Brock nodded. Connor watched Brock very closely as if forcing himself to take his cues from the club president.
“Well, that’s good enough for me,” Brock said. “And by the way, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t give two shits about who you were friends with in middle school. I only care that if the moment of truth comes, you’re willing to put a bullet in Eduardo’s skull.”
“Willing?” I said with a laugh. “I’m fucking hungry to do that, you fool.”
“Good,” Brock said, patting me on the shoulder.
I breathed in deep as he continued. I was getting back to my tough-but-in-control self. I could fight. I could stay focused. And I could still kill Eduardo and save Rachel.
“Did you see anything in that video that might give us a hint about where Rachel is right now?”
“I took a screenshot; let’s see.”
I grabbed the phone, which thankfully did not have an enormous crack, only a small one at the edge. I went to my photos and found one of the call. It pained me, even in the still, to see Rachel bent forward, breathing but clearly struggling.
The room looked completely barren. The carpet looked…familiar, somehow, but there were no windows, no paintings, nothing.
“Did the camera shake when you talked to him?”
“No,” I said, not recalling anything like that.
“They must have placed it on a desk,” Brock said, “and that means…oh, shit.”
“What?”
But as I asked the question, the answer was starting to come to me too. She wasn’t in the neighborhood we’d raided the past few times. She wasn’t in any of those homes. She was, in fact, much closer to us than that.
“She’s in the offices where they tried to take Tara, at the NME Services building,” Brock said. “It’s like he’s trying to make up for what happened a couple years ago.”
I looked to Connor. He displayed no visible emotion.
“I think we know what we need to do, then,” I said. “Gather everyone, we roll out when darkness falls, and then we fucking end this shit once and for all.”
“We leave now,” Connor growled.
“No,” Brock said with much difficulty. “They won’t do anything to Rachel right now.”
“They fucking bounded her to a chair in the office!”
“They’re not going to do anything in broad daylight,” Brock said, “and if we try and do anything, we’re the bad guys. We need to at least wait until the end of the workday when everyone who might be near there goes home.”
Connor fumed. But he understood.
“I’ll make calls,” Brock said. “In the meantime, prepare yourselves. We know what we need to do now.”
We fucking do.
It just better not be too fucking late.
Rachel
When I came to, everything was still dark.
It wasn’t black anymore, not like it had been in the moments before I passed out. But I couldn’t see much.
As for my other senses, it felt like I was in a cliche office, albeit with the scent of oil and gasoline nearby, as if I’d ridden next to a fuel cannister for the last hour. I heard someone talking from across the room, but I was still coming to, and I couldn’t quite make out what it was.
But the biggest thing was I could feel bindings around me.
