Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 82973 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82973 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
“Fuck.”
“Hey, his injuries may sound bad, but Nash came out the winner. He’ll recover. The officer who was first on the scene assured me the goon with the broken neck and the two with GSWs to the head will not. Anything new there?”
Matt shoved his truck into park and climbed out. “Nothing. I’ve already swept Nash’s building—every floor of both towers. Now I’m going to hit the surrounding area on foot.”
That seemed like the next likely place to search since the university scene was the closest public vicinity for her to disappear.
“All those bars closed two hours ago,” Joaquin pointed out.
Matt hardly needed his boss to remind him. That had been screaming through his head for a hundred-twenty horrible minutes.
“Maybe there’s a place where someone could linger, like this pancake house I’m about to skim. Any updates from Hunter or Logan?” He spoke carefully, in case Pershing’s people had already zeroed in on him and were listening to his calls.
“Nothing beyond the fact they’re looking, too. Hunter headed for Dad’s house, just in case.”
Matt frowned, then realized Joaquin wasn’t talking about his stepfather, Caleb Edgington.
“It’s futile.” Even if Madison wouldn’t be risking her father because he was in Houston, she was too smart to head someplace as obvious as her childhood home.
“Probably, but better to check all the angles. And…he just texted me. No one was home. Anywhere else he should try? Logan is doing a drive-by of known friends’ apartments.”
Matt cursed in frustration. She wouldn’t put her girl-gang in jeopardy, either. “He’s not going to find anything.”
“You got better ideas about where we should be looking?”
He didn’t, and that was a huge chunk of his foul mood. “Have you had any communication at all with Nash? Do we even know what happened?”
“Nope. All I have is an update on his condition, because I was a good boy and presented the proper paperwork. And Trees showed up.”
“At least there’s that.”
“Yeah,” Joaquin seconded. “Tell me where to look, and we’ll do it.”
Matt tried to mentally map the city and think of places Madison could have escaped. Lafayette wasn’t bursting with taxis. They happened…but not often. She knew better than to use credit cards—not that she had one with her—so that left out ride-share options. She wouldn’t have called anyone who couldn’t handle the danger for a pickup or a place to crash—if she could even have gotten her hands on a phone. According to Hunter, her burner device was sitting uselessly on Nash’s kitchen counter. If she remembered anyone’s phone number—big if—pay phones were extinct. She probably could have hoofed it to campus police. But if she had, someone would have reached out to them by now.
So, she was on foot with limited resources. Fuck. Where would she have gone? How far could she have traveled?
“Has anyone tried that big park south of campus?” Matt knew he was grasping at straws.
“I’ll get Hunter on it.”
“Tell him to try the twenty-four-hour pharmacy about six blocks west, too.” Maybe she was hiding there.
Waiting for what?
“Isn’t that a national chain now…with cameras and facial recognition?”
True, but she wasn’t trained to think of that shit. “Just try it.”
Joaquin sighed. “Okay. I texted him. He’s en route. Logan came up blank. Anyplace you want me to send him?”
Matt was flat fucking out of ideas—for her sake, he couldn’t afford to be. He’d lost her for three years. He’d be damned if, so soon after finding her again, he let harm come to her. “Isn’t there a twenty-four-hour gym east of campus? I think I remember—”
A beeping interrupted his call. Matt paused on the steps of the pancake house and stared at his phone. Incoming call from Ethan Garrison. What the fuck did he want? “Does Ethan know anything?”
“Nope. Only the six of us in the gazebo. And Nash.”
Who was in no position to spill anything—not that he would blab secrets.
Matt declined the call.
“I don’t know why he’s calling me, then. It’ll wait. Let me think of somewhere else Logan can search…” But before he could pull a new location out of his ass, his phone beeped once more. He gave it another glance. “It’s fucking Ethan again. Why does he keep calling me in the middle of the night?”
“No idea. Gotta go. A nurse is finally taking me back to see Nash. Talk to Ethan and figure out what the fuck he’s up to. If it’s anything helpful, holler back.”
“Roger that.” He dropped the call from his boss with an exasperated sigh to answer the aggravating punk.
Yeah, they were all supposed to gel together and trust each other and be a band of brothers, blah, blah, blah. The bosses had gotten big on that in the past couple of years, but Ethan hadn’t really tried to mesh.
Have you made any effort to include him?
“What?” he barked at Ethan as he barged into the pancake place, taking advantage of the fact there was no host at the stand to stop him from scanning the nooks and crannies of the old restaurant.