Page 60 of All Wrong
“We can’t fix the world, but wedomake a difference. Deep down, you know that.”
He exhaled. “It’s not enough.”
“Nick, I know you feel personally involved here, but?—”
“Iampersonally involved,” he told her. “AJ came to me. He trusted me. Now, he’s in the hospital because of it.”
He knew that logically, none of this was his fault, but he couldn’t help but feel responsible. AJ had put himself at risk, trusting Nick to take care of things, and Nick had let him down. He had no substantial leads. The only thing he did have was an intense, guttural dislike of a fucking gym teacher.
He’d reached out to his contacts. Gone over everything again and again. Asked lots of questions. Gotten no definitive answers. But he kept coming back to Buckman.
“Why did they target AJ and Jackie?” Nick wondered aloud. “I talked toeverykid at The Zone, and they weren’t the only ones who admitted to being approached.”
“Maybe because they came to you?”
“But who knew that?” he asked, remembering his similar conversation with Sean earlier. “You.Sean. Candace. Sure as shit none of you said anything.”
Nicki considered this. “Is it possible that someone saw you at the fair? I know Torres didn’t get a good enough look to identify them, but maybe someone else did?”
Corinne.
Even as her name popped into his head, Nicki said, “What about Corinne McCain?”
His head snapped up. “What about her?”
Based on the way his sister’s eyes narrowed, he might have sounded defensive. Hopefully, she’d chalk it up to general crankiness.
“She saw you, didn’t she?”
Yes, she’d seen him, but he had no idea if she’d recognized the boys or even knew who they were. She’d never mentioned their names, nor had he. He told Nicki as much.
“Even if she did, she wouldn’t say anything.”
“Maybe not intentionally,” Nicki said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s seeing Buckman, isn’t she?”
Nick withheld the growl that rumbled deep in his chest. The thought of her with Buckman chapped his ass. “I doubt that’s something that would come up on adate.” The word left a bad tasteon his tongue. “Besides, I thought you said the guy was a Boy Scout.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, then, “On paper, he is.”
The way she said it, deceptively light and without emotion, grabbed his attention.
“But?” he prompted.
“But … I’ve never known your instincts to be wrong about something like this. Nothing has come upon Ian’s radar, so I made some alternate inquiries.”
Alternate inquiries.There were huge parts of Nicki’s life with which Nick was not familiar. Like the years where she’d fallen off the face of the earth and he didn’t know where she was, what she was doing, or even if she was alive. She never filled in the gaps, but he had pieced together enough over the years to know she was a hell of a lot more than a kick-ass mechanic, wife, and mother. She still occasionally disappeared for a few days at a time, usually with her husband and one or more of the brothers.
“What kind of alternate inquiries?”
“Do you remember my friend Robin? She stopped by the garage a few years ago with her boyfriend, Zeke.”
Yeah, he remembered Robin. Tiny thing,chestnut hair, thick glasses, big hazel eyes. Pretty in a nerdy kind of way, and yet he remembered thinking at the time that the woman was every bit as lethal as her big, tatted boyfriend. He and Zeke had talked bikes for a few minutes while Robin did some one-on-one with Nicki—orNix, as Robin had called her.
“Yeah.”
