The sound of shouting and gunfire grew louder. A lamp had been left on inside, illuminating a standard-sized room with two double beds, only one of which looked slept in. A single suitcase lay open across the other.
“Hello,” I called over the noise, in case someone was inside. When no one answered, Vero shoved past me into the room. A cop drama blared on the flat-screen over the dresser. I reached for the remote on the nightstand and turned it off.
A dense silence filled the room. Vero rushed to the bathroom and turned on the light, swearing when she found it empty. “Javi’s not here.”
“Try not to leave any prints,” I reminded her, handing her a washcloth from the bathroom to wipe down all the surfaces she’d touched. “Look for anything that might tell us where they took him.”
I began picking through the spare contents of Louis’s suitcase. The handful of outfits inside were all neatly arranged, folded into crisp bundles. I moved to the closet and found a heavy leather jacket, the same one Louis had been wearing in the security footage the night he’d taken the car.
I reached into the pockets, hoping I’d discover some clue inside, but all I found was a handful of crumpled sales receipts—gas stations, fast-food stops, convenience stores, hotels, highway tolls—re-creating a roadmap of Louis’s trip here. Nothing to suggest he’d made any suspicious stops.
“Finn, look at this,” Vero said, kneeling beside the vanity in the bathroom, studying the floor below the U-bend under the sink. The decor of the room was modern, the plumbing exposed, framed by sleek wooden shelves containing a hair dryer, bundles of toilet paper, and stacks of towels.
“What is it?”
Her face paled as she held up a broken zip tie. “Javi was here. He had to be.” She shot to her feet, her high heels clicking frantically as she searched every inch of the bathroom, desperate for clues.
I checked the time on my phone. Only fifteen minutes had passedsince the front desk had called to alert us to a noise complaint. “You think Javi got away?”
She swallowed, her voice strained by the obvious lump in her throat. “Or someone knew he was here and came back to move him.” She maneuvered past me, back into Louis’s room. She scanned every surface, her eyes doubling back on an empty notepad beside the landline phone on the desk. A ballpoint pen was uncapped beside it. Vero picked up the notepad and held it under the light. Then she hurried to the coffeepot and tore open a packet of decaf.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she ripped open the small disc of filter paper and shook the grounds into her hand. She dusted the tips of her fingers, carefully running them over the surface of the notepad, studying the indentations left in it from a previous page that had been torn away.
“It’s a phone number.”
Vero picked up the handset of the landline beside it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m calling it.”
“What if they recognize the number?” I reached for the receiver, but she was already dialing. She held the phone between us as the call connected.
“Where the hell have you been? I called you yesterday.” The voice belonged to a man. He shouted over a persistent ear-piercing whine and a deafening clatter in the background. Vero put the phone closer to her ear, frowning as she listened. “Speak up. It’s too fucking loud in here, I can’t hear you,” the man said when she didn’t answer.
Vero erupted into a fit of deep coughs, masking her voice as she pitched it deeper. “Sorry. Got tied up.”
Tied up? Seriously?I mouthed.
“What do you want me to say?” she whispered back.
“You know I’m on a tight schedule. I’m not running a charity here, Lou. Are you coming with the money or not?”
Vero covered the receiver with her palm, careful to give nothing away as she listened.
She disconnected, blinking at me through the fringe of her Farrah Fawcett wig. “I think I know where they took Javi. Whoever answered that phone was inside a garage.”
“How do you know we called a garage?” I asked as Vero paced the short span of Louis’s room.
She chewed on her thumbnail. “I don’t.”
“But you said—”
“I said the man who answered it wasina garage, and judging by the number of torches, compressors, and sandblasters I was hearing, that shop wasn’t small.” Which meant someone had planned to send the Aston to a garage for repairs, or they were sending it to a chop shop. Either scenario didn’t bode well for Javi. Or for Cam’s thumb drive.
“Okay, that’s more information than we had before, right? We’ll just find a list of all the garages in Atlantic City and check out each one until we find the Aston.”
“Any place shady enough to work on a stolen car for a man like Marco probably isn’t going to be listed with the Better Business Bureau, Finlay. These kinds of places do not want to be found. We can’t just google it.”
