“Sh,” Dean and I said in unison.
“What do I do after I run?” Natty’s shaking voice asked.
Chloe cleared her throat as she set her phone down in what looked like the cup holder of the front seat. “Use your phone to call your mother. Tell her everything that’s happened, okay?”
“But, what about the guy? Wasn’t there a guy following us?”
“West,” Dean whispered.
And that’s when Chloe leaned down long enough for me to see her reddened face. “Just do as I’m saying, Natty. No more questions. You run, then you call your mother. Okay? On my count. One…”
“Auntie Chloe, please.”
“Two…”
“Ple-hee-hee-heeease.”
“Three! Go, go, go, Natty!”
I heard the door being thrown open before Chloe practically shoved my daughter out of the car, and that’s when all hell broke loose in the video. Men started shouting and cursing while Natty screamed as she ran away. One of the guys in the video yelled for Chloe to get out while another commanded someone to go after my daughter. And as the terror in Natty’s screaming as her voice faded away, Chloe struggled before I heard her get wrenched from the car.
“Grab her phone and toss it,” a gruff voice said.
One of the men picked up the phone and I knew he didn’t understand that it had been recording. And when that fucker’s face clearly came to fruition in the camera lens, my jaw hit the floor.
“That’s him,” I whispered.
“Holy fuck,” Dean growled.
“What? What is it?” Stone asked.
Dean paused the video. “That man, right there. That’s the man that attacked Lexi at the hospital.”
“Un-pause the video. Let’s keep watching,” Notch said.
There wasn’t much left of the video. When Dean pressed the play button again, the man looked down at the phone, realized it had been recording, and called Chloe a “stupid bitch” before the video stopped and went blank. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around everything that had just happened.
“Can someone please fucking tell me how in the fucking fuck I got this video!?” I exclaimed.
West stepped to the forefront. “She’s probably using an app to do it.”
Stone blinked. “Explain.”
West started using his hands to speak. “There are tons of apps out there where the user can set shortcuts, controls, and conditions for how their cloud storage is used. I bet if I backtrack that video a bit, I’m going to find that she used one of those applications to not only record the video, but to send it directly to the person she set it to send to after a certain amount of time.”
Texas furrowed his brow tightly. “Any way that we could possibly use this video to figure out where in the fuck they’ve got Chloe?”
West shrugged. “I can look into it, but I’m not sure what I’ll find.”
I stared through him like a fucking hawk. “Then, try. My best friend is out there, having saved my daughter as well as your fucking hide, so the very least you could do is what you can.”
“Lexi,” Dean said softly.
But I whipped around on him and shoved my finger into his face. “Don’t you ‘Lexi’ me. You came swooping into my life and less than forty-eight hours later, my life is toppled onto its head and my best friend has been taken by some reckless crew of vacuum-nosed assholes. So, you know what you can do for me instead of getting me to calm down? You can fix what got me kicked up in the first place. Got it?”
Dean nodded. “Got it.”
I turned back around to face West. “Don’t you dare come back to these guys until you’ve got something to work with. And you better get it fast. Understood?”
