No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(8)

He approached and took a seat on a stool, seeing the men were inebriated. He turned back to the door, and one leaned over to him, saying, “Where you from, bud?”

He heard the accent but couldn’t place it. He said, “America. You?”

“America! Land of the free! Home of the brave! We just came from there. We’re from Dublin, on the great Emerald Isle.”

“Emerald Isle?”

“Ireland, friend, Ireland. The land of the leprechauns. Let me buy you a drink.”

Curtis took another glance around the bar, still not seeing what he wanted. He said, “Sure. Whatever you’re having.”

“Irish whiskey. What else? Although the bog down here isn’t exactly pedigreed.”

The bartender poured and his new friend picked it up, turning a complete circle to hand it to him, staggering as he did so. Curtis took a sip and nodded. “Good stuff.”

The Irishman clinked his glass and said, “Who are you here to meet?”

“Supposed to hook up with a girl here.”

“A horny little lass? Some hot Honduran gee?” He gave a drunken wink, and Curtis took another sip, wondering how he was going to break contact from the sots when his date showed up.

Curtis said, “Well, I just met her online . . .” He stopped, unable to continue his train of thought, his head beginning to swim. What the hell? I only had two sips.

He focused on the Irishman and saw double, the room starting to swim. The Irishman said, “What’s the girl’s name? Is it Esmeralda?”

His head was spinning, and he was fighting the bar stool as if he was riding the mechanical bull in the corner. The only thing that penetrated was the name.

Woozily, he said, “You know her?”

“Yes. I do.” The Irishman smiled, not looking nearly as drunk as he had a moment ago. “Sorry, bud. She’s not coming.”

Curtis started to slide off the stool and felt someone grab both of his arms. Then he felt nothing.






DAY FOUR

The Panic





5




Colonel Kurt Hale could barely make out the words through the sobbing in the phone, the hitches of his sister’s voice making her incoherent.

“Kathy, calm down. Take a deep breath. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

He heard sniffling and looked at his watch. Running out of time.

“Kathy, listen, I have a meeting I have to be at in thirty minutes and it’s all the way across town. I’ll give you a call back when I’m done.”

The hitches stopped and he felt the heat through the phone. “Meeting? I’m talking about your niece. She could be lying in a ditch or dead. Jesus Christ, she loves you better than her own father, and you’re not even giving her the time of day.”

“Okay, okay, calm down. What’s he doing about it? Did you call him?”

He knew the answer before she even spoke. Kathy’s ex-husband, a Wall Street bond trader, was a philandering, narcissistic jerk. Kurt had always wanted to punch the smirk off his face, but it had taken Kathy five years to figure out his true stripes. Kathy now used him only to provide for her daughter, like paying for Kylie’s student exchange to England.

“That * just offered money. He can’t do anything anyway.”

“Kathy, neither can I.”

“Bullshit! You work for the CIA or something. You can find her. You’re the only person I know. Nobody else cares. Maybe you don’t either.”

He rolled his eyes up in frustration. He loved his sister dearly, but her views on how the world worked were distinctly different from his. She was a pacifist, to the point that it had taken seven long years before she’d even speak to him again after he’d joined the Army. When he started working in classified assignments, she naturally defaulted to thinking he was some Black Ops assassin and—even when he told her he was in a Special Forces unit—she believed it to be the CIA. She believed everything was the CIA. For twenty years he’d listened to her conspiracy theories, and, ironically, if he told her what he was doing now, all her fears would be realized.

He deflected the line of discussion, saying, “Kathy, look, it’s only been twenty-four hours. There’s probably a simple explanation. Maybe she’s just out partying. Shit, she’s grown up now. A college kid. You remember what that was like.”

“Kurt, that line of BS would work when we were her age, but not now. She’s got a cell phone, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Lord knows how many other means of communication. All of them have been stagnant. Her cell phone goes straight to voice mail, and she’s not posted a thing when she usually does that four or five times a day.”

Which were the first words his sister had said that made Kurt pause. The first clear signal that this wasn’t a college drunken blackout.

Kathy spoke again, the rage gone, replaced by fear. “Kurt, I don’t know anyone else to call. She’s not important enough for anyone to care. She’s just another lost American. And she’s in trouble. I know it as a mother. You’ve got to help me. I have no one else.”

He said nothing for a moment, then: “Okay, Kathy. Send me an email with all of her information. Don’t forget all that social media stuff. Let me get this meeting over with and I’ll see what I can do.”