22
Ethan
A Week Later
“No, daddy! That’s not the way Jordan does it!”
David’s shrill voice piercing my thoughts caused me to drop the bowl in my hand, sending it sailing to the ground and shattering upon impact. I’d been his father for six years, Jordan had been his nanny for two months, yet somehow I was making his cereal wrong.
“Well Jordan’s not here, is she?” I barked. David recoiled, and I immediately felt terrible. Tears started to gather in the corners of his eyes and I crouched down and pulled him into a hug. “I’m sorry, buddy. I got frustrated. That wasn’t fair to yell at you.”
What David didn’t know was that I missed Jordan just as much as him, if not more. I hadn’t fully explained her prolonged absence to the twins, or any of the children for that matter. Whenever they asked about her, I just told them that she was taking some time for herself and would be back soon. I hated telling them that, not just because they didn’t really want to accept it as an answer, but because I had no idea if that was true or not. We had no idea where she had gone, and even once we found her, there was no guarantee that she was going to come back to us. Harrison had kept some pretty huge secrets, and even if we could convince her that he didn’t kill his ex-wife, he had kept his real name from her; that kind of thing wasn’t easy to forgive.
I allowed Davin to hand-hold me through doing some things the way Jordan would do it to help the boys adjust, but the truth was that they felt what all of us dads had felt; Jordan was the one. She was the link that was missing in our family, and with her being gone, all of us could feel it. The kids were less happy, the dads were less happy, and we were taking it out on one another. Once the kids were off to school, I decided to call an emergency meeting of the dads. We had to figure something out; we needed our cornerstone back.
Oliver was walking through my kitchen slamming my cabinets when he arrived that afternoon. “What the fuck, Ethan?”
“What?” I replied.
“Where’s all the booze?” he barked.
“It’s 10 o’clock in the morning,” Lowe responded.
Oliver whipped around on his heel. “Hey Lowe, look at me.” He was pointing a pair of fingers towards his eyes. “Look into my eyes.”
“I’m looking at you, you fucking weirdo,” Lowe replied.
“I don’t give a shit what time of day it is. I want a drink,” Oliver hissed, then turned his gaze to me. “Well?”
“Jordan has been gone for a week. You think I have booze left?” I responded. “I’ve been drinking it like water.”
It was true. I tried to be careful with my alcohol intake, as both my father and my grandfather had developed alcoholism later in life, but I was missing my woman, I needed something to stifle the pain.
“I’ve been having it delivered daily,” Rogan said. “I can’t get over it. I’ve been with dozens of women. Why does this one hurt so bad?”
“Because she was everything,” Harrison added, with a thick sadness to his voice. “She was perfect, and I ruined it.” His head drooped low. “I’m so sorr–”
“Nope!” Oliver yelled. “Nope, nope. We’re not doing this.” He walked over at smacked Harrison gently on the back of the head. “No more self-pity.”“He’s right,” I said. “We have to do something. We have to find her, and we have to find out who sent her that shit so we can prove to her that it wasn’t true. We need her, the kids need her, we have to figure this out. Oliver, where is Cade? What have you two learned?”“When I called him he answered and just said ‘I’ll be there, but I’ll be late,’ and hung up on me,” Oliver said.I crossed my arms in a huff. Oliver and Cade were our best hope for a lead, and Cade told us that he’d paid some seedy guy he knew down in Florida to track down the person who sent the package, but we hadn’t heard anything additional since then. We had to be able to do something more. We had to be able to find the woman we loved.
“Can’t you do something else?” I asked Oliver. “Did you run the fingerprints?”
“There were about fifty prints on those photos. They’d been handled by everyone from the sales clerk at the place he printed them from, to Joe Schmoe from up the street. The prints are no good,” Oliver explained. “All we were able to learn from the paper is that it was from Florida, which we already knew, and we have nothing to compare the handwriting test to. We ran it through the system to see if there were any matching samples in the system, but came up totally empty.”
“So, what?” Lowe whined. “That’s it? We’re just at a dead end?”
“Right? Can we go back and work the delivery man over a little more?” Rogan added.
“All threads lead back to Florida and the address that we already have. It’s not a residential address, but a police department with over 100 officers. We can’t rightfully ask Cade’s shifty contact to walk in there and yell ‘Hey, any of you chaps blackmailing a guy in Texas that’s in witness protection and not supposed to be talked about, by the way, can you also please not arrest me for the myriad of crimes I’ve committed?’” Oliver was dramatically flailing his arms about in a way that would have made me laugh if I wasn’t so upset. “We’re doing everything we can, guys. We want to find Jordan just as badly as you do.”
“Damn right we do.” I looked over my shoulder and Cade was walking into the kitchen. “And we’ve finally caught a break.”
“You’ve found her?” Lowe said, jumping up from the stool where he was sitting, looking like a puppy being offered a bone.
Cade looked at Lowe sadly. “No, but I did find our blackmailer.” He set a folder on the counter and opened it and everyone gathered around. The top page was a picture of a man with short blond hair, cyan blue eyes, and severe, cut jaw. “An ex-cop from West Palm Beach, Florida, Nathan Greene.”
“The brother?” Rogan said, remembering Harrison’s story from before. “Was running you out of town not enough?”
“Evidently not,” Harrison said. “How did he find me? My new name and location were only known to a select few.”
“Yeah,” Cade said, flipping the top image of Nathan over to reveal a picture of another man with a drill sergeant look to him, with buzz cut hair. “Recognize him?”
“The FPD captain,” Harrison responded. “Milton Jones.”
“Apparently, Milton had a thing for your ex. He was told your identity as a confidant of the FBI to inform them if Nathan tried anything crazy, but he worked with him instead to find you,” Cade said, flipping the top page, and revealing a far off shot of the two of them clinking whisky glasses in a bar. “My guy found them talking about how Nathan had delivered the photos and everything should be falling apart.”
Oliver hissed. “Please, please tell me you had that guy take them out?”
“And have us become the men that Jordan is horrified Harrison is?” Cade responded. “Why would I do that when I have the law on my side?”
Harrison smiled. “Good man.”
“So what’d you do?” I asked.
“I called the FBI of course. I told them that their PD captain had violated a federal law by compromising Harrison’s identity and that Nathan used that compromised identity to blackmail Harrison and threaten Jordan,” Cade explained with a grin on his face. “They’ve both been arrested and being punished to the full extent of the law.” His grin grew into something more mischievous and evil. “Although, just in case they did get the message, I had Liam deliver them some packages of their own.”
Oliver gasped like a school girl at a concert. “Explosive car kind?”
Cade nodded. “Explosive car kind.”
All of the guys and I started clapping and Cade bowed. “Thank you, but I can’t take all the credit. The car packages were Oliver’s idea.”
Oliver shrugged. “I figured if they wanted to deliver packages, they could receive them.”“Nathan tried to figure out who did it, and may have met the wrong end of Liam’s guys’ boots,” Cade shrugged. “But I can neither confirm nor deny that.”“How did you seriously manage to pull that off?” Rogan murmured.Cade shrugged. “There isn’t a lawyer or cop alive who doesn’t know some criminals for hire, and can use those people to their advantage.” He closed the folder. “Jordan means too much to me, to all of us, and I’m not about to let her go without a fight.”
Sentiments shared. Cade had taken care of one half of the problem, and it was beyond the time to buckle down and find our girl and get her back home.
