Switch

Her room was empty. Cleaned out. If Gunn hadn’t been there, I might have ripped the desk clerk’s throat out. I asked for the security camera footage and he hesitated.

Gunn had a hand on my arm. “Listen,” he said to the kid. “You know who we are. If I have to call Sly in to talk to your boss, that’s not going to go well for you. So just pull up that footage and save us all the trouble.”

He was nervous, young. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he tried to figure out what to say. He settled for silence. Good choice. Then he led us into the back office where he had the computer set up.

“It’ll take me a few minutes,” he said. “I gotta log in.”

Gunn and I stood in the hallway. Josh was waiting in the parking lot, keeping watch. “You need to calm your shit,” Gunn said. “We don’t even know what’s what.”

“She’s gone!” I said. “That’s what’s what. If those fucking animals took her ... it’s one thing for them to mess around with Doreen ten miles away. But this is Green Bluff. In the middle of fucking town.”

“And you need to keep your head clear, man. Everyone around you has been trying to tell you this but you’re too blind to see it. We don’t know enough about Kitt to turn this into the shit storm you want. We have to think proportional response.”

A red haze clouded my vision. I’d never been so close to punching Gunn in the face. “You think she’s working with the Rebels?”

“I think we need to keep all options on the table. And we need to make sure whatever we do is what Sly wants.”

My father’s words thundered through me. Sly was twisting himself into a pretzel trying to keep the club from imploding. I knew in the rational side of my brain that he had to think about more than just one person. He had the whole club and all our families on his shoulders. Family. Mad Max was the only living person left I shared any blood with. But in the short time since I’d known her, Kitt was becoming my family too. If anything happened to her ... if being in my world had gotten her hurt …

“It’s coming up now,” Lyle the clerk said, poking his head out of the office. “Here’s the footage you want.”

He stood with his arms folded away from the computer screen. I pushed past him. Gunn was at my side. I pressed the enter key and the footage started to roll. It was grainy with no sound. Hansen had four camera angles. Each of four frames on the monitor showed the parking lot outside Kitt’s room, her exterior hallway, the other side of the building, and the front of the motel.

For the first minute, there was nothing to see. Then a dark van pulled into the lot directly beneath Kitt’s door. My blood boiled. There was no mistaking it. These were Rebels, the writing on their cuts was clear.

“That’s Paco Morales,” Gunn said. “Teague, Curtis, Marcus, and I had some run-ins with him near the New Mexico border last year. He’s a low-level grunt, but he’s a good soldier for Manny Torre. The other two I don’t know. Prospects, probably.”

I watched as they went up to Kitt’s door. Even though I knew the outcome, I willed her not to answer. What was she thinking?

“Looks like she let ’em in,” Lyle said. I shot him a look. He shrank back against the wall.

Paco shut the door behind him as the three of them went in. My heart shattered. There was no way to tell what happened inside that room. All I could do was watch the timer on the lower right of the screen.

“Fast forward,” Gunn said. Lyle grabbed a remote off the desk and did as he was told. Eleven minutes and thirteen seconds went by before that door opened again. Paco had a hand on Kitt’s arm. She wasn’t struggling. She looked calm. Stoic, even. Then she turned her head just as the four of them walked down the exterior hall toward the stairs. She looked up at the last second toward the camera. Her eyes were filled with terror. She mouthed something. But there was no sound. To me, it looked like “help me.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Roll it back.”

We watched three more times as the Rebels took Kitt out of that room. On the second replay, I noticed one of the guys had Kitt’s suitcase.

“You think she left willingly?” Gunn asked. “It’s tough to tell from this.”

Eleven minutes and thirteen seconds. It killed me not to know what happened in that room. Did they hurt her? Where the hell was she now? The van was parked at an angle so I couldn’t see her get in it. They took her around to the other side.

“She didn’t go willingly,” I said. I had Lyle try to zoom in on the van. But the plates weren’t legible.

“She could be anywhere,” Gunn said. “Switch, we need to get back to Sly’s. Lyle, can you make a copy of that tape?”

“Just take it, man,” Lyle said. He pulled the flash drive out of the computer and handed it to Gunn. Gunn nodded, then gestured for me to follow. We were done here.

“We go back to Sly’s,” Gunn said. “We regroup. If Kitt went willingly, she’s in no danger. If she didn’t, the Rebels are gonna reach out. There would have been no point in them taking her otherwise.”

“Goddamnit,” I said. “If they hurt her …”

And there wasn’t a damn thing Gunn could say to that. He couldn’t give me any logical reason why those assholes wouldn’t do something bad to Kitt.

My phone rang. All the blood drained from my head. It wasn’t a number I recognized.

“Answer it, man,” Gunn said.

“Hello?”

There was a banging sound on the other end of the phone. I nearly hung up. “Are you Switch Madison?”

It was a guy’s voice, but he sounded young and scared. I couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t sound like he could be a Rebel. For one thing, he started off too polite.

“Who’s asking?”

“Listen, you don’t know me. You’ve got no reason to trust me, but I need you to. My name is Paulie. Paulie Gates. Does that mean anything to you?”

For a second, it didn’t. Paulie. Then, recognition slammed into my brain.

“Paulie, you’re a friend of Kitt’s.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s ... listen. She’s in trouble. You have to find her.”

“What do you know?”

I pushed past Gunn and headed straight for my Harley. He trailed behind me shouting.

“I don’t know what happened,” Paulie said. “I got a call from her. Like a butt dial. At least that’s what I thought. It wasn’t though. I heard enough. She needs help.”

I tore a hand through my hair. This was nuts. Fear for Kitt made it hard to think straight.

“Look, I don’t have time to explain how I know what I know or what I do,” Paulie said. “But I’ve got an address. More or less. I know where she is. Or ... where she was about a half an hour ago. Can you get to her?”

“Just tell me,” I said. Gunn was right by me. He was never going to go for this. At that moment, I realized I didn’t care. Nothing was going to stop me from getting to Kitt.

“Cactus Road,” Paulie said. “Past a viaduct. I don’t know the area, but it looks like 1233 is the street number. Do you know it?”

“I know where that is,” I said. It was a shitty area just outside of Green Bluff. It made sense that they would have taken her out of town.

“Okay, can I trust you?” Paulie asked. The real question was from me to him. But he was a friend of Kitt’s. I knew she didn’t have many.

“How did you know to call me? How’d you get this number?”

Paulie sighed on the other end of the phone. “I told you. I don’t have time to explain it all to you. Half of it you probably wouldn’t understand, no offense. Kitt made me promise not to, but I did some checking up on her. I was worried. I heard her mention your name. The rest wasn’t that hard to track down. So if I was able to do that from six hundred miles away, never having laid eyes on you, that ought to tell you that I’m telling the truth about Kitt.”

I squeezed the phone against my ear. The kid could be lying. Shit. It could all be a setup. Chances are it was. Except Kitt had an envelope full of a bunch of Sly’s personal information. She said this Paulie was the one who got it for her.

“She said you’re a hacker,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s the most simplistic way of putting it. I’m actually …”

“Save it,” I said.

“That’s probably best. But Mr. Madison? You need to hurry. I couldn’t hear much of what else was happening in that room, but Kitt’s scared.”

I clicked off the phone. I checked my weapon. It was time to roll.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Gunn asked.

I turned to him. “That was a friend of Kitt’s. It’s way too much to explain right now. I know what you’re going to say. But I’ve got a good tip that they’re keeping Kitt in a house about ten minutes from here. I’m going to get her. I don’t expect you to come with me.”

“We need to run this by Sly!”

“No time.” I was already mounted. Fury fueled me. There was no time for rationality. Everything in me told me Kitt was running out of time.