LITMIR.BIZ

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like a coffee stain on it, and jeans that were too big for him, hanging low on his hips.

      “Are you Ike?”

      The dealer looked him up and down. “You a cop?”

      “No. I’m looking for my daughter. Sara. She’s sixteen, blonde, about this tall…”

      “Never seen your kid, man.” Ike shook his head. He had a frown on his face.

      But Zero noticed the tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of his eye. A flicker on his lips as he willed them not to scowl. Anger. He showed a brief flash of anger at Sara’s name.

      “Okay. Sorry to bother you,” Zero said.

      “Yeah,” the guy said flatly. He started to close the door.

      As soon as Ike was partially turned away, Zero raised a foot and delivered a solid kick just below the doorknob. It flew open, crashing into the dealer and sending him sprawling on his belly to the brown carpet.

      Zero was on him in a second, a forearm against his windpipe. “You know her,” he growled. “I saw it in your eyes. Tell me where she went, or I’ll—”

      He heard a snarl, and then a blur of black and brown as a thick-necked Rottweiler leapt at him. He barely had time to react other than to take the force of the dog and roll with it. Teeth gnashed and bit at the air, finding purchase on his arm and sinking fangs into flesh.

      Zero clenched his teeth hard and rolled once more, so that the dog was under him, and pushed down, forcing his bit forearm into the dog’s mouth even as it tried to clamp down further.

      The dealer scrambled to his feet and fled the room while Zero grasped behind him for whatever he could find. The dog wriggled and thrashed beneath him, trying to get free, but Zero pinched his legs together so it couldn’t get upright. His hand found a ratty blanket draped on the leather couch, and he pulled it loose.

      With his free hand he delivered a single, snapping blow to the dog’s snout—not enough to hurt it badly, but to stun it enough that its teeth released his arm. In the half-second before the jaws clamped down again, he wrapped the blanket around the dog’s head and relaxed his legs so it could flip over and stand.

      Then he whipped the end of the blanket under its body and tied the ends behind its head, wrapped the front half of the Rottweiler tightly in the blanket. The dog thrashed and bucked, trying to get free—and it would, eventually. So Zero scrambled to his feet and dashed after the dealer.

      He skidded into a tiny kitchen just in time to see Ike pulling a small, ugly pistol loose from a drawer. He tried to bring it around, but Zero leapt forward and stopped it with a hand, and then snapped it from his grip in a twisting maneuver that definitely dislocated, if not broke, one of the guy’s fingers.

      Ike yelped sharply and cowered, holding his hand, as Zero aimed the gun at his forehead.

      “Don’t shoot me, man,” he whimpered. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”

      “Tell me what I want to know. Where is Sara? When did you last see her?”

      “Okay! Okay. Look, she came to me, but she couldn’t pay, so we worked out a deal where she could run my stuff around town—”

      “Drugs,” Zero corrected. “You had her running drugs. Just say that.”

      “Yeah. Drugs. It was just a few days, and she was doing okay, but then I gave her a big score of pills…”

      “Of what?”

      “Prescription pills. Painkillers. And she just ghosted me, man. Never showed up, never delivered. My people were pissed. I was out more than a thousand bucks. And she even took one of my cars, ’cause she didn’t have one of her own…”

      Zero scoffed loudly. “You gave her a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, and she ran off with it?”

      “Yeah, man.” He looked up at Zero, his hands up near his face defensively. “If you think about it, I’m really the victim here…”

      “Shut up.” He gently pushed the barrel against Ike’s forehead. “Where was she going, and what kind of car did she take?”

*

      Zero took the black Escalade, which he’d “borrowed” from Ike along with his gun, and used the GPS on his phone to drive as quickly as he could to the drop-off point, all the while looking for a light blue 2001 four-door Chevy sedan.

      He didn’t see one before he reached the delivery point, which much to his chagrin was a local rec center. But he couldn’t worry about that in the moment. Instead he thought to himself, What would Sara do? Where would she go?

      He already knew the answer before he even finished asking himself the question. It floated to him on the salty scent of the air as easily as recalling a memory.

      It was no secret in their family that Kate, Maya and Sara’s late mother, had a favorite spot in the entire world. She had taken the girls there on three separate occasions, the first time when they were only eight and six respectively, and told them: “This is my favorite spot.”

      It was a beach in New Jersey, a phrase that would typically make Zero cringe. The beach was too rocky and the water was usually too cold except for two months in the summer, but that’s not what Kate liked about it. She just liked the view. She’d gone there every year when she was a little girl, all through her teens, and had a fond and almost unfounded love for the place.

      The beach. He knew that Sara would go to the beach.

      He used his phone to find the closest ones and drove there like a maniac, cutting people off and blowing lights and overall generally surprised that no cops zipped out from hiding places to pull him over. The parking lots at the beach were only a few rows, long and narrow and full of cars and happy families. But he didn’t see any vehicles that matched the one that Ike had described.

      He searched three of the largest, closest beaches to Sara’s home and work and found nothing. Dusk was falling fast. In the back of his mind he was aware that the US had a new president; the former Speaker of the House had been sworn in that afternoon. Maria was invited there, to the ceremony, and was most likely at some cocktail party by now, full of stuffy politicians and wealthy constituents, sipping champagne and talking idly about a bright future while Zero searched the coast of Jacksonville for his estranged daughter who, last time he’d seen her, had called the police on him and shouted that she never wanted to see him again.

      “Come on, Sara,” he muttered to the ether as he flicked the headlights on. “Give me something. Help me find you. There must be a…”

      He trailed off as he realized his mistake. He’d been searching public beaches. Popular beaches. But Kate’s beach had been small and sparsely visited. And Sara had a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. She wouldn’t want to be where people were.

      He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the browser on his phone. He frantically searched for less popular beaches, rocky beaches, places that people didn’t often go. It was a hard search, and it didn’t feel like he was making progress until he touched the “images” tab and then he saw it—

      A beach that looked remarkably like Kate’s beach. As if it had been molded from his own memory.

      Zero headed there at about eighty miles an hour, not caring about police or traffic laws or even other drivers as he swerved around cars going far too slow, people casually heading home for the night and not concerned that their daughter might be dead in the surf somewhere.

      He skidded into the tiny gravel parking lot and slammed his brakes when he saw it. A blue sedan, the only car in the lot, parked at the farthest end. Night had fallen, so he left the headlights on and put the Escalade in park right there in the middle of the lot, and he jumped out and ran over to the sedan.

      He threw the back door open.

      And there she was, looking like both heaven and hell: his baby girl, his youngest daughter, pale-skinned and beautiful, lying prostrate in the backseat of a car with her eyes glazed and half-opened, pills scattered around the floor below her.

      Zero

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