13. Memphis

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

memphis

I ’d turned Utah’s entire truck into a Wi-Fi hotspot by the time he was loading his gear in the backseat. He hadn’t carried the detective back out with him though.

I turned to the backseat to ask, “Did you kill him?”

“No. Indy is going to wait until we’re gone, and then call the partner to come pick him up.”

“Will you do me a favor, then?”

He paused to look at me.

“Go back in there and tell him that he needs to get his daughters off of social media if he wants to keep them a little safer. I’ve only been looking for nine minutes, and I know where they go to school. I know which neighborhood their house is in. I know names, faces, their friends…way too much.”

He stared at me for another few seconds.

“Yes, I’m serious. Please, tell him,” I said. He turned back for the school without another word.

While he was gone, I dug out the makeup wipes from my backpack and pulled down the visor to try to fix my face with the use of that little mirror. Then I went right back to my laptop.

Indy popped up in our chatroom just a few seconds later.

Indy

You good?

No .

But this wasn’t the time for that discussion.

Me

Can you sort through the list of teams and start looking for any that might be involved in the trafficking aspect? Teams who exclusively pick up people, teams who keep to only specific areas, teams who revisit the same drop points.

Me

I don’t even know where to start for the finances. That would be huge sums of money. There’s no way it’s just a U.S. bank. But shutting down the money would halt everything else almost instantly.

Me

Look for connections to local politicians if you narrow in on any specific location. Big money movers too. The high class crowd.

Indy

Memphis.

Indy

Stop and breathe.

Indy

We can shift gears, but we need to plan it out better than this. Use the same caution we were using for the drugs/arms side of it. Probably even more. This is dealing with innocent lives. Not strung-out gangbangers.

Indy

Put the computer away for a minute. Sit there and think about it. Logically. Not emotionally.

I slammed my laptop shut.

Then my phone buzzed a second later with a text message.

Indy

Just breathe.

I laid my head against the window of the truck and closed my eyes.

Indy wasn’t wrong, but approaching any of this without feeling wouldn’t be possible. If we were truly shifting gears, I really would need Utah to show me what to do with all this anger. If I could bottle it just to successfully redirect it and turn it into an outcome, we’d be golden. But emotions were so very messy.

I didn’t bother to move while Utah climbed back in on his side once he returned.

“He, uh —” he said and stopped to chuckle. “He said thank you . The guy we picked up and tortured. The guy I planned to kill…said thank you. ”

I felt his very warm hand on my thigh the next second, and he left it there until I managed to look back at him.

“I don’t know if I can tell Jersey about this,” I said.

“No one said you had to.”

“But I also don’t know how I could just not tell him, Utah.”

“That’s why you’re upset?” he asked.

I about choked trying to keep in the fresh wave of sobs that wanted to burst out of me.

“Can we just go home?” I pleaded.

He let go of my leg and we were headed back toward Indiana right after that. In a moment of unprecedented levels of madness, I raised the center console that was between us and unbuckled my seatbelt. I scooted my way right into that middle seat to lay my head on Utah’s shoulder.

I couldn’t work up the nerve to look at him, but I was touching him, dammit. Just because he felt good and everything about him made me feel better.

He shifted to reach across me for the middle seatbelt to buckle me right back in and I turned my entire face into his shoulder as soon as he was finished.

“Daddy Utah, indeed,” I giggled and shook my head.

I glanced at him just long enough to watch him smirk, but I lost all my nerve and looked back into my lap when his gaze shifted to me.

His hand went right back to my thigh, though. And it stayed there that time. With a very dangerous thumb dragging back and forth across the width of my leg while, his other four fingers found a home on the inside of that thigh. I spent a second being grateful that I was wearing jeans because my skin probably would’ve melted from whatever fire-inducing magical friction his thumb possessed otherwise. I thought really hard about getting brave again. I tried to tell my hand that all it had to do was inch its way forward until it was sitting on top of his.

My heart tried to tell my brain that that one little move could be all it would take to wipe out a decent chunk of the lifelong loneliness.

But my brain reminded my heart that that one little move could also complicate things to a level that might never be reversible if Utah were to realize I was messed up beyond repair.

I wondered how nice it might be to be able to underthink something just one fucking time.

I started using my index finger to scrape off the edges of the nail polish on my thumb and focused all my energy on that instead. When that wasn’t working quickly enough, I shifted that thumb to my teeth to start chewing it off. Until Utah chuckled. His hand abandoned my thigh, grabbed the hand I was busy trying to cannibalize, placed my palm on my own leg, and dropped his hand on top of it to hold mine there. All while I just stared at both our hands.

“What do you want to cross off that list next, angel?”

“What list?”

“The things you missed out on.”

“We don’t have time for that, Utah.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. We have too much to do and too much to figure out as it is. We can’t afford to waste time on things that don’t matter if we have the opportunity to bust a sex trade.”

“Giving you the chance to experience life isn’t wasted time.”

“I’ve experienced plenty of life.”

“Alright, sasshole, giving you the chance to experience the good things in life isn’t wasted time. You don’t have to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult, you know? There’s no rule. You can just let me be right when I’m right.”

“And when you are actually right, I will let you be.”

It made me smile to hear him breathe in so very deeply through his nose.

“Memphis, you precious, sweet little pain in the ass gifted to me straight from Satan, pick the next thing off that list. Or I will choose it for you.”

“Nobody gifted me to you. Satan or otherwise,” I laughed.

“I swear I will pull this truck over and just make you dance with me again until. You. Pick. Something.”

I wiggled my hand around under his until he raised it just enough for me to flip mine over so our palms were touching, and I could lace my fingers between his.

“That doesn’t sound so terrible,” I said as quietly as possible. I could feel Utah shift ever so slightly to try to see my face when he looked down at me that time, but nothing in me had the willpower to meet that stare.

He pulled the truck into the first parking lot that we happened across after that. This time it was a church that was perfectly empty. I went right around to where he was opening the back door on his side, probably thinking he’d get that speaker out again, but it really wasn’t dancing that I wanted. I didn’t need music. We didn’t need to even move. Those little circles were useless.

He turned just barely to look at me and I took that chance to squish all of my body into him and wrapped my arms all the way around his waist.

I’d watched him hug Trista more than once when she was caught in her own head. It seemed to be exactly what she needed each time.

I just wanted to find out if maybe he could have that effect on me, too. The way he’d felt when he hugged me outside of that school had my mind wandering in several directions.

That made it easier to accept.

Call it a science experiment.

Inexplicable tears came right back to my eyes when his arms crushed me against him and he kissed the top of my head.

“You don’t ever need to come up with an excuse if you just want me to hold you, angel.”

He was so sure of himself. So calm. So in control.

It radiated from him with so much force that it felt like if I just stayed there, he might crush every ounce of the nerve-wracking worry about what needed to happen next.

And that led me right to wondering what he might be able to do about the demons behind me.