Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“Fuck off, I don’t know dick,” he returned.
But after Jessie’s question, there was something different about him.
He was always such a jerk, and he seemed pretty down with being only that.
Now he seemed uncomfortable.
I knew Luna sensed it too when I felt her hand touch my back, encouraging me to keep at him.
“Bambi’s mother is worried sick about her,” I shared.
“Like I care,” he said, no longer quite meeting my eyes.
“All these women have people in their lives who are worried about them,” I pushed.
“Yeah? If they were, they’d keep their asses off the streets.”
“Is this your dream job?” I asked. “What happened in your life to land you here?”
“I got it good, bitch,” he snarled. “Sit and drink coffee and rent rooms and read my porno mags, then go home, jack off and go to sleep. Got no hassle in my life, ’cept you bitches recently. As long as I show up at work, it’s all good.”
“So that’s what you wanted to be all your life, working reception at a crappy motel,” I remarked.
“Fuck off,” he bit, getting seriously angry now. “I don’t give two shits what you think about me.”
Luna touched my back again, this time to tell me I was following the wrong trail.
Mentioning Bambi got to him.
I needed to go back to that.
“Christina Markovic, you might know her as Bambi, would go to her mom’s house every Sunday and do her laundry.”
“This isn’t gettin’ through to you, I don’t care,” he returned.
“Her mom still talks about her daughter in present tense. She still has hope she’s going to come home. She was out asking around. Have you talked to Betsy?” I kept at him.
“If you’re not gonna rent a room, you can get the fuck out of here, or it’s gonna be me calling the cops.”
“She just wants to know where her daughter is.”
Both Luna and Harlow put their hands to my back at that, and they left them there, not communicating about my interrogation, communicating something else.
Me not knowing where Macy was.
I had to force myself to finish.
“Even if she’s dead.”
His eyes flicked to the windows and his demeanor changed again, and this time, it was a whole lot easier to read.
I couldn’t look over my shoulder to the windows because, abruptly, he lost it.
We all took a step back when he pushed the pictures off the counter and shouted, “Get the fuck out of here, bitches, and don’t fuckin’ come back!”
Harlow bent down to pick up the pictures again, but Luna, Jess and me looked out the window.
Cold crawled over my skin.
Sergio Duzek was out there, leaning against the trunk of his BMW, arms crossed on his chest, eyes on us.
It was too bad he was kinda hot, with dark, curly hair he wore a bit long in the back so it brushed his collar, swarthy skin and good bone structure. He wasn’t all that tall, but he had a decent body.
Considering he was clearly an asswipe, though, he sat at a point two on the normal scale, and about negative two hundred on the Cap Scale.
“You know what’s good for you,” Mr. Shithead said so quietly, it was barely discernible. “You’ll leave this alone.”
We turned back to him to see him pound on the desk angrily.
And he was shouting again when he said, “Get the fuck outta here! I mean it!”
One thing I knew about this, Sergio Duzek was in on the missing women.
The other thing I knew about it, Mr. Shithead was terrified of him.
The last thing I knew about it, I was terrified of him too.
With nothing for it, I had to channel my inner Rolex-extorting badass.
This was what I did.
I circled my finger in the air and said, “Let’s roll.”
We walked out to the car, and as we did, I caught Duzek’s eyes and called, “Hey.”
I was trying to play it cool.
Duzek wasn’t in the mood to play it cool.
Instead of saying hey back, he asked, “How’s it feel to be watched?”
Yikes!
They’d noticed me in Tweety.
Totally.
I gave him my best confused look. He openly didn’t buy it. I looked away and stopped trying to sell it. And we all got in the car.
I pulled on to Roosevelt, and no one said a word.
We were nearing The Parking Spot when Luna noted, “I know you’re fired up, Raye. But that was not good. I think we need to give ‘We’ Duzek and not be seen anywhere near Roosevelt and Van Buren between Sixteenth and Twenty-fourth until, maybe, my fortieth birthday.”
“Those women are somewhere, Luna, maybe somewhere close,” Jess said.
“Yeah, and my birthday is tomorrow, and I’d like to see my next one, not to mention all of yours, so my vote is, we feed this to ‘We,’ encouraging them to push the powers that be to look hard at Duzek and talk to that night clerk, then go back to our normal crazy.”