“She was exactly where you pointed the last time I saw her. Maybe she went to get coffee or something?”
“I feel like she would have told me if she was stepping away. She’s not answering her phone,” I explain.
Mac frowns. “That’s not like our Nova. She always picks up when we call.”
We walk over to Jasper and Rock. “Nova’s gone missing. She was standing on the sidewalk making a call. She’s not here anymore and she’s not answering her phone.”
“She might have just stepped away to get a breath of fresh air,” Jasper responds calmly.
My old man adds, “It’s been one hell of a long night for her.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell them. “But with everything going on, we need to be eyes on with her. Let’s split up and look for her on foot. Check the side streets, the shops, the alleys. She can’t have gone far.”
We break apart, all going in different directions. I cover the alley between the shop and the hardware store, checking doorways and side entrances. When I don’t find so much as a trace of her, I call her phone a couple more times while I’m walking. It just keeps rolling to voicemail.
The search takes about twenty minutes. We come back together in the alley behind Greer’s Hardware, out of view of the public. Nobody’s seen her. My old lady is just gone.
“She didn’t just wander off,” I say. “Nova doesn’t disappear without telling someone. With all the shit going on, I’m worried something’s happened.”
“You think it’s her ex?” Onyx asks.
I shrug. He seems the most likely suspect. But then I remember something I noticed earlier not long after we arrived here. “Hang on a moment. Earlier on when we were talking, Nova kept looking over my shoulder at something. I turned to see what had captured her notice. It was Bran talking to a copnear the alley. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but now…”
Jasper asks, “Why the fuck would Bran of all people be cozying up to cops?”
“Exactly. I don’t know what they were talking about but they looked cozy as fuck.”
“Bran’s supposed to be confined to the clubhouse,” Rock points out. “What the hell was he doing out here?”
“He said Ma gave him the evening off,” I tell him.
“That’s bullshit,” Jasper responds hotly.
“It’s weird. I didn’t see Bran anywhere when I was looking for Nova. Did any of you?”
They all shake their heads, murmuring to one another about how strange that was.
Mac speaks up, holding his phone out. “I’ve been filming the scene all night. The building, the crowd, faces, everything. I figured if whoever did this was stupid enough to hang around and watch their own handiwork, I’d have them on camera.”
Jasper tells him, “That’s damn smart, Mac.”
“Pull up the footage you took,” I say. “Let’s try to find out where Nova, Bran, and this cop went.”
Mac starts scrolling through his footage. We all huddle around the small screen, scanning faces. Townspeople, firefighters, and a couple of other cops.
“What did this cop look like?” he asks.
“I didn’t pay much attention. But he looked young. Like a rookie,” I answer.
Mac pauses the footage and backs it up.
“This is the only younger cop I saw.”
“That’s him,” I say excitedly. “That’s the cop with Bran earlier.”
The image is a little blurry, but you can still make out his face. He’s standing near the alley with his hands in his pockets, separate from the rest of the law enforcement on scene. Mac leaps forward in the feed. We find him again a few minutes later, closer to the sidewalk, closer to where Nova was standing the last time I saw her.
Rock leans in closer to the screen. His expression changes to one of concentration. “Shit. I know that fuckin’ cop,” Rock says abruptly. “His name’s Weaver. He’s Darkness’s man inside. We all have someone inside the local PD. Weaver works for Darkness.”
