant. Acted like he suddenly grew a pair of balls."
Zach cleared his throat at the woman's crudeness. "This was yesterday, you said?" She nodded. "He came home looking like something the cat dragged in. When I said something about it, he grabbed me by the throat. I tell you, I thought he was going to kill me right then and there. But he just mumbled that he had work to do, then went inside his room and closed the door. That's the last he was home, far as I know. Part of me hopes he never comes back, the way he treats me. Part of me wishes he would just ... go away. To prison, if that's where he belongs."
Zach stared at her, realizing that her fear and dislike of her own son could work to his advantage here. "When he was here at the house last, did he say what kind of work he was doing?"
"He didn't say, but that boy's never done an honest day's work in his life. You wanna have a look inside his apartment? It's a damn pigsty, but if it's proof you need--"
"Can't do that," Zach said, even though right now he wanted nothing more. "From a law enforcement standpoint, I can't search his residence. That would require a lot of paperwork and procedures." The rounded bulk of her shoulders slumped a bit. "I see--"
"However," Zach added helpfully, "seeing how I've known you folks for the past decade or so since I've lived in Harmony, I suppose if you asked me as a personal favor to come in and have a look around-unofficially, as it were--then I would not be opposed." She peered at him for a long moment, then stepped back from the door and motioned him inside. "It's this way, down the hall. He'll have locked the door, but I keep a spare key tucked behind the baseboard." Ida Arnold ambled down to her son's door, retrieved the tarnished brass key from its hiding place, then unlocked and opened the door for Zach.
"I'll be just a few minutes," he said, dismissing her with both his tone and his unblinking academytrained stare. "Thank you, Ida." Once she had shuffled back up the hallway, Zach walked into Skeeter's dump of an apartment and began a swift, thorough search of the place. Empty food wrappers, bottles, and other trash littered the floor and nearly every flat surface. And there--surprise--on the counter next to an old police radio, a roll of twenty-dollar bills, secured with a rubber band.
It didn't seem like Skeeter to leave his money lying around. Didn't seem like him to leave his cell phone behind, either, but there it was, jammed into the seat of a tattered light blue recliner. Guess that explained the ignored calls and texts, although it hardly excused Skeeter for being an asshole out at Pete's the this morning.
Zach grabbed the cash and counted it out: fifteen bills. Not the five hundred bucks Skeeter owed him, but he'd gladly take what he could get.
Hell, he'd take the cell phone, too.