Page 29 of Operation Rescue
Erin finished the last call on her list. Mrs. Larson, Connor’s mother, was running out of patience, she could tell. She tried not to be a nuisance, but it wasn’t like she could quit looking. She’d even tried texting, knowing a lot of people preferred that method of communication, actually including her, but somehow she needed to hear other human voices.
When she had realized people were getting irritated—something she didn’t quite understand, given the circumstances—she’d broken the names down into two lists and rotated them, so she only called each person every other day. But lately her calls had been going straight to voice mail, and a couple of people had even blocked her.
Sometimes, when she was exhausted after a sleepless night of worrying, she wanted to ask them how they’d feel if it was their own child who was missing. But she knew it would come out angrily, probably almost hysterically, so she bit back the words and reeled in her temper. Or tried to. She needed their help, not their antagonism.
When she caught herself pacing the living room floor repeatedly for the third time today, she broke.
She had todosomething. She couldn’t go see the people on her lists and irritate them even further, but she could revisit the places she knew about, that Ethan hung out. Or at least, where he used to hang out, before he got sucked into whatever he was into now. She didn’t expect to turn up anything, but at least she’d be doing something. She had to try, or she’d go mad. Besides, the odds of Ethan showing up after all this time seemed beyond slim to her. And she suspected making her stay home was just as much—if not more—that Blaine didn’t want her with them.
So she spent a couple of hours going from place to place to place and finding out nothing, before she got to the commercial block that was last on her list of possibilities. She parked in the first spot she found, mentally making a list of all the places she could think of that Ethan might have gone to. The first two, first only because they were the nearest to where she’d parked, turned up nothing. She’d not expected anything, but the next she had higher hopes for.
There was a new cashier at the small game store she knew he used to visit. The girl, who looked about eighteen, shook her head at Ethan’s photograph. “Nope, never seen him.”
“You’re sure?”
The girl, whose name tag read Hannah, nodded. “I’ve only been here a few days, so there’s not a lot to remember yet. But I pay attention.” She glanced around, as if to see if anyone was close enough to hear, before adding, “We get some guys coming in here who scare me. As in already looking for another job scare me.”
Erin’s breath caught before she recovered and asked, “You mean gang types?”
“Yeah. Well, younger, like junior high age, but the same look.” She grimaced. “Like those gangsters are something to emulate.”
Erin had to calm her breathing, and wished she could do the same for her pulse rate, which had just kicked up. It was the first connection she’d found, the first location that both Ethan and the gang wannabes had in common. Assuming, of course, this group was the same one he’d gotten tangled up with.
She asked a few more questions, got a couple of descriptions that might be useful, and the interesting news that none of that group had been in for almost a week.
Almost the same amount of time Ethan had been gone.
“Good luck finding that other job, Hannah,” Erin said, meaning it as she handed the cashier her business card with her phone number.
“Thanks. I hope you find your son.” The young woman smiled. “And I’ll call if I see him come in.”
She exited the store and headed back to where she had parked, a couple of blocks down. She was both up and down, up that she might have confirmed at least the likelihood of a connection between Ethan and those other boys, and down for the exact same reason.
She’d known early on that that connection was a possibility, but she kept hoping it wasn’t true, so she hadn’t spent much time considering what might happen if it was.
Something Blaine’s intimidating friend had said, about the attorney he’d talked to, came back to her now.
He can help with any aftermath issues for Ethan as well.
Aftermath issues.
It hadn’t registered at the time but it did now. He meant legal trouble. He meant if Ethan had been lured into breaking any laws while in the company of those kids she’d hoped against hope he wasn’t involved with. She’d been so focused on worrying about his safety, and whether their relationship had been fatally fractured that she hadn’t even thought about other kinds of repercussions. For instance, ending up having to visit her son in some juvenile detention facility.
The very thought made her faintly nauseous. Images rose in her mind of prison jumpsuits and a glass wall always between her and Ethan. And that was what she was lost in thought about when she was jolted out of the reverie by a sharp exclamation of her name.
“Erin! What are you doing out here?”
She snapped out of the fog to see Blaine headed for her, now barely six feet away. When he reached her he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to the narrow grass parkway that ran along the side of the street, out of the pedestrian lane.
“Let go of me,” she snapped, not because he’d hurt her or even because he’d made the decision to move for her, but because his touch still had that crazy effect on her and she hated the fact.
“Sorry,” he muttered, releasing her instantly with an exaggerated movement of his arms, his hands wide-open now. As if she’d burned him. As perhaps she had.
It was a moment before he asked again, “What are you doing out here?”
“What do you think?” she asked, waving the photo she’d shown to Hannah. “Looking for my son.”
She saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Pain? Belatedly she realized it was at her referring to Ethan as her son, notour son. But he didn’t call her on it. Instead he just said, “We’re doing this. Why aren’t you at the house?”
