Collateral Read online

  “Hey? Hey, are you listening? Zeth!” My cell phone is shouting at me. Or rather, Rebel’s shouting at me out of the speaker.

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry about Sloane. I’ll find her, okay?”

  “Rebel, I wouldn’t trust you to find my girl if you were the last fucking man alive.” I hang up the phone. I don’t want to hear another word come out of his mouth.

  I keep forgetting Michael is this asshole’s cousin. He curves an eyebrow at me, his mouth lifting in the corners. “Not a fan, huh?”

  “Not particularly. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. He’s an acquired taste.” Michael huffs out a breath, running his hands down the front of his suit jacket. “Okay, so what’s the plan? Are you about to go throw yourself on the mercy of this DEA agent or what? Sloane said not to.”

  I stand, shooting him a filthy look. “It’s rude to pretend you’re asleep when people are having a private conversation.”

  “No, it’s not. Having a full-blown make-out session when someone’s trapped in the back of the same car as you? That’s rude.”

  I bite back the urge to growl. We leave Fresco’s, but not before Michael returns his macchiato glass to the barista and informs him that his coffee is bad. Really, really fucking bad. The barista looks like he’s just shit his pants.

  When we’re outside, the city is unusually still, as though it’s holding its breath, awaiting an approaching storm. In some ways it might as well be. Somewhere out there, Sloane’s potentially being interrogated, held against her will. That does not sit well with me. If I don’t have her back within the next hour, Seattle will be hit by the biggest storm it’s ever seen. And that storm will be me. Michael hands over the keys to Rebel’s Humvee without needing to be asked.

  He climbs into the passenger seat, putting on my aviators. “What are we doing?”

  “We, my friend, are going to find ourselves some goddamn collateral.”

  Michael pats the dashboard, grinning. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “And Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  “Once Sloane’s back where she’s supposed to be…I’m gonna need to borrow a suit.”

  The last time I saw Dad’s wood-paneled station wagon, it was in the rearview mirror of a getaway car. I never thought we’d be able to retrieve it from Julio’s compound, and yet here I am, sitting in the front passenger seat, listening to the damn thing’s all-too-familiar choking and grinding as we head out of the city.

  “So, where do you think we ought to start?” Dad asks, hands firmly at ten and two on the steering wheel.

  My chest feels like a heavy weight is pressing down on it, making it hard to breathe. My hands are shaking. I’m so livid I can barely sit still. “Maybe at the beginning? Like how you came to be involved with the DEA, Dad? You’ve known all along, haven’t you? You’ve known all along that Alexis was alive and you haven’t said a goddamn word. That’s why you reacted so weirdly when I came to the house to tell you and Mom I’d found her. God!”

  “Sloane.”

  “What, Dad? Don’t take the lord’s name in vain? What the hell am I supposed to say? You’ve been lying to us. Lying to us for years.” I brace my elbows against my knees, leaning forward, trying to clear my head. Pointless though. I can’t fucking believe it. “You haven’t even denied it,” I whisper. “You haven’t even told me it’s not true.”

  His remorse rolls off him in waves that practically pull at me. Like Zeth, Dad’s never been one to lie. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I really am. But it was imperative you didn’t know where Alexis was.”

  “And Mom? Was it imperative she didn’t know where her freaking daughter was? She thought she was dead, Dad!”

  “I know, Sloane. I know. But you have to understand, I did what I had to do. It was the way it had to be. It wasn’t going to be forever.”

  I sit up straight so I can look him in the eye—the man I’ve respected my whole life. The man whose footsteps I’ve wanted to follow in since I was a little girl. The man who taught me love and justice and honesty. My stomach twists, and I realize something terrible is about to happen. “Oh, no. Dad, pull over.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dad just pull over the damn car!”

  He swings the station wagon over to the side of the road, just in time for me to push open the door and part company with the contents of my stomach. I throw up so hard my eyes cloud over with tears. Dad places his hand in the center of my back and rubs up and down, just like he did when I was sick as a kid. The action doesn’t make me feel any better. It makes me feel even worse.

  I hear a car pull up behind us and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel at the side of the road, then a deep voice saying, “We can’t stay here. She can throw up back at the field office.”

  I don’t know the man that voice belongs to, but I already hate him. I swat the tears from my eyes and look up into the face of the tallest guy I’ve ever seen. His generic SUV is parked right behind us, the passenger door still yawning open. Lowell’s at the wheel, staring at me with an impassive, unaffected look. The same one she was wearing when she showed me the bodies of the many men she says Zeth killed. I flip her off, and then I spit on the ground, ridding myself of the foul taste of vomit.

  “Tell your boss she can go fuck herself,” I inform the giant in front of me. I swing my legs back into the car and then slam the door so violently the whole car rocks.

  “You don’t know the truth, sweetheart. I think as soon as I explain everything, you’ll understand,” Dad says softly.

  If he thinks that, then he has another thing coming. “I don’t care what the truth is now, Dad. It’s too late. Both you and Alexis have totally betrayed any trust that might have existed between us. You’ve destroyed everything. I just…I just don’t wanna hear it.”

  A car horn blares behind us—Lowell bitching about our lack of movement. Dad puts the station wagon into gear and pulls back out onto the road. We’re apparently headed to a field office. Somewhere I can be righteously preached at about my recent life choices. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere with my father or Agent Lowell given the choice, but it was either this or getting my ass arrested and my assets seized until I complied. I haven’t touched my bank account in weeks. It seems that whenever I’ve needed something it was simply there, provided to me by either Zeth or more often than not by Michael. But at some point I am going to want access to my money, and I am definitely going to want to go back home. But when the hell will that ever happen? The very thought of being able to step back inside the sanctuary I created for myself without towing a whole heap of trouble right after me is laughable.

  Besides, my father promised me he’d drop me off wherever I wanted after I’d heard him out, so this seemed like the best option at the time. We drive for another forty minutes passing turnoffs to Mountlake Terrace, Lynnwood and the Paine Field Airport until we arrive in Everett. I haven’t been here since I was a kid—a birthday party for either Alexis or myself, I can’t recall now. The place reminds me of screaming children and the smell of hamburgers.

  Dad pulls the station wagon into the parking lot behind a liquor store of all places. He kills the engine and removes the keys from the ignition. “Sloane, you have to know that I’m sorry. I didn’t withhold anything from you to deceive you, or your mother. I—”

  “How about you just show me what you so desperately need to show me and then you can take me back to the people who don’t lie to me and abuse my trust, huh, Dad?” It strikes me as very strange that this is actually the truth. Zeth has never asked for my trust and then let me down. He’s never hidden anything from me. If I’ve wanted to know something, if I’ve found myself in a situation where he has control over me, if a situation’s been bad, he hasn’t hurt me or betrayed me. He’s been honest, and he’s kept me safe. Zeth, a man I know to be a criminal, has treated me with more respect than my own father, a man of the church.

  Oh, the irony’s so bittersweet, I feel
like I’m choking on it.

  “Just keep an open mind, okay, kiddo?” Dad tells me.

  Lowell and her subordinates have pulled up in their hulking great SUVs, and are already out of the vehicles, waiting not so patiently for us to get out, too. I don’t answer my father. I get out of the car, shooting an evil look at the woman who seems to be at the heart of this whole fucking mess. Lowell gestures toward a flight of metal stairs that zigzag up the side of the liquor store, wearing a grim smile. “After you,” she says. The diamond tread on the steps of the staircase have almost worn clean away in the middle, a slick silver patch of steel in the center of the otherwise rusted metalwork. My footsteps clang out, echoing around the parking lot as I climb up one, two, three flights, and then I can’t go any farther.

  We’ve reached the top of the stairs, and in front of me a solid, reinforced steel door covered with dark green chipped paint bars the way. Lowell slips by me and punches a code into the keypad on the wall; the door shunks open, and an alarm sounds from within the building, a single-pitched ernnnn noise that reminds me of prison gates. The ones I’ve seen on TV, and hopefully not the one I will soon be calling home.

  Lowell hurries into the building, not bothering to check behind her to see if I’m following. I wouldn’t have a choice even if I didn’t want to; my dad is right behind me, followed by the giant who told us to hurry up on the side of the road before, and two other guys in immaculate suits. Dad smiles sadly at me, and I don’t smile back. Inside, the building smells like Pop Tarts. Burnt ones. Someone’s obviously charred the hell out of their late breakfast.

  A florescent strip light flickers overhead, emitting a high-pitched buzz, as the five of us move in quick, silent efficiency down the corridor. There are rooms off to the left and the right. We pass open doors that give way to empty, bare concrete boxes beyond. No office furniture. No admin workers. Just the occasional smashed-up cardboard box and in one room a broken wooden stool with only three legs instead of the four it obviously started out with.

  Lowell proceeds with military precision, turning left and then right as the corridor snakes out in front of us, until we hit another heavy metal security door. Another code goes into another keypad. Another alarm. This time there are people on the other side of the door. Hastily thrown-together work spaces, photo-fit images taped to walls, ringing telephones and curious glances welcome us as we head toward an office with an open door at the far end of the vast room.

  Lowell goes inside, as do I. Dad follows behind, but the nameless men peel off to various workstations, dismissed with a perfunctory glare from Lowell.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” Lowell nods her head at a chair facing what I assume is her desk. When Dad shimmies around the unnecessarily large desk and sits down on the same side as her, I almost vomit again, right there on the floor. This is fucking crazy.

  “Now, since you don’t care about my photos just now, I’m hesitant to try and show you any more,” Lowell says. “Your father has other ideas, however. He feels you ought to see why it’s important for us to find your sister. Are you willing to listen to what we have to say this time? To let us show you what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  I glance at Dad; he doesn’t look away, though I get the impression he wants to. “I’m kind of a captive audience right now,” I snap. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Good.” Lowell opens up a laptop that’s sitting on her desk and frowns, concentrating on the screen for a moment. She clicks a couple of times, apparently finds whatever she’s looking for, and then spins the thing around so I can see the display. It’s footage from a security camera of some description, dark and blurry. It’s hard to make much out at first, but it looks like there’s snow on the ground. Lowell reaches over and hits the play button, and the still image comes to life. There’s no sound. I see a dark figure walking quickly down an abandoned street, alone, and my heart feels like it’s swelling in my chest. It’s Lexi. I can tell by the huge, sloppily knitted scarf she has wound around her neck—she spent three months trying to finish that thing before winter arrived, and then refused to leave it at home once it was done.

  I suddenly know what I’m watching. I know what I’m being shown, and I do not want to see it. I lean forward in my seat, reaching for the laptop, to turn it away, to close the damn thing, to just make it stop, but then Alexis freezes on the screen. She just stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, her focus fixed on something or someone I can’t see. A second later, I do see what she’s looking at: a long stream of motorcycles burn down the road—three, five, eight—I don’t know how many of them. Half the actual road is cut off on the screen, so it could be thirty for all I know. Alexis stands and watches them pass, the strange sight of so many men on their bikes, ripping through the center of Seattle obviously enough to stop her in her tracks.

  “What the hell is this?” I whisper.

  Dad just shakes his head. “Keep watching, sweetheart.”

  The bikers disappear. Alexis remains still a moment longer, dark hair flying about her face, being teased at by a silent wind. She steps up to the side of the curb looks up and down, as though she’s going to cross over. However, before she can take another step, a dark figure, a man, runs out of the side street behind her and falls to his knees, reaching out a hand to my sister. He clearly frightens her; she visibly jumps, and skitters backward away from the person.

  Alexis pauses, as though trying to decide what to do, and then she rushes forward, bending toward the man on the ground, unwinding that hideous scarf from around her neck.

  “She was helping someone?” I ask. I don’t take my eyes off the screen, and neither Lowell nor my father respond. I’m supposed to see for myself. I’m scared though. I’m a coward. I don’t want to see her get hurt, no matter how badly she’s hurt me.

  The two people on the screen are talking, that much is clear, and it’s incredibly frustrating that I don’t know what’s being said. I squint at the laptop, even though there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to lip read what’s coming out of their mouths. The quality of the image is so poor and pixelated that I can’t make out their actual facial features. Alexis offers out a hand, but the man on the ground recoils backward. Confusing. He was reaching for her only a second ago, but now he seems scared. He starts scrambling away from her, arms and legs working against the snow on the ground, trying to put some space between them. And then his fear suddenly makes more sense. He’s not trying to get away from Alexis. He’s trying to get away from the group of men that are approaching her from behind.

  I count eight of them.

  “Oh my god.” I cover my mouth with my hands, half considering covering my eyes, too. Alexis never turns around. She never knows the men are behind her. The tallest of all of them, broad in the shoulders with a pronounced limp, is the first to reach my sister. He clamps a hand over her mouth and physically lifts her off the ground. Her legs kick out desperately, but the guy doesn’t put her down. Another one of the men grabs hold of the person still lying in the snow and tries to wrestle him up, but he doesn’t succeed. Instead, he takes him by the arm and then drags him back into the same alleyway he appeared from. The other men follow. My sister is carried out of shot and into the darkness by the tall guy with a limp.

  And she is gone.

  Lowell reaches forward and snaps the laptop closed. “The man you saw in that footage, the one she encountered first? That was Judge Ryan Conahue. His body was found under a pile of trash the morning after this happened. A restaurateur took out his garbage at 5:30 a.m. and got a bit of a fright. Conahue had been stabbed once in the chest, directly in his heart. He’d bled out into the snow.”

  She produces another file from a drawer in her desk and tosses an image down—a silver-haired man in his late fifties, early sixties, eyes clouded over and staring straight up toward the sky, blue lips slightly parted. There is, indeed, a wound in his chest—the obvious source of the copious amounts of blood that have stained his grea
t coat and turned the dirty snow around him bright red.

  “A judge? He was a judge?” I ask.

  “Yes, sweetheart. He was presiding over a murder case at the time. A man had been arrested, a very dangerous man, and his companions, the men you just saw in the video, didn’t want the judge to find him guilty of the crime. They’d been leaning on Judge Conahue, trying to coerce him into freeing this individual, but he refused.”

  “So they murdered him.” Just when I thought this couldn’t get anymore complicated, any more fucked up…

  Agent Lowell fiddles with the computer for a second and then turns it back to me. It’s already playing. A beaten-up van is careening down the street. It pulls over at the side of the road in front of the alleyway and two men get out. They go to the back of the van and open the rear doors. It’s hard to see what’s going on in the mouth of the alleyway now, because the bulk of the vehicle is blocking the view, but I can see a scuffle taking place. An arm, a leg. One of the men slips in the snow and lands on his ass, his whole body suddenly in view. I still can’t see his face properly, but I have no problem whatsoever seeing his shoulders hitch up and down—he’s laughing. Laughing.

  The rear doors to the van close, and then the man who fell over walks back to the driver’s door and climbs in. There’s movement at the passenger door but it’s so dark I can’t see who climbs in there. The van pulls away, and then they’re gone. The street is empty.

  “Who are they?” I ask. There’s a lump in my throat the size of a basketball. I can barely talk around it.

  Lowell shifts in her seat, tracing her fingers over the fat file in front of her. “They’re a cartel.”

  “Colombian?”

  She shakes her head. “Mexican.”