“Me too,” Gavin said. “Part-time, anyway.”
“Weasel. You know him?”
Silence heard Jonah sigh.
Gavin cocked his head. “Beg your pardon?”
Silence took his PenPal notebook from his pocket. PenPals’ plastic covers came in a variety of bold colors. This one was red. He flipped it open, removed Amber’s sticky note, and handed the note to Gavin, who gave it a puzzled twist of the lips.
“What is this?”
“It’s Amber’s,” Silence said.
Now that he realized what he was holding, Gavin held the note like a fragile artifact, a religious relic. His mouth fell open. “Where did you get it?”
“Our apartment,” Jonah said. “Cops overlooked it.”
Gavin nodded slowly, staring at the note. “Yeah, I know the Weasel.”
An endorphin rush of potential fluttered through Silence.
Gavin finally looked up from the note, to Jonah. “Ray Beasley.”
Jonah’s eyes widened.
Gavin turned to Silence. “He was a cop, in C11 with Carlton. Got kicked off the force for heroin use. But before that, when Amber was a kid, he was a big part of her life. A surrogate uncle. She called me and Ray her ‘two uncles.’” He paused. “And then she lost both of us. Within a few years of each other. Ray went nuts with drugs, and Carlton excommunicated me from her life.”
He looked back through the open side of the parking garage toward the headquarters complex. Silence let him be, allowed the moment to breathe.
Gavin turned back around, and Silence held out his hand for the sticky note.
Jonah stepped toward Gavin, took the VHS tape from the front pocket of his jacket, handed it to him.
Gavin looked it over, raised an eyebrow.
“A video for me. From Amber,” Jonah said. “I … can’t watch it. Hold on to it for me?”
Gavin nodded, looked deep into Jonah, his jaw set. “You think her disappearance is related to C11, don’t you? Some shit my brother got involved in, someone he pissed off getting revenge, taking it out on his daughter.”
“You know I do.”
They looked at each other.
Gavin set his jaw. “And you think she’s dead. I can see it in your eyes.”
A pause from Jonah.
“Yes, I do.”
Gavin looked from Jonah to Silence, back to Jonah.
“She’s alive.”
He stepped back to the Grand Cherokee, climbed inside, and slammed the door.
Chapter Nine
Jonah followed Brett up the stairs, back to the third floor where they’d grabbed one of the last remaining spots to park his Fiero.
When they’d first arrived, Jonah had noted that the parking garage was on the nicer side. Not a big, squarish, gray thing like so many of them. This one had rounded corners, contrasting brick and concrete, green accents—a dark, bluish, copper-patina type of green.
The builders hadn’t skimped on the stairwell. Its outfacing side was covered in similar green glass, giving the outside views a surreal quality. The concrete was smooth and clean. And there were trash cans and large concrete planters with a few spiky plants at the ground floor and on each landing.
By the time they’d finished the conversation with Gavin, the crowd had disappeared, and so they were the only ones in the stairwell, their footsteps echoing.
She’s alive, Gavin had said.
He’d been so demonstrative. Such fire in his eyes. But he hadn’t been certain. His words had come out with the ferocity of deep determination, sadly biased denial.
Jonah was being more pragmatic. As much of a goof-off as people thought him to be, he still knew that when push came to shove, logic, not emotion, was what got a person through life. And logic told him that Amber was dead. Jonah’s preemptive grieving had been an act of pragmatism.
And yet, every time he heard someone like Gavin say, with such passion, such clarity, that Amber was alive, something sparked inside Jonah.
Maybe…
One notion that hadn’t wavered in his mind, however, was that Amber hadn’t run off to “find herself,” as Carlton and so many others had said. She and Jonah had made great strides with Dr. Nogulich, and by the time they left, handing each other the VHS tapes, Jonah knew things were going to be all right. He’d seen it. In her perfect blue eyes. He knew.
Amber wasn’t the most intelligent of individuals—as her father was always so quick to point out—but she was very wise and more than self-aware enough to realize her naïveté made her a an easy target in the harsh wide world. No, she wasn’t out there somewhere off the grid. She wasn’t living in a tent in the middle of a national park. She hadn’t skipped the country to sip ayahuasca and meditate with a shaman somewhere in South America.
Something had happened to her.
District C11.
An old grudge. A gang leader who hadn’t received a promised favor twenty years ago. A recently released ex-con who felt he should have been slid under the table like so many others.
Amber was gone because of something connected to those bastards. Jonah was certain of it.
It must have been this certainty that had led Jonah here, to this stairwell, following this tall man with the Frankenstein voice who refused to give his proper name.
Jonah watched the man as he ascended the stairs. The small muscles in the back of Brett’s neck twitched with his steps. It wasn’t a massive neck, nothing about him screamed bodybuilder, but everything was just … strong. His power exuded from him, and he tamed it with a layer of classy-chic clothing.
Brett looked back, over his shoulder, not making eye contact with Jonah, rather looking behind them, down the steps. He’d been like this all morning—always a watchful eye, careful monitoring of his surroundings.
They reached the landing between the second and third floors, pivoted. And as they continued up to the final landing, Brett slowed slightly, looked over his shoulder again, eyes squinted, as though listening.
At the third-floor landing, he quickly, silently pulled to the side, along the edge of the wall. He held a finger to his mouth in a shushing motion, and swiped his other hand to the
