Chapter Fourteen

 

Josh Meadows still isn't sure that he made the right call letting this go forward when the call comes through. Nor, when Mitch picks it up like he's screening his calls, is he reassured that he made the right decision by staying with the men.

Still, it's a real question whether or not he would have been able to reassure Anna well enough. Sherry is a pro, and if anyone can make it all work in the end, it's her.

The call came through a while ago: the money was dropped, no problems on their end. Now that the call's come through, fifteen minutes later, it's do-or-die time. They'll be expecting a tap and a trace, of course. They expected it the first time, and they're not suddenly morons.

The same voice comes through. It's too muffled, through the soft sound of the phone against Mitchell Queen's head, for the detective to hear anything. But they'll be hearing it loud and clear at headquarters. Probably louder and clearer than Mitchell's signal, even.

"Are you sure?"

His words sound worried, but his voice doesn't. It's hard to buy Mitch Queen as the worrying type. He seems petty and vain. It's easy to believe that he doesn't worry about much of anything except whether or not girls are noticing him.

He looks at the phone in frustration. Pulls it away from his ear and looks at it. "You're joking, right?"

Josh feels his stomach twist up. Something's gone wrong. What could have possibly gone wrong? The whole plan was simple. There was nothing to go wrong about it. Which means that if something did go wrong, his gut reaction—that this whole thing had been a setup—was spot on.

Mitch pulls the phone away from his ear again and slaps the pad of his thumb down on the hang-up button. He seems like that's calmed him down for a moment. Then, as if he couldn't hold back for an instant longer, he throws the phone hard at the third sofa in the room. Thankfully, it's empty.

The phone bounces off the back and clatters to the floor. He doesn't bother to check and see if it's broken. Josh doesn't move, either. He's got his eyes on Mitch Queen. At the edge of his awareness, so does his father.

"Well, are you going to let us in on what happened?"

"Your girl didn't fucking pay up."

He says that like it was entirely Josh's idea to have Anna involved. He wouldn't have involved her at all if he'd had his choice. It had seemed like a big risk.

Not because she wouldn't pay, though. There was no way that was going to happen. That was not only unthinkable—it was impossible. He'd taken the call from Sherry herself.

They'd had four separate guys watching the drop. Four different vantage points. All but one of them had watched her pick up the suitcase, seen her slide it onto the front passenger seat of a black Subaru Impreza, and had seen the same Impreza drive away.

The Impreza might be a lead. They'd track it down, regardless. Something told Josh that it wasn't going to lead anywhere, not in the long run. If it did, he'd be surprised. More than surprised. He'd be god damn flabbergasted.

He wasn't going to say anything about it, though, because there were procedures and rules and you followed them when you had to, regardless of what you wanted to do.

Now Anna was getting blamed for something that he knew wasn't true.

"So Anna didn't pay, you're saying?"

They hadn't been privy to that little call. Not so far as Josh knew, anyways. They'd have to have been pretty damn sneaky about it.

"Didn't show at all. We give that girl a million in cold hard cash and she cuts and runs?"

"Okay. What now?"

"What the fuck do you mean, 'what now?' What now, we're toast is what now. Fucking moron."

Josh's fists clench up a little bit. He relaxes them. This isn't the time to lose it. This is the time to maintain your professional attitude real well, because if you don't, then things are going to end real bad for you.

It doesn't matter how bad it ends for him, because that's just one scummy son of a bitch in the end. There are thousands more just like him. Millions in the city alone. You have to keep perspective together, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

"Mr. Queen, I'm going to ask again. What's next?"

"What's next is, they call us, they ask for more money, and we find someone who will fucking pay it this time. Where the fuck is Anna? Shouldn't you have had someone with her?"

"Calm down, sir. She's on her way here. We'll talk about this when everyone's arrived, when it's all situated. Then we'll figure out what to do next."

Josh's jaw is so tight that it's starting to hurt bad. The headache feels like it's spreading through his whole damn body at this point, and there's not a God damn thing he can do about it but wait.

Wait, and hope that he can figure out how they're going to stop things going sideways again.

It doesn't matter how many people saw her pay. It only matters that Anna will always be ready to admit fault. She'll always say that she might have screwed something up.

Maybe she paid the wrong guys. She's not the sort of person who would just give the money away to some random fucking person, but she doesn't know if she got the right car. Maybe she didn't.

The details were vague in the original call. A black, late-model sedan. They weren't even nice enough to clarify if it would be an import or a domestic. No make or model. Likely the car was stolen.

They'd get a call about it in a couple of days, maybe. Until then, it was going to be Anna's fault that she'd lost her only chance at getting her daughter back.

Why? Because she was a convenient choice. Because she would take the fall, regardless of whether or not it was her fault.

It was a crock of shit. She hadn't done anything wrong, and everyone in that room knew it. Josh Meadows's gut told him that Mitch Queen knew it, too. That every bit of that had been a show. Likely for the benefit of the police department.

Meadows walked to the door and back. His shoulders were tight. His jaw was tight. His entire body felt like a coiled-up spring, and he didn't have to wonder for a second what had him wound up so tight.

It was a little rich son of a bitch sitting on a ten-thousand dollar sofa older than half the buildings in the city, and only a couple years younger than the other half.

It was a couple of bastards who thought they could fool him by putting the blame on a poor girl who didn't do a God damn thing wrong. They'd get away with it, too, in all likelihood.

Because there was plenty that Josh Mitchell could see as a person. As a detective, as someone who had learned to trust his gut when the chips were down, it was all he needed to see the way that Mitch suddenly got invested the minute that it was convenient.

None of that was going to matter in the end, if he couldn't prove it. And that was going to be the hard part, because Mitch Queen had all the time in the world to plan this thing. He'd had almost seven months.

Josh Meadows had been here for four days now, and he was already starting to see the skeleton of the plan that was laying out in front of him.

None of it was going to matter if he couldn't start laying down track ahead of where they were going, because somewhere in the future, there was going to be a point where they had already gotten away with it and no investigation was going to change that.

He had to make sure that Ava Witt was back with her mother before that happened, because that was the point where there wouldn't be any getting her back.