“Good morning,” Gervais said, flashing a sinister grin.
“What the . . . ?”
“Stay calm,” Gervais instructed. “We don’t want to wake up the girl down the hallway, do we?”
The man stiffened, fear spreading down the length of his body. Gervais was used to seeing this very reaction. He’d woken many targets in this same manner.
“You are Mr. McGee?” Gervais asked.
“Who are you?”
Gervais moved the gun slightly and pulled the trigger. The muffled bullet took off the man’s left earlobe, making him jerk back and grab his now-bloody ear with a yelp.
“I ask the questions, not you,” Gervais said. “One more time. You are Mr. McGee?”
The man quickly nodded, clutching his left ear with his left hand. Blood was covering his fingers.
“Do you know someone named Jake Slater?”
Another quick nod.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Uh, last night. He came to my house.”
“Good. What time?”
“I, uh, I don’t remember.”
Gervais shifted the gun again, pulled the trigger, and took off the man’s right earlobe. The guy groaned, jerked again, and now had both hands pressed to the sides of his head.
“I need you to think more clearly, Mr. McGee,” Gervais said. “This is important to me. Do you understand?”
More nodding. “It was, uh, before midnight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I was, uh, watching the UCLA football game. West Coast. And it was only halftime.”
“What did Mr. Slater want?”
The man swallowed, grimaced. Blood from his ears was oozing through his fingers and running down his neck. “He was acting crazy. He thought I had his daughter or something.”
“Do you?”
He shook his head. “No. I, uh . . . I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“What else did he say?”
“I mean, nothing, really.”
Gervais cocked his head, as if a warning.
This sent panic through the man’s eyes. “I swear! He just started apologizing. My stepdaughter came in, and he apologized to her, too. Said he made a big mistake. And then he left, and that was it. I swear to God. That’s all of it.”
Gervais studied the man. He was telling the truth. The piss stain now forming in the front of the man’s blue jeans told him that.
“OK, you have a good day,” Gervais said.
He turned and began walking back toward the hallway. But then he heard sudden movement from behind him. Spinning back around, Gervais found the guy scrambling to reach under his bed. Then the man put his hand on a gun and began lifting it out into the open. Gervais rolled his eyes, aimed his own gun, and fired off two shots. They both hit the man directly in the center of the forehead, and he plopped back onto the mattress.
“Idiot.” Gervais sighed, and left.
TWENTY
Jake parked on the side of a dirt road surrounded by open fields in deep East Austin and stared up ahead of him at a run-down RV that sat alone on a couple of acres of unkempt land. It was a setup similar to other trailers and mobile homes he’d passed along this same route for more than a mile. He studied the digital dot on the map on his burner phone. According to the map, this was Eddie Cowens’s place—whom Jake now believed to be the driver of the tow truck who killed Sarah in the hit-and-run crash last year and took Piper from Caitlin’s house.
Who the hell was this guy? Jake had spent several minutes searching the internet for info on the man. There was barely anything out there on his name. The guy didn’t participate in social media, as far as Jake could tell, and he wasn’t part of any club, organization, or business that had once published details on the web. Eddie Cowens was a no one—so how had the man become the center of a tornado that had destroyed Jake’s whole world?
Jake eased his vehicle forward. As he did, he noticed a small white barn with a metal roof appear behind the RV. It was more like a shack, but still—could Piper be inside? His heart started pumping faster. Was this where they were holding her hostage? There were no vehicles currently on the property. If someone was here, they were without a car. After parking his truck in the grass beside the dirt road, Jake got out and surveyed the entire landscape, just so he had his bearings. He had no idea what was about to happen when he approached the trailer and the barn. He wanted to be ready for anything. Up ahead of him about a quarter mile down the dirt road, he noticed a guy on a huge tractor working in a field. But that was the only person he’d seen in the general vicinity.