“Holly and Mindy are missing. Mancuso’s guy has them somewhere. Asshole gave me a bunch of numbers and said some seriously cryptic shit, but none of it made any sense.”
“You sure? I got a red line on one of his guys right now,” he says. Of course. I told Jim we needed a full table. Everybody we can spare is up here right now. We probably got at least four guys in those woods with sniper rifles on these assholes.
“Positive.”
“Meet me at the highway,” he says and hangs up. Turning the bike on and revving her up, I tear down the dirt road and make it to the highway in record time. I swing onto Highway 101, heading north. It’s not even a half mile before I see Ruby’s red Suburban parked off to the side. I pull up behind it and cut the engine. Ian strides over to me with a laptop in one hand and snaps his fingers together with the other.
“I caught thirty-nine, one four, and a few other numbers. Then negative one and sixty-eight, but there were a few numbers between those, too. He said to hurry because the degrees are dropping and it’s brackish?” I say in frustration. I should have paid better attention so I could remember it all.
“Brackish? Like water is brackish?” he asks me. I shrug.
“Fuck if I know,” I say.
“Degrees are dropping… like it’s getting cold? Cold water?” he muses and starts typing something into the laptop. We probably shouldn’t be getting signal out here, but some poor kid from Stanford’s computer sciences department needs money for his fancy fucking university, and we need signal in places only the government technically has. It’s a beneficial arrangement.
“Wait—degrees… what if it’s not temperature, but like a location?” I ask. Ian’s eyes dance for a moment before his brows draw together.
“Thirty-ninth parallel, do you think he could be talking about the thirty-ninth parallel?”
“I don’t even know what that fucking is,” I say.
“Longitude and latitude. Fort Bragg sits on the thirty-ninth parallel. They’re somewhere along the water,” he says in a hurry.
“How do you know that it’s the coastline and not farther inland?”
“Brackish water is salty. Lakes and rivers, with few exceptions, are not.”
“How the fuck do you know this?” I ask.
“I actually graduated high school, asshole,” he says back with a taunting smile.
“Okay, well, we have miles of coastline. They could be anywhere. I need something more specific.”
“I need you to remember the two numbers that come right after thirty-nine so I’ll be able to narrow it down to a few blocks,” he says.
“Shit,” I say and hit the handlebars of my bike. Holly’s life depends on my ability to remember a bunch of fucking numbers. Had I known this was going to be important one day, maybe I would have paid better attention in school, or maybe I wouldn’t have spent a couple of decades killing my brain cells. “It was… thirty-nine, one, four, two.”
“Cuffey’s Cove, down in Elk,” Ian says after typing a bunch of shit into the computer. I nod and start my bike. Ian rushes to the Suburban, tosses the computer inside, and climbs in. We head off south as fast as we can. The farther I get away from Fort Bragg, the less this feels right. Something nags at me, and I rack my brain trying to figure out what it is. We’ve been heading south for barely two minutes before I signal Ian to stop and pull over. When he does, I pull up to the driver’s window.
“Coordinates are wrong,” I shout over the noise of the Harley. Ian puts the SUV in park and leans over, grabs the laptop, and opens the screen. When he nods, I continue, “It’s not thirty-nine, one, four, two. It’s thirty-nine four, two seven.” He doesn’t ask, and I don’t bother to explain the Mad Hatter-like rhyming the bastard was doing and how confusing it was. He just enters the numbers into the computer and nods again.
“Follow me,” Ian says, and we turn around and take off, going north now. I’m not a spiritual man, but I kick myself half the ride, especially as we pass the dirt road that leads to the safe house. At some point, I’ve started to wonder if every fucked-up thing I’ve ever done is coming back to me. Am I such a bastard that the people I care about are going to keep getting hurt?