Page 76 of Burning Ember
She tries to leave and I grab her shoulder. “Lita . . . Lo, whatever-in-the-fuck your name is, you got somethin’ to say, speak your peace.”
“You’re really off your face, Mav, and I don’t want to stir shit up.” I glare and her resistance falls to the wayside. She eyes me hesitantly, takes a deep breath, and starts talking. “Earlier, I was in the bathroom. In the stall next to me, someone was snortin’. Snortin’ coke.”
Ice skates through my veins. I jump from my chair. “The fuck? Pumpkin?”
Lita grabs my arm. I rip it from her grip. She hurries to say, “I tried sticking around to see who it was for sure, but I didn’t want one of the guys ripping my head off for being gone too long. So I kept my eye on the door.”
“And you saw her come out? Just her?” She nods. “You’re fuckin’ sure?” I snarl.
“She’s the only one I saw come out.”
Piece by piece I puzzle together Doll’s behavior tonight. I don’t want to believe it. But she was jittery as fuck. Sweating. Wouldn’t look at me. Nervous as hell. Scared. Because she fuckin’ knew the rules and broke them!
She waited until we all fuckin’ trusted her.
She lied! Right. To. My. Fuckin’. Face.
I grab the empty bottle in front of me and hurl it through the air, shattering the mirror behind Lita. Shards of glass tumble to the floor. I spin around. The remaining people left in the room are eyeing me like I’ve lost my damn mind.
My past circulates. Five fuckin’ years ago, they looked at me the same way. Not only on the day Dana left me, but the day I found her too.
A muffled ringing wakes me. Groaning, I check my alarm and see it’s almost threeA.M.I’m still drunk from the liquor I drowned myself in a few hours ago. Pulling my cell from beneath my pillow, I see an incoming call from a restricted number. My skin prickles. Hope rockets like a shooting star through my torso. I answer, praying like hell it’s Dana. Maybe she’s calling from a payphone or a friend’s cell. Please God, let it fuckin’ be her.
“Yeah.”
“You the guy lookin’ for the redhead?”
Instantly, I’m sober and wide awake. I sit straight up in the bed and wipe the sleep from my eyes. “Who’s this?”
Silence greets me and a shot of panic flares inside my chest. “Hello? You there?”
“You still offerin’ a reward? If so, I got an address for ya. But we meet first. I want the money up front.”
Every limb in my body strings tight. I pull in a shaking breath. I grip the sheet and throw it off me, swing my legs over the side of the bed. “No problem. Tell me where she is and you’ll get your money.”
“No. We meet. I get paid. Then I give you the address.”
I start yanking on my jeans. “Fine! WHERE?” I bark.
Turns out the guy’s a lowlife drug dealer from Albuquerque. Some guy I showed Dana’s picture to about two weeks ago. When we meet up, Edge threatens the guy and I end up giving him half of the promised reward now, and he’ll wait for the rest, but only if and when I find her. If she is, in fact, where he says she is.
The address he gives me is on the Westside, a shithole apartment complex. It’s December, and for New Mexico, it’s bitter and chilly as fuck out.
J-twenty-two is the apartment number. As I near it, I hear “Last Resort” by Papa Roach coming from behind the door. Dana always plays that song when she’s feeling particularly low. If those two things aren’t the mother of all bad omens then I don’t know what is. The lyrics slice like razor blades crisscrossing over my heart, cutting deeper as each word penetrates.
For thirty-seven days, I’ve been a dead man walking. My sanity hanging by a thread. A thread that’s been thinned with each passing day. I can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t think of anything but finding her. I’ve gone from bar to bar. Searched every goddamn dive and drug house. Trolled central. Cap even promised a marker to the 13 Ds if they helped us find her. We bled every one of our contacts dry and they in turn bled theirs.
Daily, I concocted scenarios in my head. Where she was. What was happening to her. Maybe she hadn’t left me. Maybe she’d been taken. Maybe she was being held somewhere by someone who had a beef with the club. Maybe she’d checked herself into rehab. But fuck. I’d checked all of those too.
Hearing the song, and seeing the apartment number that eerily reminds me of my tattoo, is all it takes for me to know . . . know that today is the last day I search for her. I glance back to Cap. We lock eyes. I see he knows it too. My life will forever be changed after this day.
It takes two kicks to bust the door in. What I see when the door opens has my entire body shaking with rage. Naked bodies. Drugs. A fuckin’ brick of coke,only half of it left, andlines cut on a glass table waiting to be snorted. The place fuckin’ reeks of reefer, sex, old food, and sweat. The boys flood in behind me. They easily subdue the two men and a whore who starts screaming at us to get the fuck out.
With ice in my veins, I turn over passed out junkies and inspect each one. The skin and hair color aren’t familiar, but I still examined every female. She could have tanned, or died her red hair back to its natural color or something else.
The junkies grumble and moan as I move them. I slap a few awake and yell questions at them, like where’s Dana? Is she here? Have you seen her? A redhead? A goddamn white skinned redhead . . . have you seen her?
But they’re useless. Zoned out. Lifeless zombies. The lot of ’em.
