Page 27 of Live for Me

“I am pretty much just here to do your bidding, angel.”

I would find a single motherfucking grain of rice on a sandy beach if she was the one asking for it.

Something shifted in her face, in her emotions.

She wanted to askwhy, but she was afraid that I’d answer.

“Wait in the truck, Memphis. I need to go sort this out.”

I let go of her face to get the radio back in my ear.

“Please. Stop. Doing. That,” Indy said instantly.

“Sorry, man. Won’t happen again.”

“Until the next time you do it, you giant bitch. I can’t help you when things go wrong if I don’t know that things are going wrong, Utah.”

“I know, Indy.”

The number of times we’ve had that exact conversation.

I waited until Memphis was locked in my truck before I went back into the school.

“I don’t think you can kill him now,” Indy said.

“I don’t even think Memphis wants me to kill him now.”

“I can call it in?” he suggested. “Just gather your shit and leave him there. It’s not like he’s going to follow you. I’ll give you a giant head start and call his partner to come pick him up. Can’t imagine either of them will want to have to explain what happened or why.”

“Is there anything else I can get out of him?” I asked, more to myself than Indy. “Memphis wants to take apart the sex trafficking side of this now rather than just focusing on the President himself.”

“See, this is why it would’ve been helpful to have left me in the fucking conversation, Utah!”

I chuckled.

I didn’t have a good explanation for why it felt like I was supposed to protect her overwhelmingly emotional response to what was happening here, but she walked out for a reason. It wasn’t up to me or Indy to decide if she was going to share that reason.

“Start looking into the trafficking side, will you? Don’t make Memphis find a starting point. I can’t imagine the good detective will have anything useful to say about it. If the President was threatening his daughters with sex slavery, he wouldn’t hand out any information about what his role in it was.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

memphis

I’d turned Utah’s entire truck into a Wi-Fi hotspot by the time he was loading his gear in the backseat. He hadn’t carried the detective back out with him though.

I turned to the backseat to ask, “Did you kill him?”

“No. Indy is going to wait until we’re gone, and then call the partner to come pick him up.”

“Will you do me a favor, then?”

He paused to look at me.

“Go back in there and tell him that he needs to get his daughters off of social media if he wants to keep them a little safer. I’ve only been looking for nine minutes, and I know where they go to school. I know which neighborhood their house is in. I know names, faces, their friends…way too much.”

He stared at me for another few seconds.

“Yes, I’m serious. Please, tell him,” I said. He turned back for the school without another word.

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