Infinity (part six)

After a small child is kidnapped at a local park, our fab four are on the trail...
The race is on to catch the abductors before they disappear back into their seedy underworld.

Missed the earlier parts? Don't worry! Find Part One here, and Part Five here.

So we’re there, driving around the park. Iggy and me in one car, Dax and Sadie cruising the opposite side in another; both cars scouting the surroundings for a third car, speeding away. Inside the third car is a kid, probably one who’s only expected to live for another couple of years. A kid and some scumbags. If our theory is correct, a couple of scumbags only expected to live a few years themselves. Paid huge sums of money to do exactly what they’ve just done. So that they can live the high life and still have enough left over to leave some behind for their families.

Then I spot it. A banged up saloon. Green, bodywork rusting, in need of a wash. It pulls up a side street.
“There!” I scream, and Iggy’s nodding and following.

I get on the radio to Dax so him and Sadie can follow us. We’re around the corner just in time to see it disappear around the next. I relay every move to Dax.

“Do you think they know? That we’re following them?” I mean the kidnappers.

Iggy gets me. “Don’t think so,” he says, as the car we’re tailing weaves in the traffic, like a raindrop coursing down a window.

So we follow, weaving through the same traffic, Dax and Sadie tailing us. Heading down to the waterfront, close to the club where Sadie caught up with me a few months back. And in my mind I go back. Not to that night and Remy’s Last Party: Way back.

I’m not sure why, but I go back to the day my secret got out. My girl. I told you she asked about the birthmark: that infinity symbol on my wrist. The same one my new friends share. But I didn’t just blurb it. It wasn’t pillow talk: I had to tell her. When the glass you try to catch because you’ve just dropped it smashes before you get there and gashes your palm, unleashing enough blood to make a surgeon gag, and by the time she convinces you to let her take a look, the cut has healed, well, it tends to raise questions.

Reality fades back in when Iggy jerks the car to a stop and I see the car we’ve been tailing turn through a gate on the docks – a gate that closes as soon as the car’s inside. Now the scene has that strange twilight glow. The sky is a wash of orange, coloured by the setting sun.

“Did you get it?” Dax. On the radio.

Before I open my dumb mouth to ask what he means I realise he’s talking about the licence plate of the car we followed, and for a second I still don’t know the answer. I have to glance down at my notepad and see the scribbled sequence of numbers and letters scrawled there. I can’t read it properly, but I say ‘yes’ anyway.

Iggy starts the engine and we go.

“What about the kid?” I ask.

Iggy says nothing. He just drives. He doesn’t speak again all night. Dax and Sadie stay behind to case the warehouse, they’ll note any car that comes out, or goes in.

Back at the hangar, the only thing Iggy says is “That enough?”

I just nod. I go to work.

I run the licence plate through every database I can access, which with my skill-set, is basically all of them. Including the one used by the cops. None of us really got a good look at the driver, so I know I can’t cross-reference him with mug shots of known felons. But then I get a surprise. The search I ran comes back with nothing. No owner. Not stolen. Not listed or recorded. Anywhere. Like it’s been scrubbed from existence.

All Iggy says when I tell him is “Thought so.”

I’m not sure what that means, for all I know, it’s Iggy being Iggy, but I see something in his eyes. It makes me guess it means that the people we’re dealing with are powerful enough to make a car disappear.

My eyes are dry and tired, but I can’t sleep. Whenever I’m not thinking about the job at hand I’m thinking about the kid. About Jamie.

Running the address of the warehouse the jalopy pulled into comes back with a similar result. No official owner. I go back as far as I can. Last record I get, it belongs to the city.

The sun is coming up again and I’m just about to go to bed, and the radio squawks. Iggy doesn’t budge. If anything, he snores louder. Dax speaks, and it’s just one word:

“Cops.”

“How many?”

“One car. Went straight in. No lights. No sirens.”

So I stand there. Twenty minutes crawl by. The only words exchanged back and forth come one at a time.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

I wait. Expecting him to tell me that a squad of cop cars has arrived. To bring swift justice to the kidnappers. Or that the car has left with two guys in the back. Or expecting to hear ‘Shots fired.’

But I don’t.

Then Dax speaks. “Cops are leaving.”

“Alone?”

He said that, yes they were, and gave me the licence plate, asking me if there was anything I could do with it.

Fuelled by the knowledge that whatever hell was taking place in that warehouse, the cops were a part of, I was reinvigorated. The need for sleep was gone. I had work to do.

For Jamie.

“Already on it.”

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