Page 43

“Ah,” he says and I can hear papers shuffling on the other end of the line. “I do indeed. I assume he gave you the basics?”

“Yeah.”

He sighs. “Right. Well, Owen was working for Delta Line and Power when he and Lennon moved here six months ago. He was there a grand total of forty-three days before he was fired for drinking on the job.”

Jesus Christ.

This is worse than I thought.

“I found a couple applications that were submitted to other companies for a lineman position but when he didn’t receive a call back from those, nothing else. His bills are all current though which leads me to Lennon,” he says and I hear a page flip. “She got a job with Calvin about a week after she arrived in Baton Rouge and got a job at The Cypress Grand Hotel about ten days after Owen was fired. She was sending money to Owen’s account every month to cover all the bills. There is also a younger sister in Arizona, Grace, that Lennon sends money to every month to help her with her bills.”

The fuck?

“No parents?” I ask, clenching my hand into a fist.

“Their dad passed in a motorcycle accident when Lennon was seven and Grace was one. The mom is around but they don’t seem to have much contact with her.”

Shit.

I nod and begin pacing next to my bike. All this is great but it doesn’t answer my biggest question - Is Lennon in danger?

“Any police reports involving Lennon or Owen?”

“Cops were called there the other night when Owen was screaming out in the parking lot but nothing came of it. Lennon was already long gone so they sent him back inside and told him to keep it down.”

I run my hand through my hair. “We know the responding officers?”

“Naw,” he says. “But I’ve got Max looking into it and he said he’ll get back to me. What are we thinking here, Roost?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. Cal was concerned. Said Lennon has become a shell of herself and he thinks the split wasn’t amicable.”

“Clearly not,” he barks out a laugh. “You don’t go screaming through a parking lot if it was fucking amicable but that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.”

“We gotta know for sure,” I tell him.

“Yeah. I hear you. I’ll keep digging but nothing is jumping out at me yet.”

I clench my teeth, draw in a breath and slowly release it with a nod. “Yeah, okay. I gotta go. Got a fight to get to.”

“Go kick some ass, brother,” he says but I don’t even respond, hanging up the phone and slipping it into my pocket as I head over towards my bike.

Something is itching underneath my skin, nagging at my mind, and it’s pissing me the fuck off.

The rumble of the bike only seems to amp me up more and I pull out into traffic, barely feeling the wind blow through my hair as I stare at the road in front of me.

I need to find a way to protect Raya and Joey.

Find a way to give them a life that is more than just surviving.

I have to figure out if Lennon is truly in danger. Every fucking instinct that I have is screaming that she is. And I don’t have a single…goddamn… answer for any of it. I squeeze the handlebars tighter, yanking the throttle back and racing down the road as all these fucking questions roll through my mind.

I’ve never felt more fucking ineffective in my life.

Well, no…

That’s not true.

It’s been a long time since I felt like this and I promised myself that I’d never go back.