35. Ryder

35

Now Ryder knew how a bear caught in a trap felt. Angry, helpless, and stuck in the wrong place. The jet flew steadily toward Vegas, and all he could do was watch as the drama unfolded thousands of miles away. At least they were over land now. Elene was sleeping peacefully thanks to the Benadryl Emmy had mixed into her decaf.

On-screen, the Luna-sized blonde they called Echo was sipping coffee from a mug bigger than her head. The team had moved to the Cathouse while the cops fucked around at the Nile Palace. Reporters were frantically interviewing anyone who would talk, Amethyst was in the lobby losing her shit on live TV, and Danny Wells had crawled out from under his rock to take pictures of her. Those pictures were everywhere—gossip blogs, social media, news shows after a juicy story.

The decision had been made to run a parallel operation. Neither Pale's team nor Blackwood had confidence in the local cops, and nobody wanted to jeopardise Luna's safety—or Kobie Jiminez's—by performing for the media circus. Romeo Serafini had been dispatched to do what he did best, namely act like an asshole, in order to keep the press out of the team's hair. The view shifted as Pale walked to a seat. Emmy had insisted he wire himself for sound and vision, and he'd chuckled and told her it was easier to agree than to argue.

Dan, Knox, Slater, and Caro had arrived in Vegas, and they'd taken on the vehicle angle. Well, not Caro. She'd been sidelined, a fact she was distinctly unhappy about. But she was an accountant, not an operator. Ryder would apologise to her later.

Although there was no footage of the area by the dumpsters, a camera in the hotel's parking lot had filmed seven silver SUVs in the vicinity during the period when Luna had disappeared. Echo had worked her tech magic and discovered that none of them were registered to Anton Hebert. It was possible he was using an alias, and if they didn't find him at his apartment, the vehicle would be key.

An hour ago, they'd all watched as Pale and Tulsa opened Anton Hebert's locker and shared in the disappointment when it didn't contain a smoking gun or a manifesto. But Tulsa did find a necklace in a velvet box hidden at the back, orange and turquoise beads on a gold chain. A discussion followed. Had Hebert's reassignment foiled his gift-giving plans? Or had someone planted the jewellery to throw suspicion onto the wrong man? Occam's razor suggested the first option was more likely.

But ultimately, it was Hebert who'd received the biggest gift of all—the perfect opportunity to snatch Luna.

Ryder blew out a breath and tried to calm his ragged nerves. Tried to convince himself that this was just a bump in the road and he'd get his girl back. The grief that had pummelled him after Neve's death pushed against the flimsy wall that held it back, threatening to break through and overwhelm him once again.

"Why do you call him Pale and they call him Priest?" he asked Emmy, anything to distract himself from the matter at hand.

"Different eras. When I first met him, he was in his ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse' phase. Black, White, Red, and Pale."

"Black was Black, right?"

"Right."

"And was Nate a horseman too?" It was common knowledge that Nate and Black had been tight before they started Blackwood. Swim buddies in the SEALs before they got poached for some hush-hush role that nobody much talked about.

"He was Red."

"So, who was White? You?"

"Before my time. White died in combat, but his legacy lives on."

"Really? Where?"

Emmy tapped the screen. Her finger landed on one of Pale's Choir girls, a stunning woman with braided hair and skin the colour of a Lincoln penny. She wore tight blue jeans and a leather jacket, and her ass looked good as she leaned across the table to pour a glass of water from the jug in the centre.

"There. The baby of the team."

"She's his daughter?"

"They call her Dice because she's unpredictable, just like her daddy."

Another camera feed appeared, then another. Two views of the same apartment building, one from the front and one from the rear. Nothing much seemed to be happening.

Emmy clicked her microphone onto "live." "Is that Hebert's place?"

Pale answered. "Sixth floor. Tulsa, Spider, and Storm are there. We're working out which unit is his."

Ryder counted the windows. Only one sixth-floor apartment had a light on, and a slight flicker in another suggested someone was watching TV. Was Luna in there? Kobie? He had to believe they were still alive, but fear made his heart stutter. There was anger too. Anger that Mark Antony had snatched Luna from her life and put her through hell. He pushed the feeling away before he rammed a fist through the fuselage.

"How long will it take us to get there from the airport?" he asked.

Emmy snorted softly. "Oh, you're not going."

"The hell I'm not."

"I'll hogtie you and leave you on the plane if necessary."

"But I'm trained for this."

"And you think they're not? Look, Luna's your girlfriend, I get that. But Pale's team is more than capable of handling the situation, and do you really want to wait another couple of hours while we faff around in traffic and get acquainted with the area?"

No, he didn't want Luna in a madman's hands any longer than necessary, but he also wanted the operation to go smoothly.

"They ever rescued a kidnap victim before?"

"Fun fact: Tulsa was the youngest woman ever to make it onto the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. You know how tough that is?"

"If she's so good, why isn't she still with the HRT?"

"Because after her father got killed in the line of duty, she didn't think they handled it very well and quit. The FBI's loss was Pale's gain." Emmy turned her attention back to the screen. "Oh, hello…"

The new picture on the screen was crystal clear and steady, moving slowly as it approached the apartment building. They were using a drone?

"Apartment 602 is at the rear," Echo said, surrounded by three laptops, two cups of coffee, and a platter of snacks. "East side of the building. I found the development plans in public records. It's a small unit—entrance hallway, one bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. Only the living room and bedroom have windows."

The camera moved in that direction, but Ryder didn't see a drone appear on either of the two external feeds.

"How big is the drone?" he asked.

Pale held up a thumb and finger three inches apart. "About that size. Looks like a hummingbird. We have smaller models, but those sacrifice speed and range in favour of miniaturisation."

The hummingbird flew to the first window. Ryder leaned forward to peer at the scene and saw…nothing. The apartment was dark. Then the scene lit up, and at first, he thought somebody was home, but then he realised there was something wrong with the picture. The overhead light fixture was still turned off.

"Full-colour night vision?" It was the best he'd seen.

"Nice," Emmy said. "I could do with one of those."

Priest laughed softly. "Come and work for me, and you can have one."

"I'm pretty sure my darling husband would have a few words to say about that."

The hummingbird was looking over a small balcony and into Hebert's living room with the kitchen beyond. The space was painfully neat, and while most modern bachelor pads were dominated by a flatscreen, there was no TV in evidence here. Instead, there were books. Shelves and shelves of books, and…

"What are those tanks? Fish?"

Dice was the one who answered, rising as she did so. "No, reptiles."

"You should head over there," Priest told her, and she left without a word. "If Dice hadn't gone into special ops, she would've been a zookeeper. She likes animals better than she likes people."

After the events of the past few months, Ryder couldn't blame her for that.

The hummingbird headed left and found a couple doing unmentionable things on a couch. Wrong apartment. To the right, a blind covered the window, no glimmers of light around the edges, no signs of life. If anyone was inside, they'd be in the bedroom or the bathroom.

"The lock on those balcony doors isn't worth shit," a voice said. Ryder wasn't sure who it belonged to.

"Don't forget he was military," Emmy warned. "It's possible he booby-trapped the place."

"Plus he's reasonably competent when it comes to technology," Ryder added. VPNs, the security system at the Nile Palace—Mark Antony knew his way around them. "Expect cameras or an alarm system."

"Relax, we'll be careful."

When Tulsa, Spider, and Dice climbed down from the roof and let themselves into Anton Hebert's apartment forty-five minutes later, moving as quickly and as carefully as they'd promised, cameras was all they found. Well, camera. It was trained on the reptile enclosures. No sign of Luna, Kobie, or Mark Antony.

But they'd only just missed him.

"The kettle on the stove is still warm," Tulsa said once they'd checked for any unexpected surprises and dismantled Hebert's spying eye. "He was here recently."

"Fuck," Ryder muttered.

Spider peered into the trash can in the kitchen—she was the Choir's breaking and entering expert, apparently, and she'd gotten through the balcony door in less than ten seconds. And she'd done it silently. The first hummingbird had returned to base to recharge, but a second had replaced it. Blackwood's jet was making its descent.

"Unless Hebert's into colouring, the kid was here."

"There's a colouring book?" Emmy asked.

"Plus a box of crayons, Where's Waldo? Las Vegas edition, and a half-empty bag of potato chips."

"Who throws away perfectly good potato chips?"

"Someone who isn't coming back."

"He left a lot of stuff here."

"But he took his pets," Dice said. Ryder was getting better at recognising the Choir's voices. She'd been poking around the tanks in the living room, a job that he didn't envy. He also noticed that Tulsa kept her distance from them. "There's a shed skin that might have belonged to a pit viper."

"How do you know that?" Emmy asked.

"There's a single row of scales under its tail rather than a double row."

"Isn't it illegal to keep venomous snakes in Nevada?"

"The man kidnapped two people."

"Fair point. How many snakes do you have in the Cathouse?"

"Seven, but only five of them are venomous, and my pit viper is a real sweetheart."

"Guess we know who put the king cobra in Julius Whitlow's house now."

"Right. What an asshole. I mean, who abandons a pet like that? I hear it was a nice one."

"Are there any reptile-related leads that might tell us where he's gone? If he took a bunch of snakes, then he must have another place set up for them. Unless he released them into the wild. Would they survive?"

"Possibly. I guess they might find a pet cat to snack on."

Tulsa shuddered in the background.

"I think he kept them. The cobra at Whitlow's place was a means to an end. Killing off a man he saw as a rival. Julius-not-quite-Caesar. In his own weird way, I think Hebert cares. All those meals he sent to Luna, the jewellery. The damn crayons. He's fucked in the head, but he's not your common-or-garden monster." Emmy nudged Ryder. "That's a good thing."

"He thinks she's his wife."

And for Luna, with her hang-ups about sex, that might be worse than a quick death.

"In some ways, she is like Cleopatra. Luna's no pushover."

Tulsa spoke up. "If she can survive the Miss American Splendor pageant, then trust me, she can survive anything. You know what? This place is oddly clean. Hebert ate here and he slept here, but I'm not sure he lived here."

"Maybe he cleared all the personal stuff out?" Emmy suggested. "He must have known we'd find the place."

"That's the weirder part—there are no gaps where missing stuff would have been, and there's still food in the refrigerator, clothes in the closet, a shaver and an electric toothbrush in the bathroom. If he planned to leave for good, why wouldn't he have taken everything?"

A bump, and the jet was on the tarmac.

Thank fuck for that.