Chapter 281: Chapter - 281
Chapter - 281
The Harley Davidson was a black-and-chrome bullet tearing a hole through the morning. The city’s polished skyscrapers and manicured suburbs bled away behind them, replaced by the monotonous grey ribbon of the highway, flanked by flat, uninspired countryside. For the first hour of the four-hour journey to Portstown, the only sound between them was the guttural roar of the engine, a constant, angry vibration that seemed to match the tension coiled in both their bodies.
Sharon was a statue of focused rage, her back rigid, her eyes hidden behind dark aviator sunglasses. Rick, seated behind her, was a mirror of calm, his body relaxed, moving with the sway of the bike as if he were a casual passenger on a Sunday ride. The contrast was infuriating, and Sharon was the first to break.
"So," she yelled over the wind and the engine noise, "are we going to talk about it, or are you just going to enjoy the ride?"
"What’s there to talk about?" Rick shouted back, his voice maddeningly casual. "We have a destination. We have a goal. Everything else is just noise."
"Noise? Those men weren’t noise, Rick. They were professionals. The kind of people who don’t just show up randomly. That means they were sent. So, I’ll ask again: who did you piss off? My list of potential enemies for you currently starts with organized crime and ends with a rogue intelligence agency. Help me narrow it down."
Rick let out a short, humourless laugh. "My, my, Sharon. Such a vivid imagination. Let’s just say I’m not known for my stellar customer service skills."
"This isn’t a joke!" she snapped, twisting the throttle. The bike surged, pressing him slightly against her back. "You fight like a trained operative, you have enemies who can make a man ’fall’ into a coma in a guarded hospital, and you’re somehow connected to a woman with amnesia who gets kidnapped twelve hours after meeting one person from her past. None of this is normal. So, you can either start giving me something to work with, or I can turn this bike around and drop you at the nearest precinct where you can explain it to people far less patient than me."
"You won’t do that," Rick said, his voice losing its playful edge and hardening into a flat statement of fact. "You know this is the only way to get to her. Your hands are tied just as much as mine are."
Sharon’s jaw clenched. He was right, and the fact that he knew it, that he was so damn smug about it, made her want to slam the brakes and watch him fly over the handlebars. She was a cop, a lieutenant, used to being in control. But here, she was just a passenger in his chaotic world, and her authority meant nothing. She was breaking protocol, lying to her department, and all for a man who treated a life-or-death situation like a goddamn inconvenience.
They rode in simmering silence for another hour until fate decided the tension wasn’t high enough.
It happened in a blur of screeching rubber and the sickening sound of exploding steel. A semi-truck in the lane ahead of them, hauling a trailer full of scrap metal, suddenly convulsed. Its front right tire blew out with a cannon-shot boom, sending shredded pieces of rubber flying across the highway. The massive vehicle lurched violently, the trailer jackknifing as the driver lost control. The entire rig swerved directly into their path, a moving wall of metal and death.
Sharon reacted on pure instinct. She slammed on the brakes, the Harley’s back wheel fishtailing as the bike decelerated with brutal force. Then, seeing the swerving trailer was still going to clip them, she did the only thing she could: she gunned the engine. The throttle roared as she yanked the handlebars, aiming for the rapidly closing gap between the out-of-control truck and the concrete median.
The whiplash motion was ferocious. Rick, caught completely off guard, was thrown forward. His hands shot out instinctively, desperately searching for something, anything, to brace himself against the violent lurch. He found something. Two somethings. Soft, yet firm.
His hands clamped down, and his panicked brain, focused only on survival, registered the shape and texture. He was holding onto Sharon. More specifically, he was holding onto her breasts, his fingers digging into the leather of her jacket, his palms cupping her fully. In the chaos of the moment, his survival-driven grip tightened in an involuntary, desperate squeeze.
Time seemed to warp. For a split second, Sharon’s entire body went ramrod straight, every muscle locking up. The professional, hardened cop vanished, replaced by a woman whose personal space had just been violated in the most intimate way possible. A tiny, mortified squeak, a sound she would deny making until her dying day, escaped her lips. A furious, hot blush, thankfully hidden from Rick’s view, erupted across her cheeks and neck.
Her embarrassment lasted for precisely one-point-five seconds before it was vaporized by pure, unadulterated rage.
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME!" she shrieked, her voice cracking into an octave she hadn’t used since she was a teenager.
She wrenched the bike to the side, clearing the swerving truck by inches. The roar of the passing semi was deafening, but not as loud as the fury now boiling inside her. She slammed the Harley to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the highway, the back wheel kicking up a cloud of dust. She twisted around, her eyes blazing with a fire that could melt steel.
"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, YOU PERVERT?"
Rick, having hastily retracted his hands as if he’d touched a hot stove, held them up in a gesture of surrender. "It was an accident! The truck—"
"I don’t want to hear it!" she yelled, her face flushed. "You think I’m an idiot? You think I wouldn’t notice?"
"Notice what? That we almost became a pancake on the I-95? I was trying not to die!" Rick protested, though the corner of his mouth was twitching. The sight of the unshakable Lieutenant Vintner, completely flustered and yelling like a scorned high-schooler, was dangerously amusing.
"Don’t you dare laugh!" she warned, pointing a finger at him. "Don’t you even think about it! I swear to God, Smith, I will leave you on the side of this highway to get eaten by vultures!"
"Okay, okay, I’m sorry," he said, trying his best to sound sincere. "It was a reflex. You saved our lives, by the way. Incredible reflexes."
His compliment did nothing to soothe her. She just glared at him, breathing heavily, before turning back around and kicking the Harley back into gear. "Touch me again, accidentally or otherwise," she growled over her shoulder, "and I’ll break both your arms. Got it?"
"Crystal," Rick replied, carefully placing his hands on the designated sidebars.
The rest of the ride was conducted in a silence so thick and frigid it felt like it had its own temperature.
Two hours later, they rolled into Portstown. The town looked tired. The glamour and glitz of Nadia’s social media feed were nowhere to be found. This was a place of brick buildings stained with age, of cracked pavements and storefronts with faded signs. It was a town that had seen better days and had long since given up hope of them returning.
Nadia’s apartment building was a perfect fit. A three-story, rundown brick structure with rust stains weeping from the window frames. It was a place for people living paycheck to paycheck, not for influencers posing next to a Rolls Royce.
"So this is where she lived," Sharon muttered, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she killed the engine. "Doesn’t exactly scream ’luxury lifestyle’."
"The luxury was funded by others, obviously," Rick said, dismounting. "This is where she came back to when the party was over."
The lobby smelled of stale cigarette smoke and boiled cabbage. Rick walked to the apartment door and examined the lock. "I could have this open in ten seconds."
"And I could have you in cuffs in five," Sharon shot back, pushing past him. "We do this my way. The legal way. Sort of."
She found the superintendent in a cramped, cluttered office in the basement. He was a portly man in a sweat-stained undershirt, watching a tiny television with rapt attention. He looked up, annoyed at the interruption.
Sharon flashed her badge. "Lieutenant Vintner. We’re conducting a follow-up on a cold missing person’s case. Nadia Ahmed. We need to perform a welfare check on her last known residence."
The man’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but the badge held a certain power. He grumbled, heaving himself out of his chair. "Ain’t seen her in months," he said, grabbing a ring of keys. "That girl... always had fancy cars picking her up. Bentleys, a Ferrari once. Seemed out of place here. Then one day, poof. Gone. Left in a real hurry, looked like."
He led them up to the second floor and unlocked the door to apartment 2B, the key grating in the lock. "Don’t make a mess," he grunted, before shuffling back to his television.
The moment the door opened, a wave of stale, musty air hit them. The apartment was a time capsule. A thin layer of dust coated every surface, preserving the scene of a life abandoned in haste. A half-empty coffee cup sat on the small table, a ring of dried brown liquid at the bottom. A book lay face down on the sofa, its spine bent to hold the page. In the bedroom, a suitcase was open on the floor, half-packed with clothes.
"She definitely left in a hurry," Sharon observed, pulling on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket.
The search began. They split up, their differing methods immediately apparent. Sharon moved with the meticulous precision of a detective, carefully examining papers, bagging receipts and small notes she found on the counter. She was building a profile, looking for any clue, no matter how small.
Rick was a predator, an instinct-driven hunter. He ignored the surface clutter, his eyes scanning for anomalies. He tapped walls, listening for hollow spots. He ran his hands along the bottoms of drawers, searching for false panels.
"Find anything other than dust bunnies?" he asked, pulling out a drawer and finding nothing but cheap cutlery.
"I found a receipt for a five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes and a packet of instant ramen from the same day," Sharon said without looking up from a stack of mail. "This girl was a walking contradiction."
They found more evidence of her dual life everywhere. Designer clothing tags in the trash can, sitting on top of empty microwave meal boxes. Expensive art history textbooks on a shelf next to a pile of trashy gossip magazines. It was the apartment of two different people, a woman living a champagne life on a beer budget.
An hour turned into two. The clock was ticking. Frustration began to set in. They had no idea what they were even looking for. A hard drive? A ledger? A piece of jewellery? It could be anything.
"This is pointless," Sharon muttered, running a gloved hand over her face. "It could have been something small she had on her when she was taken."
"No," Rick said, his voice quiet, focused. He was standing in the bedroom, staring at the large, clunky wooden headboard attached to the bed. "If it was valuable enough to kill for, she wouldn’t have kept it on her. She would have hidden it. Somewhere safe. Somewhere nobody would ever think to look."
He walked over to the bed and gripped the heavy headboard. With a grunt, he pulled it away from the wall. The back was a solid piece of cheap particleboard, covered in the same dust as everything else. Nothing.
Sharon sighed. "Well, that was—"
"Wait," Rick interrupted. His fingers were tracing the edges of the particleboard. He stopped at one corner, his brow furrowed. He pressed down. A section of the board, no bigger than his hand, clicked and popped inward, revealing a small, hollowed-out cavity.
Tucked inside was a small, cloth-wrapped bundle.
With a sense of grim anticipation, Rick reached in and pulled it out. He unwrapped the cloth. Lying in his palm was not a weapon, not a hard drive, not a bundle of cash.
It was a small, nondescript, silver key. The kind used for a safe deposit box. Attached to its ring was a simple plastic tag. On it, written in faded black marker, was a cryptic string of numbers and letters...
"Why in the hell is this key so important?"