HIS BABY’S KEEPER

by Evelyn Glass

  Maybe that was stupid, maybe he was selling both of them short. Hell, it wasn’t like she’d fucking missed the part where the girl was missing. But it didn’t make it easier or less painful.

  How could he declare his love to a woman his daughter hadn’t even met? He hadn’t told a woman that he loved them since Sam. He hadn’t told anyone that he’d loved them before Sam, either. What kind of track record was that?

  He’d left her behind. He’d done the right thing. She’d get over him now, and she’d be able to move on. And he... Well, who the hell knew what he’d do. Something. Something smart, and sensible, and responsible. There had to be an answer.

  Connell was waiting for him at the clubhouse, a bottle of Scotch at the ready. He’d already poured two fingers for Dean, who threw them back without hesitation. His jaw ached, his fists ached, his body ached. His heart ached, although he didn’t want to think about that any goddamn more than he had to. Connell didn’t say a word, not for a long time. Whenever Dean’s glass got empty, it was refilled.

  “How much do you know?” Dean asked after a very long time.

  Connell gave a shrug. “Whoever they are, they covered their tracks. This is bigger than two clubs pissing on each other’s territory, Dean. We have to start looking at the bigger picture.”

  Dean spent a moment sizing up his old friend. “You think it’s time to call the police?”

  “Not in any official capacity. But I called up a couple of old friends — guys who used to ride with us before they decided the straight and narrow had some kind of appeal. They’re looking into some things. Maybe Sam knew something we didn’t know about at the time, man. Maybe she was involved in some darker shit than we ever thought.”

  The idea that this wasn’t all his fault. God, he could cling to that like a goddamn life preserver, but at the same time, it felt so fucking wrong to even consider.

  “I don’t know, Henry, it just seems wrong. Sam never did anything dirty, you know that. She hated that I was ever here, she hated that I was ever a part of this life. She wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “I know,” Connell said, nodding. He’d consumed more than his share of whiskey as well. The bottle, which had been nearly full when Dean had arrived, was at the bottom of the label. Connell tipped it again, filling both of their glasses, and emptying the bottle. He gestured at the bar, and someone reached down to find another bottle of the reserve Scotch Connell kept for himself back there.

  “Tell me again. At the end. She had a new job, you said. Interning with someone.”

  “Legal aid,” Dean replied. “She said it was her way out, that she was really going to make a difference. For kids like her, who’d grown up rough. She never said kids like me. But she meant it.”

  Connell waved that part away. “Focus with me for a minute, man. Did she mean that the job was going to make a difference, or that she’d learned something about someone who was going to help her make a difference? Would she have told you which it was?”

  Dean sat back in his chair, his entire world suddenly shifted ten feet to the left. He couldn’t follow the words in his head, not with any ease. It had been so many years ago, but — no, Sam had never been really clear, which it was. He’d assumed because he’d been a dumb kid. They’d both been dumb kids. And he’d been sure that they were going to change the world, yeah, but they were going to do it together, and how was Sam going to do anything by being just another fucking wage slave, and especially one who’d just gotten some shit job where she didn’t even get paid. Cocky Dean had been sure that was some kind of fucking rip-off gig and a piece of crap. And maybe he’d been right, but it had been their last fight, so he’d avoided thinking about it for years.

  He stared at Connell, and everything he hadn’t been able to finish thinking was there in his eyes.

  Connell nodded. “I’ll make some calls. Find out what she was looking at, what she might have found out. Who we can talk to.” Connell lifted the bottle to fill it again, and Dean nearly choked. He reached forward, grabbing the bottle, splashing whiskey over both of them. Connell shouted but stared as Dean lifted the bottle up into the air.

  There, on the bottom, was a symbol sketched in black. The bottle from Connell’s private collection that no one goddamn well touched. He wouldn’t have known the symbol twenty-four hours ago, but now… Emma had drawn it for him. It had been etched into the base of a bullet that had been hanging from her kidnapper’s rearview mirror.

  “Connell,” Dean said, his voice scratchy and broken. The man had been here. The man had touched absolutely everything that Dean had ever considered his.

  The man was going to die.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Emma

  When Dean was gone, Emma let her knees give way. She managed to collect herself enough not to fall in the goddamn cum stain, but that was as much as she could manage at that exact moment. She should have kept her mouth shut. She shouldn’t have asked. She knew better than to ask for things. Than to want things. Hadn’t she learned well enough in her life? That asking for things led to pain and misery and shattered expectations. Nothing good, ever.

  She gave herself a solid five minutes to wallow in misery, in hating herself for wanting things that she shouldn’t ask for, and then she made herself pull her phone out of her skirt pocket and tap in the number that she’d memorized back in Abbey’s apartment. She probably ought to climb those stairs again, wait with her until her girlfriend came back, but she couldn’t stand the thought of it. The woman looked at her like she was the worst kind of traitor, and maybe she was. Maybe she’d played this whole damn thing wrong from the first second, but what could she possibly do about it? Looking back, thinking it over, there wasn’t a single thing that she could have done differently. In hindsight, sure, there were isolated events that might have played out in a different way, but knowing what she knew at each moment, there was nothing she could point to and say yes, that was the change that would have made this okay. She had to trust Abbey and Dean. How hard would the police really have looked for the child of a known gang member and a dead black woman? It hurt, but she couldn’t find herself believing that they would’ve looked for Mia half as hard as she and Dean had. And as much as she wanted to believe they would look for any child as hard as any other child… it just didn’t seem true. You only had to turn on the news at night, follow half a dozen hashtags on social media, to know that some kids were worthier than others. Sick as it was.

  She pushed away those thoughts. She had to exist in the here and now and find a solution that would help her, help Mia, help all of them. For Dean. Even if he didn’t want her. The child needed to be brought home safe. Mia was still her responsibility.

  She dialed the number, the one the kidnapper had used to provide proof of life. It only took a moment for the phone to pick up.

  “Took you long enough,” he said.

  “I figured you were making a point, calling from an unblocked number,” she replied. “I’m surprised you answered, though. I want the girl back.”

  “I want a lot of things, Miss Mills,” the man said.

  “Tell me your name,” she replied. Let him give her something, anything.

  Still, when he said, “Soren Jay,” she jumped a little bit. She hadn’t expected anything like a response. Who knew if it was an honest one. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t made her fight for it, which was strange, odd. An offering of some kind.

  “What do you want, Mr. Jay?”

  “I want to get out of some very bad trouble. I do not want this girl to get hurt, Miss Mills, and I feel like I’ve been very clear about that. I’ve done quite a lot to keep her safe. Not just getting her medicine, which I consider an act that any decent human being would’ve completed, but things you don’t realize yet. She has been in incredible danger for years, and no one knew it. But very recently, someone found out, and now some very, very bad men are following her, trying to get what she knows.”

  “She’s a little kid,” Emma sa
id. She didn’t realize how loud her voice was until she heard it echo back to her, bouncing off the roof of the parking structure. She forced herself to lower her voice, take a breath, calm down as much as she could. “She’s a child. What could she possibly know that would have caused all this chaos?”

  The man on the phone — Jay — laughed, and it was one of the most awful sounds Emma had ever heard in her life. “Ironically, Miss Mills, if I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m not sure even the child knows what she knows. It’s just not as simple as all of that.”

  “What do we do?” Emma asked, and tried hard to keep the rising tide of fury out of her voice.

  “So far you and I have shown that we can exist in the same space without tearing each other to pieces,” Jay said. “I think it’s time for us to meet, face to face, no subterfuge, and see what we can do to create some peace where currently there is only chaos.”

  “The last time you asked to meet me, I got kidnapped and dumped in the hands of a biker gang with a grudge against me and my—” she’d stopped herself before she called Dean her boyfriend. “I don’t feel like meeting with you is going to lead to peace.”

  “It’s up to you,” Jay said, “but I’m afraid to tell you, I have to meet with someone in the next hour. If it’s not you, it will be those very bad men who want the child, and I can no longer vouch for her safety once she’s out of my hands.”

  Emma cursed. What could she possibly do? Call Dean? Make him come back for her? No, dammit. No. No subterfuge. Jay had given her the number. He’d picked up because she had called him back, not Abbey, and not Dean. For whatever reason, he was fixated on her. If she called Dean, whatever fragile deal they were forming would be shattered. She might be about to make a terrible mistake, but if it helped Mia? Then the risk was worth it.

  “Where do you want to meet?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dean

  Dean didn’t exactly mean to knock over his chair and tear across the floor to the bar, where Connell’s Scotch was kept. He didn’t exactly mean to take the bartender — Jimmy, he thought vaguely, Jimmy the Kid he called himself, the idiot — by the collar and put him up against a wall, jarring him hard enough that a couple glasses fell down, smashing on the floor. He didn’t mean to growl in the kid’s face, demanding to know where exactly that bottle had come from.

  Jimmy didn’t have anything to say other than an incoherent spill of moans, and it took a long time for the pressure Dean felt on his wrists to resolve into the feeling of Connell’s fingers prying him loose. “He doesn’t know anything, Dean, for fuck’s sake, let the kid go before you hurt him.”

  Dean forced himself to drop the kid, who sagged as soon as his feet touched the floor. Dean didn’t feel far from doing the same thing. He’d seen that mark on the bottom of the bottle, the sign that somehow, somehow the kidnapper had even infiltrated this place, where he was supposed to be away from all that shit, and his vision had just twisted into a knot.

  “Connell,” he said, same as he had when he’d been hunched over yet another glass of whiskey. “Connell, my girl. My baby girl.”

  “I know, boy,” Connell replied, and it was the first time Connell had called him that in nearly a decade. “I know. We’re going to find her. But you can’t go making this even worse for us than it already is. It won’t help us, and it won’t help her. Feel me?”

  He wanted to rip Connell’s face off his skull, but he understood. He forced himself to nod.

  “You check on Abbey yet?”

  Dean shook his head. He knew damn well why Connell was changing the conversation, and he didn’t want any goddamn part of it. “Her girlfriend’s there with her. She’ll call me if she needs me.” He swallowed, then said the thing he didn’t want to say. “She doesn’t want a damn thing to do with me right now, Connell, and I can’t really fucking blame her. Shit, she’s spent more time with that kid than I have. She’s the one who puts the kid to bed at night, and gets her ready for school in the morning.”

  He felt Connell nodding next to him, the man’s hand tightening on Dean’s bicep as Dean rested his trembling fists on the bar. “She’s done a real good job with the day to day raising of that child. But I’ve never once seen you bail on the girl. You’ve given her everything you could, including the best mother you could find for her. You stepped out of the way when you thought you wouldn’t be good enough for her, but you made sure you were still in her life. The way I figure it, you did a pretty good job. You’re fighting for her now harder than I’ve ever seen anyone fight for anything.”

  “I love her,” Dean said, and he wondered for a moment if he’d ever said it out loud before.

  “Figure she loves you, too,” Connell said. “And I figure she knows you’re going to come for her. Doesn’t matter if she calls you Uncle, or Daddy, or fuckin Santa Claus inside her head. The thing that matters is she knows you’re going to come for her. There’s a lot of kids in the world who don’t have that.”

  “Yeah,” Dean made himself say, trying to believe the older man’s words. “I just don’t know where to start, Connell. I’ve run out of leads. A cryptic fucking drawing on the bottom of a bottle. What the hell does it even mean?”

  “I’m going to call a guy over in organized crime,” Connell said. “I think I’ve seen that before. He might know a thing. Have you heard from your girlfriend?”

  He could try to explain that he and Emma had not had any kind of organized conversation about exactly what the status of their non-relationship was, or he could just skip to the point where Connell took the next step and moved along. “No, Emma hasn’t been in touch yet.”

  “Why’d you leave her behind, anyway?”

  The million dollar question. Who the hell knew? Because he was afraid? Because he didn’t want to dishonor Sam’s memory? Because he was an absolute fool? All of the above? Maybe.

  Connell let go of Dean’s arm and got him a glass of water. He set it down in front of the other man and patted his shoulder. “Drink that. Start thinking sober thoughts. Let me see what I can find out about this,” he said. He lifted the bottle and took a cell phone picture of the marking, then withdrew to the far corner of the room.

  Dean drank the water, then glanced down at Jimmy, who’d gone and found a broom to sweep up the mess he’d made.

  “Sorry about that,” Dean made himself say.

  Jimmy shrugged. “They got your little girl, man. I’d fucking kill anyone who got in the way of me taking back my kid.”

  Yeah. Yeah, that was just about it.

  ###

  It took two hours, and then Dean was on the road again. Connell’s calls had revealed that the symbol, an arrow cutting through a diamond, had recently appeared on the north side of a building on the outside of town. One of Connell’s contacts had sent on an address, and after a very heated argument, Dean had mounted up on his bike and set his front wheel toward the warehouse district, yet again. There was nothing casual about driving up this time. He peeled into the yard, dumped the bike on its side, and strode angrily into the front office area of what had once been some kind of processing plant. There was a small administrative area, and a window overlooking a sunken plant full of rotting metal machinery and old barrels of God knew what.

  Sitting behind a desk that looked like it dated back to the Vietnam era of pencil pushing was a gorgeous brunette who fulfilled every fantasy he’d ever had about a Girl Friday. She had carefully constructed waves in her hair, a pencil skirt, a slim blouse, and breasts that looked too luscious to allow into his dreams. He had to force himself to look away — and then was surprised that he did so. He’d never stopped himself from catching an eyeful, no matter who he was with, and he and Emma weren’t even together. Who was he even turning into?

  The woman smiled at him, pleasant and empty, and waited for him to speak. He coughed once, then said, “My name is Dean Patterson. I’m here about this.” Connell had run off a copy of the photo he’d taken. Dean pulled it ou
t of his pocket now and held the photo out. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d expected, though complete and total bland indifference was not on the list. She glanced at the photo as if he’d held out a blank piece of paper, and then redirected her gaze up to his face. She seemed to focus just off from his eyes. There was no intimidation to it, just a casual not-caring.

  “What can you tell me?” he asked after a little while, not entirely sure what else he should say.

  “It’s a photo,” she replied. He searched the sounds for any sign of sarcasm or irritation or anything at all, but there was nothing there. Nothing. She was completely flat, totally unaffected.

  “Yes, it is,” he said, trying to go along with the conversation as if it were some kind of code he just wasn’t quite sure of yet. “But do you know what the subject of the photo is meant to be?”