Dark Blue (South Island PD Book 1) (37 page)

They didn’t stay there much longer. Next thing she knew, he was holding her hand – no, taking the car keys from her hand. After he did that, he stood and shut the car door.

A sense of foreboding pierced the veil of her exhaustion. Something was wrong – whatever he was doing, she didn’t like it.

She tried to speak up as he opened the driver’s side door and slipped into the seat, but it was useless. She remained silent as he turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred to life.

“You shouldn’t have been so stuck-up,” he said. “You made me do it this way.”

She was too tired to be as afraid as she should’ve been when all four locks clicked down, driving home the reality that she was an unwilling passenger in her own car with a man she apparently didn’t know nearly as well as she’d thought.

“Sorry y’all, but I’m going to head inside for the restroom. Maybe I’ll catch up with you on the patio later.”

Jackson extricated himself as politely as he could from the group he’d joined on the beach. For a while, the novelty of being out of his apartment and in the company of other human beings had been so fresh that he’d gotten lost in conversation. Now, he was aware that a chunk of time had passed and Belle still wasn’t back with her sweater.

He turned toward the beach access stairs and moved as quickly as he could. The white lie he’d told her colleagues was so they wouldn’t think he was treating her like a child.

He knew better – Belle was so adept at babying
him
that he knew it was strange that she wasn’t back yet.

The stairs were a bitch, and the ramp wasn’t much fun either. But he made it to the patio, where he scanned the crowd for Belle.

She wasn’t there, but her co-worker with the curly reddish hair was leaning over a small table, a bottle of champagne open on its surface.

“Keira.” He remembered her name at the last second. “Have you seen Belle?”

“She was here just a few minutes ago. Said she went to get something from her car.”

He nodded and went for the steps that led down to the parking lot. He could’ve avoided stairs by passing through the restaurant and out the front door, emerging at the other end of the lot, but he didn’t want to waste time.

Leaning heavily on the rail, he took the steps as fast as he could. As soon as his feet hit blacktop, he started scanning the lot, sweeping his gaze back and forth as he moved toward the end where she’d parked.

When he got there, an icy fist closed around every organ in his chest cavity and squeezed, freezing the breath in his lungs.

Her car was gone.

“Fuck!”

She’d promised to be right back. She wouldn’t have left out of the blue without saying anything to him.

He checked his phone for any missed calls or texts just in case, but there was nothing.

When he called her, he got no answer.

So he called the department, asked to speak to the lieutenant in charge and reported Belle’s vehicle stolen.

“I’ll do the paperwork later,” he said, “but I really need to find that car – at this point, it’s got to still be on the island.”

The lieutenant agreed to have the on-duty officers look for it, and Jackson gave a description of the car, plus its tag number.

He didn’t mention that the car’s owner was missing too. If he did, the lieutenant would think he was freaking out over nothing – that he couldn’t find his girlfriend and was having a moronic meltdown.

If they found the car, they’d probably find Belle too, and he could explain then. Besides, if someone had abducted her in her own vehicle, it technically had been stolen.

He dialed again, quickly. Belle hadn’t been gone long enough to make it over the bridge to Charleston – whatever had happened, she was still on South Island. Every minute counted.

Which meant he needed to get on the streets as soon as possible and find her. Without a car, he was damned to waste valuable time.

He breathed a sigh of relief when Elijah answered the phone. He was the one person he could count on to take his concern seriously.

“Hey, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sure. What’s up?

“Something’s wrong. Belle disappeared from the party without a word. She said she was going to get her sweater from her car, but the vehicle is gone and so is she. She went to the parking lot alone, and I can’t get in touch with her.”

“Shit.”

“I need you to get to Moreno’s as fast as you can and pick me up. I’m waiting on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.”

“Okay. Be there in ten. You should call the department, too.”

“Already did – reported her car stolen.”

“All right, man. I’ll be there soon.”

Jackson ended the call. Fuck, what would he have done without Elijah?

Elijah got there in under ten minutes, though it felt like an eternity.

Jackson tore open the passenger side door and climbed into the car. “She should still be on the island at this point, but we’re cutting it close. We need to haul ass.”

Elijah frowned. He was probably the only person on the face of the planet who’d take Jackson’s intuition seriously, and in that moment, he was infinitely grateful for that. Anyone else would’ve told him to chill out.

Elijah pulled out onto the street. “There’s a radio under your seat. Turn it on.”

Jackson did so, and soon they were listening in on a police frequency.

“No idea at all where we should look?” Elijah asked.

“No.” Jackson’s alarm started congealing into anger. After all his worrying, all those nights spent by her side in an effort to protect her, she’d disappeared from right under his nose.

It never would’ve happened if he’d walked with her to get the sweater, but he’d been busy running his mouth and hadn’t wanted to suffer any unnecessary trips up or down stairs.

He was a fucking idiot, and if anything happened to her he’d never, ever stop paying for it. A cold sweat broke out on his back, making his shirt stick to his skin.

“I’m hoping a patrol officer will see her car, if we don’t see it first.” Jackson tapped the radio.

They traveled through a haze of streetlight. He kept his eyes open for her blue Honda as he strained his ears for any scrap of direction that might come across the radio. Until then, his overactive heartbeat marked each passing second.

Fuck, what’d happened while he’d been out on the beach? Had she been abducted?

If a stranger came up to him while he was on patrol and said they hadn’t seen their girlfriend for half an hour and were worried, he’d have to use every ounce of his professionalism in order to avoid rolling his eyes. But this was Belle, and he knew her – knew her and knew what had been going on with her lately.

Someone could’ve ambushed her in the parking lot and forced her into her car at gunpoint. Maybe she was even driving. It was less farfetched than someone leaving a giant dildo in her office, or sneaking into her apartment to steal her underwear.

Abductions happened more often than incidents like those. Any cop would’ve known that.

Any cop also would’ve known that he needed to find her, fast. The person who’d trespassed into her office and home was probably a sexual predator, and once a victim got into a vehicle with one of those, shit usually went from bad to much worse.

“Shit.” He clenched his jaw, telling himself not to think of her as a victim.

“Easy, man,” Elijah said. “We’re gonna find her. This isn’t a very big island, and we know every street.”

“I know we’ll find her.” The thing that really worried him was what kind of state she’d be in when they did.

He visually scanned street corner after street corner, building after building. Just when he felt he was about to lose his mind, they got a hit on the radio.

“Blue Honda sighted at the intersection of Ventura and Oasis.” The officer read off the tag number and noted that the car was traveling over the speed limit.

“That’s her,” Jackson said, his heart in his throat.

Elijah hung a hard left through an intersection and turned the car around, heading for the southeast end of the Island.

“I’m carrying,” Elijah said. “You?”

“Yeah.” And a goddamn lot of good it had done him so far.

Buildings passed in blurs of shadow, and Jackson waited to hear that the officer who’d sighted the car had stopped it.

But that didn’t happen.

“What the fuck?” Her car was an economy sedan, not a stock racer. Why hadn’t it been pulled over by now?

They blew through the intersection of Ventura and Oasis. There was no sign of Belle’s car, but the intersection was at the edge of the West Palms neighborhood – a middle class grid of single family homes and townhouses.

“Let’s search the neighborhood,” Jackson said. If she’d been abducted, maybe whoever had taken her lived here. Why else would they have driven all the way across the island from Moreno’s to West Palms?

Elijah began cruising up and down each residential street. “I’ve got the left side of the street. You watch the right.”

Jackson nodded, straining to see clearly in the darkness. There were streetlights here and there, plus the occasional light left on over a garage or front door, but many of the vehicles were difficult to immediately identify by color. Especially the darker colored ones, like Belle’s.

Because of the limited visibility, he almost didn’t see the blue Honda parked close to the side of a house, all but hidden under a latticed carport.

“There!” His heart slammed against his ribs, and the pulse-pounding thrall of adrenaline gripped him in an instant. He itched to move, his muscles primed, and tasted metal.

Elijah stopped and killed the lights, then the engine. As Jackson threw his seatbelt out of the way, Elijah grabbed the radio and reported their location and requested help.

Where the fuck the officer who’d spotted the car was, Jackson had no idea, but he did know that something was definitely wrong. The car was Belle’s – he recognized the white and orange college parking pass hanging from the mirror, even though the license plate was hidden by shadow.

She’d never mentioned West Palms to him. Mariah didn’t live here, and her colleagues were all at the party. It was virtually unthinkable that she’d have taken off to this random home in this random neighborhood without warning.

Drawing in a deep lungful of air, Jackson opened the car door as quietly and quickly as he could.

When he climbed out, he almost fell – the rush of adrenaline had numbed the pain in his leg, but he was still clumsier on it than he’d once been. Catching himself with a hand on the open door, he resisted the urge to swear.

“Easy, man.” Elijah’s voice was barely audible. “We’re here. We’ll take care of this.”

Before Jackson could breathe a word, the sound of a door slamming cut through the night.

He stiffened, then took off around the side of the home with as much speed and stealth as he was capable of, pausing by the carport just long enough to see that the car was empty. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the night, it was obvious that the two story home was divided into an upper and lower apartment – the brass letters spelling out 509 A by the front door gave it away.

The second apartment entrance had to be around the back.

Sure enough, when he rounded the corner he found a wooden staircase leading up to a door. 509 B. The light above it was off, leaving Jackson and Elijah to climb the stairs in darkness. Jackson moved awkwardly, hugging the rail as splinters snagged his palm.

The landing at the top was small, which made it hard to approach the door safely – there was barely room for them to squeeze to the side.

If a hail of gunfire greeted them, so be it. Jackson had endured that for a total stranger; he’d gladly relive it for Belle, if necessary.

He knocked, and no gunfire came.

Nothing came at all – there was only silence. But he’d heard that door slam. Someone was inside.