“Already running them,” Frankie said, her fingers flying. Three seconds later, a driver’s license bloomed across her screen. “Rodney Storm,” she read.
“Rodney,” I growled, and the name came out sounding like a death sentence. “That’s her drummer. She went to the diner to meet him for lunch.”
Except he wasn’t just her drummer, was he? He’d been on that tour. In those venues. Backstage, past all her security with access to her schedule, her dressing room, her whole goddamn life.
The notes. The calls.
It had been him the entire time.
“I’m gonna kill him,” I snarled. You could bet your goddamn life on that one.
“Can you track the car?” Bane asked.
“On it.” Cyber’s screens multiplied, town CCTV feeds tiling across the monitors—the bank, the intersection at Main, Lucky’s Market. He followed the Charger camera to camera. “Got him heading east on Shoreline... turning onto Pier Road...” He froze. “The fuck? He’s got her at the boardwalk.”
Our boardwalk? The one Gator and the prospects had been fixing up all winter?
The stupid son of a bitch had my woman on Kings’ property.
“He’s in the old T-shirt hut on the north end,” Cyber said, zooming a feed. The Charger sat crooked behind the shuttered ice cream parlor, driver’s door hanging open. “Car’s been parked twenty-two minutes.”
Twenty-two minutes he’d had her alone.
I was already moving.
“Bash!” Bane’s voice cracked like a whip. I stopped, my hand on the door. “Wait. You kick down that door half-cocked and he panics? She’s the one who pays for it.”
Every cell in my body was screaming at me to go to her, but he was right.
“Then let’s fucking ride,” I said.
We killedthe engines two blocks out and came in on foot, moving through the skeleton of the boardwalk.
Gator and Bane flanked the hut with me coming straight up the middle, because there wasn’t a force on God’s green earth that was keeping me from that door.
The T-shirt hut sat at the north end, plywood over one window, the other cracked open an inch.
And through that inch, I heard her.
“Rodney, please. You don’t have to do this,” she pleaded, her voice shaking.
“Don’t have to?” the man I assumed was Rodney answered. “I’ve been patient, Angel. Two years I’ve been patient. I wrote you letters. I told you how I felt, and you couldn’t even see me.”
I eased up to the door. Through the gap in the plywood, I could see her zip-tied to a folding chair, hair stuck to her tear-streaked face, blue eyes huge and terrified.
And Rodney Storm was pacing in front of her with a pistol in his hand.
Bane’s hand landed on my right shoulder. It was time.
I held up my hand and counted it down.
Three. Two. One. Go!
Lifting my booted foot, I kicked the door in.
It exploded off its hinges and Rodney spun, the gun swinging toward me, and the whole world went crystal clear and slow.
“Easy,” I said, hands out, palms open, stepping inside. “Easy, Rodney.”
