#scenebreak
Officer Friendly and his trusty sidekick Pal shouted at me in a locked room with a big mirror. They performed an inept rendition of Bad Cop/Badass Cop with Warren hopelessly miscast as Badass Cop.
“Just where were you after the big fight at the dance studio?” Warren’s nose was way too close to my face. “Where’s Katy, now?!”
Again and again they asked the same stupid questions, as if the answers might change. Every half-hour, an annoying clock played the Big Ben chime out of tune and off time. It was torture.
“If not you, Fox,” Pal shouted, “then who?”
Ratting out the guys on the team who might look guilty wouldn’t help me with those two, so I refused to share any of my suspicions. Besides which, for all I knew the mailman had her.
“That’s what I thought,” Pal said after my silence.
Those two belonged in the cast of Super Troopers. The actual Sheriff or Chief, or whatever he was called, was still out of town “giving a deposition” in Houston. Remember Farmer-C’s booze-guzzling gesture? I was stuck with two guys fresh out of the academy and eager to prove something. What the hell had happened to Tango, and who was out looking for her while the only two cops in town grilled me?
Piece by piece, I gathered the story from the questions Laurel and Hardy asked: no one had seen Tango since the explosion at the studio. She’d never made it home. In a surreal twist, Farmer-C was the last to leave. Were they together again because I’d been an asshat?
Farmer-C claimed Tango was closing the studio when she sent him home.
The last her mom had heard was a text saying she was going to spend the night at Juicy’s, which Juicy flat-out denied. She hadn’t seen Tango since the blowout.
No one had the least idea why her mom’s car was at the studio with the engine running. Tweedledee and Tweedledum didn’t believe my story about it, anyway. I was the guy with the only tie to her whereabouts. I had her keys.
Since I was already beat to shit, Officer Friendly didn’t believe my knocked-on-the-head testimony, and there was really no way to prove it. “I say you got drunk and kidnapped Tango after your ‘lover’s quarrel’.” He said this with a straight face. “I say you dragged her out of the studio by force, you hid her car somewhere near the studio and walked back to lock up so no one would suspect. I say you passed out from the liquor.” He gave Pal a knowing glance. “If you do have a new bump on your head, it’s from the fall when you passed out.”
The part that sucked the most was that his theory was only half-way insane.
“This all started right after you breezed into town, Fox,” Warren shouted. “You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.”
He carefully avoided referencing Dad or Dad’s issues with law enforcement. The whole thing made me crazy. Why was no one looking for Tango?!
A gentle knock on the door cut through a lull in the shouting. The cops’ surprise was easy to read: how the heck had someone trespassed that deeply in the station? Pal yanked open the door.
I couldn’t see who stood there, but I recognized her voice. “I’m so sorry to intrude, gentlemen,” Saundra Delacroix said, in a regal African accent, “but there’s nothing actually locked from the front door to this one. You have no privacy signs posted, either, so I naturally concluded that everything in your station is public.”
Warren puffed up and pulled the door open all the way. “No one’s supposed to be in here!”
“I’m Mr. Fox’s attorney, and you can call me Ms. Delacroix, thank you for asking.”
She was stellar. Absolute hell on four-inch stilettos: one of those amazing women who was drop dead gorgeous and smarter than everyone with no qualms about using both to her best advantage. To keep everyone off base, she wore her hair in four-foot-long braids and traded three-piece-suits for traditional African regalia. Okay, “regalia” isn’t a common word, but if you saw her, I’d dare you to find a word that fit better.
From the looks on their faces, the cops had no idea what to do with her.
“Hello, Ethan.” Her accent made my name sound way awesome.
“Hey, Ms. Delacroix. Really glad to see you.”
She pushed past the Tweedles. “They treat you all right?”
“I could’ve used breakfast.”
She studied everything from me to the cameras to the mirror. “Don’t get cocky now, boy, just because your fancy, high-paid lawyer is here.”
I loved, no, worshipped her fake, regal African accent.
She squared off with Warren. “Has my client been charged with a crime, officer?”
“Charged?” He and Pal exchanged a glance. “Not formally. . .”
She turned away from him abruptly. “Then let’s be going, Ethan.”
Before I could move, Officer Friendly put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s being held for questioning, Ms. Della. . . Della. . .”
“Delacroix.”
“He’s being held. For questioning.” Warren’s feeble attempt to sound intimidating was sad. “I don’t know how they do it in the big city—”
“Then I’d like a few minutes alone with my client, thank you,” she declared without missing a beat. When he didn’t move, mostly from confusion, she touched his arm gently. “I’m sorry if he’s been a handful. I promise to get him under control.”
“No, ma’am. No problem at all.”
They scurried from the room.
“You laugh, and I walk out right now,” she said in her real voice, which was somewhere between New Jersey and the Bronx. Sitting across from me, she appraised me critically. Her voice returned to the homeland. “Your father called me.”
“Dad? Where is he?” He had to be going batshit crazy.
She held up one hand. “Don’t forget we’re being observed and recorded at all times.” She glanced at the mirror behind me. “If you’re alone in a cell, assume you’re being recorded, so no whacking off, all right?”
“No, ma’am. No whacking off.”
She leaned closer.
So did I. “How’d you get here so fast?”
“When your father called and asked how many years he might get for assaulting an officer of the law who needed a beating, I decided to risk the speeding tickets.”
Sounded like Dad. “Is he okay?”
“This new man, Mike?” She patted my hand. “He seems to know how to handle your father.” She glanced at the mirror. “There’s a group of parents outside the station. He’s with them. All the parents were perfectly happy to talk to me. . . a lot, and Ethan? This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen,” she said quietly, drumming her immaculately manicured fingers on the table. Creating noise so the mics couldn’t hear us well? “This girl is your girlfriend?”
I nodded.
“And you had a fight?”
I shrugged. “I said some stupid stuff.”
“Don’t say anything to the police. I hope you learned that much from your father’s tragedy.”
I’d learned a lot. “No Miranda,” I whispered.
“Good to know, but in a small town it’s your word against theirs. Not sure it’ll help. But I’m glad you noticed. That means you’re paying attention.”
“What’s going on?”
“Ethan, child, I wish I knew.” She squeezed my hands. “You need to know the girl is well-and-truly missing. . . probably really kidnapped.” She drilled me with her dark eyes. “I need you to keep it together. Don’t say anything to anyone in here, even if he’s your best friend.”
My confusion must’ve been evident.
“There are twelve other suspects in the cells today. Ten boys and two girls.” She shook her head. “All this time spent tilting at windmills and no one out searching for the poor missing girl.” Anger smoldered in her eyes. “No Amber alert, either. The officer in charge,” she added with more sarcasm than I can describe, “told the county and state that she’s done this before and is perfectly fine.” She turned her patient exp
ression on me. “Which doesn’t explain why he’s also holding thirteen of you.” Her face grew more concerned. “I hear you were hit again. Did you get medical treatment?”
“They don’t believe it happened.” Deep breath. “Ms. D. . .” There was no delicate way to put it. “Why are you here? I mean, I’m really grateful, but we don’t have any money.”
She patted my hands and released them. “I owe you, Ethan. I proved your father was innocent, but he still lost everything. That was my fault.” She smiled. “Maybe I can do better this time.”
I guess loyalty made sense. Those two had known each other since before I was born. Could I take it one step farther? “Can I ask a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Go see what you can find out about Katy, where she might be, what the hell happened to her.”
She frowned. “And leave you in here alone?”
I scoffed. “I’m not worried about those bozos.” I fed her my most sincere pleading face. “I’m worried about Katy. Please.”
She regarded me in silence for a long time before nodding once. “Your father is going to kill me for this, you realize.”
A second later, she was gone, and I was alone.
seventeen
Twist sat at the kitchen table with a pile of cards. Tarot cards. How the hell did they work? And why was there a “t” at the end no one pronounced? Black candles burned, and amber incense. He closed his eyes and placed a hand on the deck.
“Oh, mighty. . . Isis.”
No, that was stupid.
“Oh, tarot deck, please show me where Katy has been taken.” The journal ridiculed the fancy spells and poetry of the other spellbooks. “Just say what you want,” it advised.
He struck a match and dropped it into the stone bowl. An enormous fireball leapt up and scorched the ceiling. Holy shit! Dark blue sparks flew out of the bowl and Twist leapt from his chair, knocking it over. The table bounced.
He pressed against the wall while the fire died down. Wow. The old witch’s herbs were a hell of a lot better than the crap he’d bought from the naked chick. It was a mix of stuff the journal called a “finding spell,” which seemed pretty straightforward.
He sucked in his breath a few times to calm down. The flames settled into a bright blue fire that slowly consumed the black sticky mess in the stone bowl. The cards had scattered across the floor. How many were under the stove? Damn.
As he bent down, he noticed one card still lay on the table. It showed a tower, like a castle fortress, with two men falling out of it. A lightning bolt had struck.
A prison? Well, Fox was stuck in the jail, but Twist already knew that. He wanted to know where to find Katy. “Stupid cards.”