“You hacked . . . never mind. Whose is it?”
“Peter Fairchild. Luna’s dad. Also, it turns out, her getaway driver. The thing is, I’ve seen him before. I know who he is, where he works, everything.” Well, not quite everything. I still didn’t know what exactly he had to do with my parents. Why he was hanging around in the background of their photos.
Chris raised his eyebrows. “And?”
“And he’s the director of that movie over at Pear Magic.”
“Interesting.”
I nodded. “It gets even better. He was the guy who pretended to be an agent. I’m convinced Jetta was Luna in disguise. He’s trying to hide her. He sold his house to buy a yacht.”
Chris turned into a parking lot and came to a stop. An empty, rusted grocery cart was overturned at the nose of our car. “A yacht,” he repeated once he’d turned off the car.
“A houseboat,” I said, emphasizing the word house. “Right after Luna mysteriously disappeared. Coincidence?”
“You think Luna is living on the yacht.”
“Can you think of a more Luna place to hide?”
I had only just then noticed a knot of people nearby, tucked up high under an overpass, clustered on a single filthy blanket. They were watching us carefully. Chris caught me looking.
“Is this who you’re questioning?” I asked.
He nodded. “Here’s the thing. When a homeless person goes missing, nobody even realizes it, right? They’re invisible to the rest of the world.”
“Sad thought.”
“True thought. But the thing is, they actually are missed. Their circle of friends misses them. And those friends also might know more than they even realize they know. They just don’t bother to come to us with the information. They figure it’s pointless.”
“Because they’re invisible,” I said.
“Yep,” he said to the window. “Our job is to see them anyway. To remember that no invisible person is really invisible.”
Made total sense to me, but I wondered how many cops would look at it that way. How many would think to talk to the other homeless about their murdered friend? Maybe all of them, I didn’t know. But for some reason I guessed not. For some reason, I guessed that was one of the things that made Chris special.
The sun was starting to make me sweat along the hairline.
“It’s also my job to convince them that I’m not going to bust them. That I’m going to leave them just invisible enough to get away with whatever drugs and stolen shit they’ve got going on over there.”
“So it’s better for me to stay in the car,” I said. “I get it.”
“Exactly. That was why I didn’t think you should come in the first place. This isn’t a spectator sport, as much as TV would like us to think it is.”
“Fine, whatever, I’ll wait.” I snapped down the visor. “But you know how fast I get restless—” I stopped. When I’d pulled down the visor, something had fallen into my lap with a clink. I picked it up.
A key.
A single key on a ring, a number etched onto a tab that also hung from the ring.
Brown, silver, bronze.
“One forty-nine,” I said. I held the key up questioningly, expecting Chris to yank it away from me, too, and chastise me for not minding my own business.
But his face was frozen. He looked almost pasty. His eyes bored into the metal of the ring; his mouth hung open just slightly.
“What?” I asked. I glanced at the key and back at him again. “What’s one forty-nine? An address?”
“A locker,” he said. His voice was rough, as if it came from somewhere far away. “I’m almost positive I remember a locker.”
I squinted at him, confused. “Like, a gym locker?”
He finally moved, his hand closing around the key and tugging it from me. “A storage locker,” he said. “Holy shit, Nikki, I know where Heriberto’s drugs are.”
26
THE STORE4CHEAP LOCKERS were just off the highway, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and a gate that locked by code. We pulled up, and Chris punched in a few different number sequences. None of them worked. He cussed after each try. I could feel the frustration fuming off him. To remember things bit by bit had to be maddening.
Eventually, he gave up and went inside, flashed his badge, and the attendant let us in. If only the attendant had known what we were hoping was inside that locker.
A ton of drugs meant to be peddled by children and instead confiscated by a cop on a secret mission.
I was pretty sure we would all be in deep shit if anyone had figured this out.
Chris unlocked the door and rolled it open. Inside were two giant moving boxes. We stepped inside, turned on a battery-operated lantern, and shut the door behind us. The air felt close and stale and smelled dirty and somehow a little oily, like exhaust. I wanted out. Everything looked gunmetal gray, and I knew that meant it wouldn’t be long before that gray bubbled up into black bumps and panic would set in and I would have some sort of embarrassing meltdown. I tried to concentrate on the smell of Chris to keep me grounded. But I could feel the slate nerves crackling off him like static. His yellow was intense in here. Almost too intense.
He stood over one box, hands on hips.
“Well?” I asked. “You going to open it?”
“I know what’s inside,” he said. “I remember. I know what’s inside both of them.”
Still, he didn’t move, and if something didn’t happen soon, I was going to go crazy and start clawing at the door, so I bent and opened the flaps of a moving box. Inside, bags upon bags filled with powder and crystals and pills. Heriberto and his boys could have given the Hollises a run for their money when it came to pushing.
I reached in and scooped up a handful of bags, then let them drop.
“Holy crap,” I breathed. “You’ve been at this for a while.”
He nodded. “Sam.”
“Huh?”
He scratched the back of his neck, and then one eyebrow, wincing at the memory. “Ever since I realized it was Sam. It was one thing for Heriberto to be dealing. That goes with the territory. Using someone like Sam to do his dirty work, though . . .” He shook his head. “These aren’t just any kids, Nikki. These are kids who will eventually end up in the gang. If they’re not already. These kids have no future. And I couldn’t let that happen with Sam. Not after everything Rebecca did to get me out.”
I picked up and dropped another handful of bags. I couldn’t even imagine how much money was in that box.
“How did you afford all this?” I asked.
He pointed to the other box. Slowly, curiously, I walked over and opened its flaps. And was nearly blown away by the greens and reds and yellows of twenties and fifties and hundreds. Stacks and stacks of them. I gasped.
“Are you kidding me?” I dropped to my knees next to the box. I glanced at him, but he was looking down at his feet, his face set in grim concentration. “What did you do, rob a bank?”
“Close,” he said. “I robbed Heriberto.”
I sank back so I was resting on my heels, the hard concrete floor digging into my knees. “You’re kidding, right? You? I don’t believe it.”
When he leveled his eyes at me, they were so angry they were nearly black. Slowly, he shook his head.
“How?”
“I found out where they were keeping it. My brother Javi knew. I visited him up at State and he told me where to look. I watched and I waited and the first chance I got, I robbed the bastard. And I bought his drugs with his own money. And stashed them here. It was like he didn’t even exist.”
It was a brilliant plan, really. The gang probably thought it was another gang who’d stolen from them—not a cop. The kids kept selling, so they didn’t get busted up by Heriberto and friends. Heriberto thought he was making money, but he wasn’t. And the drugs went nowhere.