Hold On (Page 179)

“Yeah, Merry.”

“Never wanted that. Not with anyone, Mike. Never wanted any of that with anyone but Cher.”

“Stick with me, brother. Yeah? Stick with me.”

Garrett pulled in breath.

He would not see a burgundy Ford Taurus with his eyes to his fucking knees.

He dropped his hand and lifted his head.

His phone sounded with a text.

He pulled it out and looked at the cracked screen.

Out looking. You got time to tell me, Vi wants to know if Ethan’s covered.

Cal.

He’s covered. Grace too. Rocky’s got them, Garrett texted back.

Someone needs to get Ryker’s head out of his ass. He’s not answering. He needs in on this hunt, Cal returned.

We’re on that, Garrett replied.

Cal sent no more.

Mike drove.

Garrett scanned the streets and listened to the reports coming in at the same time he sent a text to Ryker that Cher was missing and they needed him to report in.

After he sent it, he backed out of his texts with Ryker and went to the string under Cal’s.

He opened it.

Ethan’s safe at school. He reports we’re almost out of Pringles. You’re out, you wanna get on that?

Him to Cher.

Your wish is my command, then a half dozen x’s and o’s, another half dozen hearts of various colors, ending with a shamrock and the head of a chicken.

Cher to him.

Garrett closed his eyes tight as pain spiked through his brain.

Then he opened them and scanned the streets again.

* * * * *

Cher

“I need to go to him.”

“You fuckin’ do shit I don’t tell you to do, you’ll be lyin’ beside him.”

I stared at Ryker’s big, powerful, scary biker-dude body prone on the floor.

Wet hit my eyes.

Blood had pooled around him on the linoleum.

A lot of it.

Too much.

Too much of Ryker leaking all over my goddamned kitchen floor.

* * * * *

Garrett

He took the call from Colt.

“Got Nowakowski,” Colt stated. “Walter Jones was a profiler for the FBI. Now he’s freelance. He’s also right now pissed as shit that Nowakowski called and interrupted his vacation golf game on some course in Arizona to make him pissed as fuck by telling him some guy is impersonating him in Indiana.”

“Fuck,” Garrett whispered.

He should have checked. He should have looked into that shit.

Then again, the man who had Cher had done his homework. Preliminarily, how far would anyone dig before they let him get his foot in the door?

Still.

Fuck.

“Only two rental car agencies around Indianapolis International got burgundy Ford Tauruses in their fleets. Got folks checkin’ those that are out and who’s got ’em. They got LoJack, we’ll get positions of the vehicles that are out. Still checking other agencies not at the airport. I’ll report back on that,” Colt continued.

“Right,” Garrett muttered.

“Jake went through the footage of Bobbie’s parking lot cameras. They got an image of this guy. Isolated him. Jake’s doin’ what he can to give us somethin’ we can use. He’ll send what he’s got to your phone. Let us know if this is the guy who visited Cher, sayin’ he was Jones.”

“Gotcha.”

“And Feb wants you to know she, Jackie, Vi, and Dusty are with Rocky at Grace’s. Rocky decided it’s best that she took Ethan out of school. Since Jackie is on the list with the school to pick him up, she helped with that. She says they’re all hangin’ in there,” he finished.

Garrett thought of Ethan.

He thought of Grace.

Another spike of pain in his head.

“Thanks, Colt,” he forced out.

“More when we got it. Later.”

Colt hung up.

“They’re sending an image of the guy,” Garrett told Mike as they drove.

“Good,” Mike murmured.

A minute later, Jake emailed him an image.

It was the man who’d told them he was Walter Jones.

He confirmed that to Jake. Connie in dispatch confirmed it to everyone on the hunt. Jake sent out department-wide emails with the image.

Now they knew he was not the man he’d said he was.

And they had to hope he didn’t know about LoJack in rentals or how to disable it. Though, if he did his homework on the ex-FBI agent he was impersonating, he’d know LoJack.

So, other than knowing he was not who he’d said he was, they didn’t know dick.

Primary to that being where the fuck he was.

Which was where Cher was.

And where Garrett needed to be to take care of his brown-eyed girl.

* * * * *

Cher

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Shut up.”

“He’s bleeding a lot. What’s wrong with him?”

Walter Jones stopped frantically opening and closing my kitchen cupboards and turned, shaking his gun at me.

“Shut up.”

“He’s my friend,” I chanced the whisper.

“He’s an asshole,” Jones returned. “You don’t want me in your town, you ask nice. You don’t come and get up in my shit. You get up in my shit, I get up in yours.” He pointed the gun at Ryker’s body on the floor before returning it to me. “What’s wrong with him is I got up in his shit. And that means he’s got three bullets in him.”

Oh fuck.

Oh no.

Ryker.

Lissa.

Alexis.

Fuck!

“Let me go to him, please,” I begged, doing it not knowing what I would do even if he let me.

I just needed to be with Ryker.