First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  Charlie didn’t respond. It only egged Allie on. Better to play possum. Just sort of play dead until the bad jokes stopped.

  Charlie flicked her eyes toward the rearview mirror. She squinted as she gazed into the reflection there. Beyond the rear windshield, where empty asphalt had been the last time she’d looked, tightly packed sedans and SUVs now filled the mirror’s frame.

  A good time to make a move, she thought. She could take a look around the back and sides of the building, do some poking around now that things were in full swing.

  Her gaze slid back to the bouncer out front, who now had his smartphone pressed against his ear. He spoke loudly into the phone, so loudly that she could hear him plainly in her car.

  “So the other night, I’m home alone. Bored out of my skull, right? And I remember that my buddy Dennis got me a bottle of that Yippee Ki-Yay whiskey for Christmas—like the Die Hard thing, you know? So I drink a couple of glasses of that. Wind up getting the spins.”

  “This guy speaks in all caps,” Allie said.

  Charlie shushed her.

  She listened for a few more seconds as the bouncer talked about getting so drunk that he somehow vomited into his dishwasher, and how “for some reason it looked just like eggnog.” He couldn’t be more distracted. Now was her chance.

  Charlie slipped out of the car, quiet and slow, and closed the door behind her with a gentle push. She crept between vehicles, staying out of his line of sight.

  His voice sounded even louder out here. Sharp. Like he was trying to damage the hearing of the poor soul on the other end of the call.

  Soon she reached the edge of the cars. There was nothing to conceal her from this point forward.

  She held her breath, counted to three, and darted into the open, scrambling around the side of the building. Based on the ongoing loud babble, he hadn’t noticed. Good.

  His voice finally cut out of her range of hearing as she rounded the corner to the back of the building. The sudden quiet was jarring. The dark didn’t help either. A lone floodlight on the far corner provided the faintest yellow glow. Easier to stay hidden, at least.

  Her eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light, and at last she found what she was looking for. A fire door cut a rectangle in the stone facade, a slab of steel there. She lurked toward it. Tried it.

  Unlocked.

  Yes.

  She slipped inside, careful to keep the door from making any noise behind her.

  A dingy hallway took shape in the shadows. Brick walls painted white, gouged and scuffed and scraped. Thin industrial carpet, mottled gray with holes worn into it. It smelled like stale beer and must. She snapped a quick picture with her phone and moved on.

  “Why take a picture of a beat-up hallway?” Allie said, at least having the decency to keep her voice low.

  “So I can remember what everything looked like later.”

  She worked her way down the hall, peeking into a couple of doors. Snapping more pictures. It looked like storage, mostly. Boxes of restaurant and drink supplies. Straws. Napkins.

  In the next room, she found a healthy stash of booze. A huge box of cheap-ass Five O’Clock vodka sat next to a rack of empty Grey Goose and Absolut bottles with a funnel resting nearby. So they were passing off swill as the top-shelf stuff. Nice. She snapped a photo of that as well. Could be used for leverage later.

  Voices murmured out from behind the next door. Girls’ voices. She moved closer, trying to listen through the heavy door, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  Her hand drifted to the doorknob. Fingers lacing around it. She turned it.

  And then rough hands grabbed the backs of her arms. Squeezed. Lifted her off her feet.

  “Busted!” Allie said, an annoying level of delight in her voice.

  Charlie looked over her shoulder to see another muscle-bound hulk of a bouncer staring back at her. The human side of beef grunted, annoyed. He hefted her back toward the fire door like she was nothing.

  The wad of muscles tossed her back out the way she had come, giving her a good shove that sent her stumbling over the asphalt.

  “You must be the snooping bitch Rocky was telling us about. Well, consider this strike two. You try to get in here again, we’ll call the cops. Trespassing.”

  He slammed the door before she could think of a witty retort. And then she heard the lock clank into place.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Charlie trudged back to her car, gliding along the edge of the building toward the bright glow where the parking lot lay. Her jaw clenched in little pulses, falling in and out of time with her steps. Frustrated.

  She rubbed at the sore spots on her arms where the meathead had grabbed her. She’d have bruises for sure.

  It wasn’t the pain that bothered her, though. It was being manhandled by some juiced-up moron who thought he had some God-given right to push people around.

  “If it makes you feel any better, he probably has a tiny sack,” Allie said. “You know, from all the ’roids.”

  Charlie didn’t respond. No need to encourage her now.

  “Someone’s crabby,” Allie said in a sing-song voice.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, tried to let the aggressive feelings go. This long, useless night was over. At least that was something.

  Might as well head home. Get some sleep. She could look at the case with fresh eyes tomorrow. The club had been a bust for now, but there were other angles to work yet.

  At last she reached the parking lot and veered to take a diagonal path toward her car. Almost there. Almost done.

  A slow series of slaps caught her ear. She swiveled her head to find the bouncer out front standing, giving her a mocking golf clap as she left. He smirked and gave her a nod before going back to perching on his tiny stool, eyes going back to the stupid clipboard as always.

  Now Charlie’s jaw quivered from clenching as hard as she could, gritty sounds coming from her teeth.

  “Careful with those choppers,” Allie said. “I seem to recall the dentist giving you a stern talk about not grinding your molars.”

  Charlie put her head down and walked faster, finally reaching her car.

  There. It was over.

  Just as she put her hand on the door handle, though, she saw it: a black Cadillac Escalade with a “No Fat Chix” decal in bright yellow letters over the rear window. This was the vehicle Zoe had told her about—the one that had been driving recklessly around the park the day Kara disappeared.

  Maybe her night wasn’t over just yet.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charlie sat in her car, eyes locked on the SUV. The driver hadn’t come out of the club yet, but he would. Eventually.

  She poured coffee out of a thermos and took a drink. Bitter, but it was still mostly warm, which she was thankful for.

  Snippets of the bouncer’s loud talking came to her still. She didn’t understand how anyone could talk so loud. He seemed to be making numerous calls, but from what Charlie could tell, it was always him talking. Whoever was on the other end of these calls didn’t seem to chime in much.

  “Almost seems like he doesn’t need the phone,” Allie said. “Surely these people can hear him wherever they are, anyway.”

  Just now he was going on about a documentary he’d watched about prisoners in solitary confinement.

  “These guys are in the hole for weeks, sometimes months at a time. They start to go a little mental, right? And the only way they can rebel against the guards is to get naked and throw their food at the walls and stuff. Or take a shit on the floor and then shove it under the door.”

  There was a pause in the conversation, as though shoving shit under a door was finally something the other party deemed worthy of comment.

  “Yeah, man. They pick up their own dook with their bare hands and cram it under the door like it’s Play-Doh or something. All mushed up. Like a fine paste pushed under that tiny crack into the hallway. By the time they get to that stage, they look psycho, man. W
ide eyes, pupils all huge and shit.”

  Charlie sipped her coffee again and tried not to picture human feces being finger-forced under a door. Harder than it might seem.

  Her eyes swiveled back to the black SUV, the jagged letters of the ridiculous decal glowing bright under the sickly yellow street lamps. She’d called Zoe earlier and left a message with the license plate number. It was late, especially by Salem Island standards, so she didn’t figure she’d get any kind of response until tomorrow morning.

  In the meantime, she’d wait and watch. The driver had to come out eventually. The club was only open another hour or so. She could wait him out.

  It occurred to her, not for the first time, that so much of the private detective business came down to patience. Discipline. Waiting for the right opportunity. Whatever obstacle a case presented you, whatever mystery you were trying to solve, it could generally be defeated with the sheer brute force of time and effort. Whoever got in her way, Charlie could outwork them, outwait them, or outlast them. She was confident in that. And in that sense, this driver was just another in a long line of foes for her to dispatch.

  Time passed. Charlie finally ate the Snickers bar she’d bought at the gas station, more out of boredom than hunger. The peanuts were stale, but it was still decent.

  The bouncer’s flood of phone calls seemed to recede to nothing all at once. He was quiet now. Perched on his stool like an owl. His eyelids looked heavier than before. Saggy. Charlie watched as slow blinks assailed his face, each closing of his eyes growing just longer than the last, until his chin sank to his chest.

  “Hilarious,” Allie said. “Maybe he was talking so loud to keep himself awake. Like how they blast Metallica at prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. They should send this guy in there to describe some movies he’s watched recently. The terrorists would start talking within minutes.”

  Charlie took another sip of coffee, and movement caught her eye. The first wave of patrons came streaming out the front door. Good. She checked her phone. Only about a half hour until closing time now, so the exodus should be pretty steady from here on out.

  Men of all ages poured out of the Red Velvet Lounge and stumbled over the wet asphalt of the lot—some clean-shaven, some bearded, a scant few with mustaches. One guy just had big mutton chops, which seemed to amuse Allie a great deal.

  “’Ello, guvnah!” she said in a horrible British accent, guffawing at the end.

  The men fanned out to reach their cars, most of them probably heading home to slide into bed next to a wife who had no clue what they’d been up to. A few came dangerously close to the SUV, getting Charlie’s hopes up, but none of them went for it.

  “Nada,” Allie said. “You know this guy ain’t coming out until the last possible minute, right? That’s how this kind of thing works.”

  “Maybe. It’s not much longer either way.”

  “Easy for you to say, guzzling coffee and wolfing down a Snickers and all. As it happens, I’m bored as hell, and it’s past my bedtime.”

  “Oh, really? Big plans tomorrow?”

  That shut her up.

  The flow of foot traffic slowed some as the clock ticked down. The bouncer kept falling asleep and waking himself up again, shaved head sinking and jerking back up like a bobber at the end of a fishing line.

  When the driver came out at last, he was alone. Charlie sat forward in her seat upon seeing him, fingers lacing around the steering wheel. Some gut instinct told her this was the guy. No doubt in her mind. Even Allie kept quiet as they watched him traverse the blacktop.

  The shadows swirled around him in such a way that she couldn’t see his face, but he looked tall and skinny—all shoulders and elbows. He looked younger than she’d imagined, too, an adolescent scrawniness still visible in the way his deltoids stuck out from the rest of his stick frame.

  He veered around a couple of mud puddles as he got close, the crook of his jaw entering the light for just a second. Dark stubble shrouded the flesh there. Charlie couldn’t make out much else.

  He climbed into the SUV, the dome light glowing over messy dark hair. It looked like maybe it’d started out spiky but had gotten trampled over time. When the light clicked off, he shifted into gear and drove out of the lot.

  Charlie waited a few beats and then followed, her heart picking up speed along with her car.

  Chapter Twenty

  Charlie followed the SUV out into the sticks, going back the way she’d come. The lights winked out all around them as the vehicles wound their way deeper on the rural roads, leaving civilization behind. The traffic likewise died off until they were the last two vehicles on the road for mile after mile.

  Her heart thudded along, a firm beat she felt in her neck. Steady for now.

  She struggled to find a good balance here. She wanted to keep him in sight without getting so close as to be obvious. He opened up as they got out into the middle of nowhere, though, eventually creeping toward eighty miles an hour. When she almost lost him after the first big swell of speed, she decided she’d better stay closer. The potential upside made it worth the risk.

  It became clear almost right away that they were headed for Salem Island. Nothing much else existed out this way, save for trees and soybeans. Anyway, it made sense, Charlie thought. This SUV had apparently been spotted tearing around town just the other night, and now he was headed back. Did that mean he was a local?

  Just as they hit the outskirts of town, Charlie’s phone rang. She pressed a button on the steering wheel to pick up via Bluetooth. Allie was aghast.

  “You do know Oprah would be furious about this, don’t you? The hands-free crap? Not good enough!”

  Charlie ignored her. She focused on the voice coming through the speakers: Zoe.

  “Someone’s out late tonight, eh? I ran that plate for you.”

  “And?”

  “Stolen.”

  “What the deuce?” Allie said.

  “How often does that happen around here?” Charlie asked. She couldn’t imagine Salem Island was a hotspot for that kind of activity.

  “Almost never. We get the occasional joyride scenario, where kids steal a car for a few hours or a night. If they don’t crash it, they usually abandon it somewhere. But this is obviously different. That car was reported stolen over two months ago, in Chicago.”

  “Well, I’m following him now, so we’ll see where he goes next. I’ll report back.”

  “Wait. I got something else for you. I searched the vehicle registry—no white Volkswagen Rabbits around here.”

  “Damn,” Charlie said. Another dead end. “Thanks, Zoe.”

  “It’s cool. You owe me.”

  As if on cue, the driver of the Escalade gunned it as soon as Charlie ended the call. The dark vehicle took off like a rocket. Faster than before.

  “Well, well, well,” Allie said. “Perhaps the post-boob haze of the Red Velvet Lounge finally cleared, and it dawned on this guy that you’ve been following him for the last thirty minutes.”

  Charlie gripped the wheel tighter with both hands now as she gave chase.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The SUV fishtailed as it veered right onto a dirt road, its attempt to dart away from her thwarted some by the skid. Charlie braked hard and then followed, heading deeper into the woods. Her heart hammered in her chest as the sound of the tires changed from the hum of asphalt to the grit of dirt flecked with gravel.

  Clouds of dust billowed up from the rear of the vehicle in front of her like tan smoke flitting through her high beams. She needed to stay right on his bumper just to see him through the murk.

  The trees flicked by faster and faster as they picked up speed again. She watched the speedometer creep up to seventy, then eighty, then ninety, turning that flicker of woods into a black blur on the sides of the road, the individual trees now indistinguishable.

  The potholes throttled both cars, jamming them with more and more force as they accelerated. Charlie felt like she was getting tossed around on the ba
ck of a mechanical bull or something, her head going a little light. She pulled herself upright, holding her abs rigid to absorb the shock as much as she could.

  The Escalade bounced hard to the left and then the right. The driver looked out of his depth, speeding down this kind of road—anyone would, really. She remembered how young he’d looked—those spindly arms and legs sprouting out of the long, slender torso.

  Charlie focused on nothing but the SUV for the next couple of miles. Her pulse pounded, and her hands felt sweaty on the wheel. But she stayed on him.

  When she finally looked down and saw the orange needle quivering at ninety-five miles per hour, she thought about giving up. One mistake at this speed could be fatal—even things she couldn’t control, like deer, were potential threats on her life. She eased up on the gas pedal.

  “Don’t you even think about it,” Allie said.

  “What?”

  “Giving up now? This dirtbag clearly knows something about Kara, probably has information that could lead us to her right now. Tonight.”

  She hesitated another second, the Escalade pulling away, the No Fat Chix decal growing blurry in the swirling, brown fog. Then she jammed the pedal again, felt the car stand up taller as it lurched forward with gusto. She started making up ground right away.

  They hit an especially bumpy stretch—the road here washed out into grooves, rutted like a giant washboard made of packed sand. Both vehicles bobbed up and down, each timed to the opposite of the other.

  THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

  Charlie jostled in and out of her seat. Wrestled to keep a hold on the wheel. It felt for all the world like something had to give, something had to break. This couldn’t go on for long.

  And then the SUV careened, suddenly out of control. It juddered to the left, the rear end lurching behind the rest of the vehicle. Charlie could see the moment the driver overcorrected and jerked the wheel to the right.