All He Has Left(23)

“How could you do this!” Jake yelled.

“Do . . . what?”

No longer punching, Jake put his right hand around Judd’s neck and squeezed. “Who else is here?”

For the first time, Judd seemed to recognize him. “Coach Slater . . . what the . . . ?”

“Who else is here?” Jake repeated, squeezing harder.

Judd tried to answer through the choking. “What . . . uh, no one . . . I mean, only my stepdaughter.”

Jake heard a sudden scream come from behind him. He spun around, found a brown-haired girl around the same age and stature as Piper standing in the hallway with a look of horror on her face. And that’s when Jake realized he’d made a huge mistake. It was not Piper he’d seen through the crack in the blinds. It was a different girl. And she looked terrified at seeing a strange man choking her stepfather. Jake quickly pulled his hand away from Judd’s throat. How could he have made that mistake? Did he only see what he wanted to see through the blinds? Had his fear and panic tricked his own mind and led him to make a foolish assumption?

Jake stared back down at Judd. “Piper isn’t here?”

Judd was massaging his throat. “Who . . . ?”

“My daughter!”

“Why the hell would your daughter be here? What’s wrong with you?”

The man’s speech was severely slurred. He was clearly drunk. Jake felt his entire theory about Judd swiftly unraveling on him. Given the man’s current state, and the fact that he had his stepdaughter home with him, Jake thought it was highly unlikely Judd could’ve been the same guy who’d snatched Piper earlier. And that’s when a new wave of fear overtook him. If not Judd, then who? Where was his daughter?

“I’m sorry,” Jake said, standing up. He then turned to the girl. “I’m so sorry. Don’t be afraid. This was a terrible mistake. Everything is going to be OK.”

Without explaining himself further, Jake hurried toward the front door of the house. Once outside on the front sidewalk, he felt all his emotions boil to the surface. Feeling sick again, he hunched over and vomited what little he still had left in his stomach.





FIFTEEN


Jake parked his truck in an empty lot in front of a closed hardware store. His heart was still racing from the mix-up at Judd’s house a few minutes ago. He hoped his actions wouldn’t traumatize that little girl for life. Jake had acted rashly and now questioned his own judgment. He’d beaten up an innocent man. Jake wondered if Judd had called the police on him right after he’d left. Just in case, Jake decided he should change things up yet again. Opening the black theater kit, he found a second small bottle of adhesive removal. The instructions said to gently dab it behind the fake hair with a brush and gradually peel away the fake facial hair. He did just that until the mustache was gone. To replace it, he chose a salt-and-pepper gray goatee set. Just like before, he used the spirit gum to apply the new facial hair and then studied himself in the rearview mirror. The goatee was slightly off-center, but serviceable. He didn’t need to make it perfect.

Sitting there in the truck, Jake tried to sort out his next move. If not Judd, then who was behind all this—and why? What truth could Piper possibly know? Jake had angered a lot of people in the community last year with the way the football season had unfolded. There were so many parents and fans who had voiced their severe displeasure with him. But he couldn’t imagine anyone other than Judd responding in a way that nearly put his whole family in the grave. It didn’t make any sense to him. Could it have been something else? Could Sarah have somehow been the catalyst behind all this? Or Caitlin? Or Piper? If Jake could find the right tow-truck company, maybe he could somehow track down the driver from tonight. But that would be a challenge. His sole focus earlier had been on catching up to the black truck, not paying enough attention to company brandings or other identifiable markings. He regretted that now. But he remembered one clear identifier for sure. The tow truck had a Geaux Tigers purple-and-gold LSU sticker on the back bumper. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was all he had at the moment.

Using his burner phone, Jake began searching the internet for local tow-truck companies to see if he could find a possible match. The first search result felt like a knee to the groin. There were more than one hundred different towing companies listed in and around Austin. He shook his head. One by one, Jake searched through websites looking for images that showed off their trucks. Many of the companies did not have websites, which made his hunt feel even more futile. After thirty minutes of connecting dots, Jake came up with a list of twenty-one different possibilities. Each of the towing companies on his list used some version of black tow trucks. They were all over the city. It might take him all night to track them all down. But it was the only way forward he could think to take right now, and he certainly wasn’t going to be sleeping anyway.

Pulling out of the parking lot, Jake set off to visit each location on the list. While many of the towing companies advertised being open twenty-four hours, Jake figured this was after-hours, by telephone only, as all he found with each successive stop were locked, dark buildings. But thankfully, there were tow trucks parked in and around most of these sites that allowed him to take some inventory. However, after more than three hours of driving around town, Jake still had not found a match for the LSU bumper sticker. He was starting to lose any hope of this working. But stop number seventeen changed the story: A & Z Wrecker and Recovery.