“Hey Ryder,” she said as I walked in.
“Shut the fuckin’ door,” someone said. “We don’t want no cops seeing we’re here.”
Like the four hundred bikes parked in front wouldn’t give it away? Frankly, North La Playa police had more on their minds than busting us for drinking after the bar was closed.
I pushed my way to the back room where Hawk and Chalupa and Swole were.
“Where have you been, man? We’ve been here for hours.” Swole said.
“Just as we thought, Las Balas thinks we blew up their warehouse,” Hawk said. “We went and pulled everything out of ours and moved it to a different location.”
Chalupa laughed. “They will never find it now.”
“Where did we put it?” I asked. We didn’t have a lot of shit, so it wouldn’t be too hard to find a hiding place for the fifty or so crates of guns, ammo, and drugs we’d been keeping in the Public Storage locker.
“It ain’t right, man,” Swole said. “Not cool.”
Now my curiosity was up. “Where is it?”
Chalupa was still grinning. “At the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?”
“Yeah. In one of those mausoleum things.”
“How the hell did we…” I shook my head. “Nevermind. I have an emergency I’m dealing with and I need your help.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“Lily and her friend disappeared from the concert. If they ever made it there in the first place. They weren’t at the meetup place after all the shit went down at the convention center.”
“Tell me what happened. From the beginning,” Hawk said.
So, I did. When I got to the end, he shook his head. “It makes no sense. No one is going to create a huge diversion at the convention center just to grab two teenage girls. Even if Las Balas did think we blew up their warehouse, there would be no reason to do that.”
“Honestly, I’m less concerned with why and more concerned with where the hell they could be.”
I needed to talk to that shit Scorpion, but couldn’t get close to the warehouse because of all the cops. Where else could he be at this time of night? If he was with Lily, where would they be?
I had an idea. “I have something I need to do. You put some calls out, okay, Hawk?”
“You got it.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later,I was parking the VW in a very empty parking structure near the Point. It was a long shot, and it was almost 3:00 am, but it was the only place I could think of that they might be.
The parking structure was well lit, even for this time of night, and the full moon illuminated the street once I walked out. I could hear seals barking from the ocean, and the normally busy tourist attraction was deserted.
There was no way they’d be here. Even still, it was worth a look. I ran across the street to the Ferris Wheel. It was next to closed food carts and stores with security gates up. “Lily?” I called. “Lily!”
My voice was lost in the slight mist coming off the ocean and I could still smell a slight bit of burning rubber from the warehouse fire.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. “Who’s there?”
It was a slight flash from over near one of the buildings and so I instinctively reached down to touch the gun inside my jacket pocket. “Who’s there?” I asked again, more loudly.
I got close enough to see that it wasn’t Lily, or any other female for that matter. It was a tall skinny guy wearing dark clothes. He was walking toward me, but his body language wasn’t threatening.
