Gunner made his way through the creepy, dusty old warehouse, trying to see within the industrial litter and shattered mess where his daughter was hidden. He was no expert tracker, but he’d spent a few odd moments of his life trying to find people who didn’t want to be found, and he saw no sign that this building was anything other than what it looked from the outside: an abandoned building that had probably been used by junkies, transients, and frightened kids to get away from the parents who did nothing to live up to the name and responsibility they’d been given. He didn’t believe that anyone could’ve gotten into the building this clean, not with a child in tow. That meant Keller had to have another entrance to the building.
Which meant that Gunner had no idea where to go to find Grace.
He felt sick having left Lola behind. He had to trust that she would stay where he’d put her. Thinking about her roaming around this building on her own, trying to find Grace as well — or worse, in the hands of a maniac like Keller, the woman and the girl he loved both at the mercy of a trained assassin — it made him too frightened to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So, he told himself that Lola was a smart girl who would realize that she was entirely outmatched in this situation, and who would stay exactly where he’d left her. No matter what happened.
Even if it was the most ridiculous lie he’d ever told himself. Sillier than the Tooth Fairy, and more ridiculous than Santa Claus.
When his phone rang, he almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been skulking along for so long that the sharp hip-hop beat of the phone’s ringtone was louder than a gunshot to his ears. He crouched down low, looking for who was coming at him, before realizing that he was coming at himself, giving away his position, making himself a target. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket, rushing to silence the sound before it could get him killed, but the unfamiliar number gave him pause. And then he recognized it. It was the same number that had flashed on Lola’s screen when Keller had called her.
He put the phone to his ear at the same time that he moved forward quickly, pressing his back against a convenient wall. At least here there were only two approaches, and he could reasonably see both of them.
“Listen, you son of a bitch,” he snarled, trying for the classic action hero upper hand approach.
Keller had probably heard it all before. He laughed, low and genuinely gleeful in Gunner’s ear.
“Don’t start, son,” Keller said. “I’ve got your girl right here, and I don’t think you understand all the ways someone like me has the capacity to hurt a child.”
“I want her back, Keller. What is the point of this elaborate game? She doesn’t know anything.”
“That’s the part that you don’t fucking understand,” Keller snapped. “She knows everything. She has the key that they’re afraid of. She doesn’t even know she has it, but the men who took Lola this afternoon, they would have no problem destroying your daughter. I don’t think you entirely understand that at all.”
“What’s to understand?” Gunner held the phone away from his ear for a moment, trying to hear Keller’s voice from somewhere other than the phone, get a read on where the man was so that he’d know which way to move in the building. No dice. The empty building was a strange mix of echoes and deadened air, but he wasn’t able to tell anything about where to go next. “You kidnapped a child to save her from some threat that wasn’t even a problem until you got involved.”
It was odd, hearing a grown man scoff into a cell phone. “You haven’t been paying any kind of attention,” Keller snapped. “The girl knows what they’re afraid she knows. What her mother knew. She doesn’t know she knows it, and they’ve got the notebook now, so that’s not going to be as much of an issue as it was before. But I wasn’t completely rogue on this one, Grisham. I was hired to kill your kid. I chose not to do it, to do this instead. I’m going to be a dead man when I let her go.”
Something twisted inside Gunner’s guts. The man was terrifying, and he had held everyone that mattered to Gunner in his control in the past seventy-two hours, but it was still disturbing to hear someone speaking calmly about their own death. Keller’s voice was entirely sure, completely convinced that this would come to pass. He was not debating it for a single moment; it was a settled quantity. Gunner had heard some of his siblings in the club speak that way — when they knew their lives were close to an endpoint. It was no less disturbing to hear from a trained assassin.
“Keller,” he said, and he heard the shift in his tone when he started thinking of the man as a fellow soldier instead of an enemy combatant. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You’ve got the power in this moment, man. Let me get my little girl back, and I’ll do everything I can for you. The Breed has power in this town, and the Vipers are with us right now, so between the two groups, there’s not much we won’t be able to get done. All I need to hear is what you want. What you need us to do.”
“There’s nothing to be done. My time is just up. When I was first recruited to this organization, I was told that it was a good life, until you found the job you couldn’t do. That when that happened, you were done, because the organization does not forgive failures. There aren’t any reasons good enough for backing out of a job you’ve agreed to do. I didn’t realize that the name I was given belonged to a kid. That’s on me. Once I’d taken the job, it was her or me. No excuses. No exceptions.” Gunner could almost hear the other man shrug.
“Sure,” Gunner shot back. He had to get moving. He stayed crouched, but he chose a hallway almost at random, pushing forward, trying to both listen to his phone and keep his ears open to seek out sounds of other people creeping through the building. “But that’s not what I was told by the organization itself when they told me who you were.”
That did seem to throw Keller off his game, but only for a moment. “Who did you speak to? That bitch Tracy? She’d say anything to get rid of me. She’s hated me for years. Says I don’t ask enough questions.”
“Too many?”
“I meant what I said.” A bitter laugh echoed through the phone, and — was there an answering echo, up above him? He turned toward the sound and pressed on. “Guess she was right this time.”
“There’s always a way out,” Gunner said. “A bigger fish to turn on, a bigger problem to solve. There’s no need to assume the game is over until all the cards are dealt.”
“It’s easy to say that when—” Keller’s voice cut off, and Gunner’s heart throbbed in his throat. “Your woman is almost here. Lola. She’s a good girl. She’s helped you out more than you know.”
“You leave her out of this,” Gunner snarled, but Keller was laughing again. Yes, he was down this hall, Gunner was sure of it. He moved into a slightly more upright position, sacrificing some stealth for an increase in speed. There was something in Keller that was about to snap, and he had to get to them before anyone else got hurt. And dammit, Lola was supposed to stay in that cubicle, where she was fine (safe was the most ridiculous of all understatements), but it was still where the hell he’d put her, and couldn’t the goddamn woman just stay put for ten minutes?
“It’s not me, son.” Keller laughed. “It’s her you need to have that conversation with. She’s almost here now. You take care of your girl. Your woman. Take care of them both.”
The click of the phone disconnecting came at the same moment as Gunner hitting the end of the hall and finding that the door which led on to the next section, presumably the section that held his daughter, was locked tight.