I wake up in the night, sweating. Sophia is already awake, staring at the ceiling, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. I’m hardly surprised. She’s so wound up right now that I’d be shocked if she’s slept at all. I don’t know if she’s realized I’m conscious yet. She just lies there, staring up at the ceiling, not fidgeting or moving an inch. I blow out a deep breath, shifting over onto my side.
“You were having a bad dream,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I whisper back.
She says nothing more about the fact that I must have been tossing and turning, which I love her for. I don’t really feel like talking about Afghanistan. I especially don’t want to talk about that night, when it seemed like the whole world was enveloped in death.
“Cade was in prison,” she says.
I’m mildly shocked by this statement. “He was. For nine months.”
“Nine months isn’t very long. What did he do?”
“Nothing.” The word is heavy on my tongue, weighty and painful, and also true. Cade didn’t do anything to land himself in Chino, but he took the time and did it without complaining. I will always owe him a debt for that. “This isn’t the first time the club’s been watched by a federal agency. The ATF were interested in us once before, a couple of years back, but they couldn’t pin anything on us so they picked up Cade for possession of an unlicensed weapon. It was stupid. I was the one carrying the gun. We were in a car, and they pulled us over. Cade grabbed the thing from me before I could stop him. We were on our way to meet an informant who claimed they had information about Laura, and Cade told me I had to go. I had to make the meeting, otherwise the guy would be in the wind and we’d never find out if his information was legit. So they arrested him, took him in, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it. Took my uncle nine months to get him out of that place. The wardens were trying to make him talk on the inside. They locked away in the SHU for months on end. Refused to let him have visitors or talk to his lawyers. Eventually they couldn’t keep hold of him, though. They let him go, and Cade came home.”
Those were hard months. Knowing that he was shut away because of me was fucking shitty, but knowing that the information had lead to a dead end and he was serving time for no reason was a bitter pill to swallow. Next to me, Sophia cups her hands over something on her stomach, something round and shiny—one of my snow globes. I don’t need to ask which one it is; I already know it’s the one from Chicago. Has to be. I reach out, skimming my fingers over the cool surface of the glass globe. Sophia’s never asked me about my snow globes—this one in particular—though I know it plays on her mind. She’s too smart; she knows there’s a story there, given the fact that I keep it separate on its own on my desk. I’m not ready to offer that story up voluntarily yet, however, so I take the plastic and glass from her and set it down on the bedside table next to her. Tiny flakes of white swirl inside the globe, falling silently on the Willis Tower, 900 North Michigan and the Lake Point Tower, barely visible in the thick darkness of the room.
After a while, she asks, “Who’s Zeth Mayfair?”
In all honesty, I haven’t thought about that name in a long time. Cade’s mentioned him a number of times since he got out of jail, but he’s been a peripheral player, someone who hasn’t affected our daily lives here in New Mexico. “He’s a friend of Cade’s. Kind of. He works for a guy in Seattle, a guy we suspect has started to trade in women.”
“You think he might know something about Laura? The guy he works for?”
“No. Charlie Holsan’s only just starting to dip his toes into that shit. Cade thinks it might be a good idea to talk to his friend, though, see if we can convince him to question his boss about any girls he might have heard about going missing a few years back.”
“And you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
I shake my head. “My cousin works for this guy, too. It’s messy. We went to see Michael a while back and stormed over there to Charlie’s place but he managed to talk us down. We didn’t end up seeing him. Since then I’ve had time to look into Holsan. He’s fucking crazy, a real nasty piece of work. It would be a mistake to confront him about selling girls. And this Zeth guy doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that side of Holsan’s business, so it’s unlikely he can get information from him anyway. Better to just watch and wait, see what happens.”