“A retired police officer, really?” Hanna asked, distracting her inability to be convincingly surprised by taking a long gulp of the beer in her glass.
“I know, seems strange right?” he said with a wheezy laugh.
This man instantly put her at ease. He was the type of man she recognized. A practiced grandfather who could drink like a fish and trick his own grandchildren out of their money in a game of poker. She knew the man too, literally. James talked of him a few times and she prayed that he never mentioned her to Robert.
“There’s a story there, I’m sure,” she said.
“Not really an exciting one,” he said with a shrug. “The Pharaohs don’t have the hindrance of a badge. We can get things done without worrying about a code of ethics that some men in suits decided on.”
She frowned. “This is probably going to sound harsh, but what exactly have the Pharaohs been doing with that freedom? It’s not like they’re a group of Bruce Waynes or something protecting the streets.”
He didn’t look offended in the slightest. He sighed and nodded, swirling his drink in front of him.
“We used to have a stronger moral code. It was very black and white,” he said, taking a sip. “There was right and wrong and we fixed it when it was out of balance.”
“A black and white moral code isn’t a good thing by default,” she said.
“No it’s not, to most any way. But we didn’t bother with debating the moral philosophy behind decisions. If someone got robbed, if a woman was raped, we shut it down. Now it’s all about profits.”
“Profits?”
“The bar, the auto shop, the deals. Now the power on the streets is money, how much you can show off, not how much you can scare your enemies. Roarke wants people to envy him, not fear him.”
She wasn’t sure that was entirely bad either. Sure, it was childish of him to try and wave his toys around in others’ faces and hope that they were jealous of him. But she’d rather he be an immature child than something far more ruthless. She thought of the Caracals. They wouldn’t hesitate to rip off fingernails and break non-vital bones to get what they wanted. That was a fairly typical gang mentality. But, somehow, she didn’t think Roarke was capable of anything like that. And that thought made her feel comforted.
“Well, maybe when we figure out what happened to Isabelle, we can get back to how things used to be.”
“We?”
She paused. It came out so naturally. That we had come out too easy. Was it we already? James would blow his lid if he knew she was thinking that way. It was just part of the cover. She’d rather be in too deep with it than not deep enough and risk losing everything she gained thus far.
She was saved from having to follow up by Roarke who burst into their conversation with a fairly crazed look on his face and a cracked phone in his hand.
“I found this,” he said, shoving it right into Hanna’s face. She took it and looked at it, careful not to cut herself on the cracked glass across the screen.
“Okay?”
“It’s Isabelle’s.”
Suddenly she was very alert. She turned it over in her hands several times, as if there were secrets that could be discovered from examining the damaged surface. The battery was long dead. She dug into her bag and felt around for the familiar cord. She pulled it out and called the bartender over to plug it in. She shoved the cord into the jack on the phone and waited a few seconds to see the screen blinking, accepting the charge.
“Well, we’ll see what this can offer us in like forty minutes,” she said, staring at the blinking battery symbol.
“Did you check the people in the bar that night?” Robert asked.
“They were all Pharaohs,” Roarke said. “Except for this one here, but she was with me the entire time.”
“There’s no chance anyone in the bar helped ferry her out? You’re sure?”
“Grandpa, I’m not incompetent. That was my first thought and I checked everyone.”
While grandfather and grandson argued over whether or not Roarke was doing as much as he could in the right ways to ensure that Isabelle was found, Hanna remembered how exactly she’d snuck into the bar. The side door had been opened by a delivery man dropping off new kegs and massive twenty-four packs of beer cans. The front door of the bar was locked. That was a dead end. But that side door…
She tried to remember the delivery man’s face. It’s not like anyone had a look that screamed kidnapper, but she tried to recall it, anything about him.
“There was a delivery man that night,” she said, still in mid thought.
“What?” Roarke asked, annoyed at whatever point he was making getting cut off.
“That’s how I got in the bar. The side door was being used by a delivery guy. That’s the only unaccounted for door right? The front was locked.”
Roarke went silent and pensive, thinking.
“Now, that, is a lead,” Robert said with a kind smile and Hanna couldn’t help but smile back.
Roarke glared and turned back to Hanna.
“Do you remember the guy?”
“No, but you keep records right? We can figure out the company and track down the guy. Can’t be that hard if there’s a paper trail.”
“Keep this one around.”
Roarke glared more at Robert but nodded to the back of the bar and Hanna followed, placing what was left of her drink down and praying this lead somewhere, for everyone’s sake. She didn’t know if she could handle any more dead ends and Roarke seemed to be smoking a pack a day. Not that she truly cared for his wellbeing, but she needed him alive if she was going to keep up this cover.