25. Utah

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

utah

M emphis was quiet for almost the entire drive back to New Jersey’s farmhouse.

Part of me wondered if she wanted me to ask why she was pissed directly at me, and the other part of me was still pissed at her for being entirely unable to follow simple instructions. She even put up a fight when I made her sit still long enough to check the back of her head to make sure she wasn’t bleeding.

I couldn’t tell if she was mad that I’d barked orders at her like she was mine to boss around, or if she was mad because I’d turned her on and called her out on it before proceeding to do nothing at all about it.

She waited until I had the truck parked in front of the house before she decided to speak.

“If you still want to cross something else off that list with me, let’s go to a bar.”

I couldn’t have come up with a response to that if she’d even gone the extra step to tell me exactly what I was supposed to say to her. She was squirming again after I spent an entire minute just staring at her.

“I could use a break from all this,” she said quietly and looked down into her lap.

I felt like I’d missed an entire conversation somewhere in the last three hours that we’d spent in this truck.

“Sure,” was all I could get to come out of my mouth. “Tonight?”

She managed to turn a whole shade lighter somehow when all the blood drained from her face.

“Tomorrow?”

“Anything you want, angel.”

She was out of that truck as quickly as she could move and left me sitting there staring at her empty seat for a solid ten minutes longer in my state of confusion.

When I did finally make it inside, she hadn’t stopped to set up camp at the kitchen island. She wasn’t sitting in her spot on the couch next to Indy.

“You guys good?” he asked when I’d apparently stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room for too long.

“Where’d she go?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I assumed her room. She walked right on through. Didn’t say anything.”

“She asked me to take her to a bar,” I said and laughed when I dropped down on my end of the couch.

He put the TV remote down and turned to face me completely with his legs criss-crossed. He laced his fingers together and sat his chin down on top of them.

“Please tell me everything ,” he said with the most pleasant smile he possessed.

“Tomorrow,” I said, laying my head all the way back to stare at the ceiling. “She asked me to take her to a bar tomorrow , Indy. There’s nothing to tell yet.”

“So, she just asked you out of the blue? And she asked for a bar?”

“Almost three hours of total silence and she ended that by asking to go to a bar. She’s never been to one.”

He was quiet for a second. Understandably so. Memphis really didn’t seem like the bar-going kind now that I’d spent time around her.

“What was Nevada like?” Indy asked.

“No fun at all. You heard how it went.”

He tried again. “I meant what’d she look like?”

“Oh, right,” I said and rubbed my eyes with my fingers. This man walked around in a state of unending hornball thoughts. “She was—blonde? I think. I don’t know. I was distracted. She did not like Memphis. I’ll be surprised if we hear from Salem.”

“Blonde? You think ?” Indy asked and laughed. “That’s all you’ve got? I need to start sticking a camera on you.”

“You find anything interesting on the Tennessee kids?” I asked, very desperate to stop thinking about the level of restraint I’d shown in not pounding the life out of a woman over the sight of her tackling Memphis.

“Uh, yeah,” he said quietly and shifted to sit back in his original position. “Tennessee is in the top ten states with the most missing persons cases for the U.S. We’re talking five hundred to six hundred kids under the age of eighteen.”

“In a year?”

“Every month,” Memphis said from behind the couch. She set up camp between us on the couch with her laptop across her thighs.

“Yeah, every month,” Indy echoed quietly. “Doesn’t mean we’re talking about five hundred Tennessee babies being handed over to traffickers every month. The numbers at their base level still include runaways, misunderstandings where panicked parents overreact to kids late on their curfews, and most kidnappings in every state are actually done by relatives, and most still end up found. It’s more like twenty to twenty-five percent of that number are true kidnappings by strangers.”

“That’s still a hundred and twenty-five kids,” I sighed. “Every month. From one state.”

“Again,” Indy said. “Not all for trafficking purposes, and that’s a good thing to always keep in mind if we’re going down this nightmare of a rabbit hole. We’re not going to put an end to children going missing. If we’re going to do this, we need to stay realistic about it.”

“I’ve got it narrowed down to a handful of Marshalls to look at more closely,” Memphis added. “We need to combine the sets of information between missing persons and these specific Marshalls. Find the crossover cases.”

My head already ached over this conversation and what it meant for the coming days.

And mine wasn’t even the head that was smacked off the asphalt earlier.

I got off the couch and went to the kitchen to search through the freezer. This place had been equipped for just about any kind of medical requirement imaginable. Kyle had taken it very much to heart when New Jersey told him to keep it ready for anything at a moment’s notice.

I took one of the small ice packs from the freezer and went to the bathroom to find a towel to wrap around it.

“Utah—what are you—” Memphis tried to ask when I returned to the living room. Ignoring her question, I pushed her head forward just enough to sit the wrapped ice pack between her head and the back of the couch. I put my hand on her forehead to make her lean her head back, so it’d hold the ice pack in place against the back of her skull.

I was still frustrated and annoyed with how the day had gone about six seconds ago; still mad that she’d been hurt under my watch; still mad that if she’d just listened the first time, it wouldn’t have happened that way at all.

But the way those green eyes cut right through me while she stared back up at me wiped it all out, managed to push aside the thoughts of kidnapped children, and left me really fucking excited to just take her to a bar tomorrow night.

Images of all the things I’d do to her if she’d just give me the slightest hint that she also wanted them overtook every other thought that had crowded the space in my mind for the last several hours. I found myself very suddenly wishing she’d just agreed to having this outing tonight.

“I’m going to call it a night, guys,” I said as I backed away from the couch. Otherwise, I’d be telling Indy to leave us alone for the evening, and she’d already very specifically asked for tomorrow.

“I think I have another to add,” Indy said, not-so-quietly to Memphis while I walked away. “The possession of a pair of tits serves as a barrier to prevent blows from the fists of the Utah.”

“You assholes could at least wait until I’m out of earshot,” I called back over my shoulder.

The way she giggled nearly had me turning right back around.