It activates and he’s in the bar. The music is low jazz, the lighting dim. It’s packed, but she seems to have a quiet table in the corner.
“What if he doesn’t show?” Sabrina whispers, knowing he can hear her.
The angle of the phone camera catches the curve of her neck and chin, the red of her lips.
He texts her: Shh. Don’t talk. Just wait. Look—vulnerable.
“I am vulnerable,” she whispers, winking to reveal a glittered eyelid.
“This is a really bad idea,” says Jax, leaning annoyingly over Bailey’s shoulder. “She’s like a kid. I mean—how old is she?”
Jax is right of course. “She’ll be fine,” Bailey assures her. “She’s a professional.”
She’s not really. She’s a tech geek with no field experience.
“She doesn’t look like a professional.”
They wait, Jax shifting every few seconds, fidgety, eyes trained on the door to the bar. Ten minutes to the appointed meeting time. Bailey guesses he won’t be early or late. He’ll be right on time. He tries not to think about the muzzle-flash, the figure moving out of the dark. His shoulder aches.
“Why are you doing this?” Jax asks. “Why are you helping us? When it’s not your job. When you’re not getting paid.”
She has dark eyes trained on him, a slight frown that seems to be a semipermanent expression. He thinks about it before he answers.
“I’ve been on this case for the better part of a year, chasing this man, who seems to be the connection point between four missing women. The job is over, my firm fired. But I can’t let it go.”
She keeps that stare on him. “The real reason. The reason under the reason.”
He knows what she’s getting at. Everybody wants something and acts out of that desire. What they think they want, what they say they want, might be very different from what they’re actually craving.
“I don’t like questions without answers,” he says. “I don’t like lost. It doesn’t make sense. Everyone is somewhere.”
The sounds from the bar—music, a peal of laughter—are tinny over the phone between them.
“And Wren?”
Wren. He thought about little else these days. She seemed to have invaded even his dreams. Yes, as Nora claimed, clouded his judgment. He was chasing her as much as he was the ghost.
“I—care about her.”
Jax’s eyes, big and thickly lashed, smart, seeing, search his face. Whatever she finds seems to satisfy her, and she offers him a quick nod like he’s confirmed something she already knows.
“She’s my family,” says Jax, eyes filling. “Some friends become like blood. She has holidays at my mother’s house. She’s never once not answered when I called. A lot of people who have been through the things she has—they go crazy, get ugly, depressed, angry. But she helps people, gives everything over to the people who write to her. Strangers.”
“We’re going to find her,” says Bailey, putting a hand on her shoulder. He believes it. He has to.
“It’s my fault,” says Jax, tears falling now. She bats at them with manicured fingertips. “I’m the one who made her go on Torch.”
“Everyone’s on Torch. He’s a predator. None of this is your fault.”
She wraps her arms around her middle, stares out the window toward the bar. “I need to bring her home, okay?”
“Okay.”
She nods, looks at him sideways, another nod, a breath released. “Okay.”
Bailey sees him first and he swears his arm starts to ache in response. He’d ditched the sling, just to stop looking like a goddamn invalid. But the arm is weak and stiff; he’s not up to a fight and he knows it. Reason enough not to be in the field.
“There he is,” he says.
Right on time. His hair is longer; he’s grown a beard. He seems bulkier, like he’s been working out and packing on calories.
It’s everything Bailey can do not to leap out of the car, run up the street, and tackle the guy, beat the answers out of him. He breathes through the rage, feels it coil up into his middle.
The ghost moves, unhurried up the avenue, a tall figure on the nearly empty sidewalk. It’s a quiet, cold night, not many people out. There’s a homeless man huddled on a stoop, a couple rushing by, pressing close to each other, giggling. The snow is not sticking, but the road is slick and wet. In front of the bar, he stops, seems to pause, peering in the window. Bailey tenses. Does he sense something? Is he going to leave?