“What?” That made no sense. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“My brother’s on the phone.” Derek tapped the screen. “Eric, I’ve got you on speaker. Trevor’s with me. Repeat what you just told me.”
Eric West’s voice came through the phone, along with the sound of a nearby siren. “Fire and EMS were dispatched to Joe’s fifteen minutes ago. Someone set the place on fire, man. I’m on my way there now.”
A lightning bolt of shock went straight through Trevor’s system. “Lexi,” he whispered, not even realizing he’d said it out loud.
With a hand on his shoulder, Derek said, “Come on, brother. I’ll drive you there.”
After what felt like hours later, Trevor, Derek, and Jake pulled into the diner’s parking lot. Trevor didn’t wait for Derek’s car to come to a complete stop before he jumped out the passenger side and started running toward the burning building.
“Lexi!”
He screamed her name as loudly as he could, but his voice was swallowed by the whooshing of the flames and the fire trucks’ powerful hoses. That didn’t stop him from yelling for her again.
A uniformed officer who looked about twenty put herself directly in Trevor’s path. “I’m sorry, sir. You can’t be here.”
Trevor was about two seconds away from laying the kid out flat. He side-stepped the young woman and kept walking.
Moving surprisingly fast, the officer stepped back around Trevor, blocking his way once more.
“Sir, I’m going to have to insist that you turn around and leave immediately.”
“My girlfriend works here. I need to see her. I need to know she’s okay.” Trevor’s eyes scanned the scene, but he didn’t see her anywhere. This time, he nearly pushed the officer out of his way.
“Alexis!” he screamed again.
“That’s it,” the officer started to take out her cuffs when Eric West walked up and quickly defused the situation.
“It’s all right, Hirtler. They’re with me.” The woman looked confused, but nodded and took a step back.
Trevor hadn’t even realized Derek and Jake had caught up to him, until then. His entire focus was on finding Lexi.
To Trevor, Eric said, “You’ve got to calm your shit right now, or I’ll let Officer Hirtler toss your ass in jail for interfering. You got it?”
Rather than respond, Trevor looked at what was left of Joe’s. There was nothing more than a shell of a building, and the flames were nowhere near finished with it yet.
“She’s here, Eric. She was working tonight. I was getting ready to come pick her up when you called Derek.”
“She’s not here, Trev.”
His eyes shot to Eric’s. “Then, where is she?” He remembered the ambulance they’d passed on the highway. It had been heading the opposite direction as they were...toward the hospital.Oh, God.“Was she hurt? Was that her in the ambulance?”
“Listen to me,” Eric spoke slowly, as if he were talking to a child. It made Trevor want to punch him in the throat. “Lexi isn’t here. The ambulance you saw was transporting the diner’s owner to the hospital.”
“Joe?” Ah, hell. Lexi was going to be devastated if Joe had been seriously injured.
Eric nodded. “He was the only one found inside the diner when fire and EMS got here. He wasn’t burned badly, but he’d inhaled a lot of smoke and wasn’t breathing when they got to him.”
Trevor’s eyes found the flames again. “You’re sure she wasn’t in there? Tell me you’re sure, Eric. Tell me Lexi’s not in there somewhere.”
“She was the first one I asked about when I arrived on scene. There was no one else in the diner, Trevor. The place isn’t that big, and the guys assured me they looked everywhere. Joe was alone.”
His head felt like it was spinning. Part of him was relieved beyond words, but the other part...
“If she wasn’t in there at the time of the fire, then”—he looked around the lot again—“where is she?”
Eric’s eyes slid to the other two men, then back to Trevor. With gut-wrenching sympathy shining in his blue eyes, Derek’s brother said, “We don’t know.”
