Everything else can fucking wait. Life is on pause. Nothing else matters.
Her old man is after her. Her old man wants our baby. She ran away because she was scared.
Why the fuck didn’t she tell me?
I thump the steering wheel of my rental, gaze out of the window at the traffic slowly creeping by. The afternoon sun warms my arm, and I leave it hanging out of the car. My dark tattoos soak up all that heat.
“Dee,” I whisper to myself. “Where the hell are you?”
I followed the breadcrumbs she unknowingly left. I went to Hong Kong, tracked down that slimy fucker who sold her a new passport. I made him tell me where she was going. His cries of pain still sometimes echo in my head.
He sicced the triads onto me. I only just got out in time. When I passed through passport control on my way out, I could see, out of the entrance of the departures zone, a group of mean looking men with dyed-red hair held up in ponytails, tattoos creeping up their necks, scanning the crowd.
It was a close call. They would have chopped me up, put me in garbage bags, and tossed me out to sea.
But after that it was a dead end. All I know is that she came to Australia, so all I can do is look where I think she may have gone.
It took three months for her face to surface on a camera in an identifiable location. Melbourne. The shiny RMIT college city campus behind her was like the city’s fingerprint.
The email was sent to me anonymously from one of my fans. A lone security image at an ATM. How this fan hacked into that, I have no idea. Some people are just wizards.
But I’m glad, now more than ever, that I put out a call for help to my fans. That guy who interviewed me the night Dee left was right… if I didn’t then, anyway, I owe my fans now.
All it took was one post to fan sites, and I had thousands of people offering me their skills. I was surprised to learn how many people regularly did illegal shit on the internet, and just how easy it was to gain access to places you shouldn’t.
And how many people were willing to do it on my behalf, just some underground fighter.
Glass fucking Marino may have resources, he may have people in high places, he may have an army of enforcers on the payroll, but I realized that I have a militia of people who can hide behind IP addresses, who are able to track anybody by the digital footprints that they leave on the internet.
And everything is on the fucking internet these days.
A post on a message board looking for a job – young pregnant woman seeking teaching position at a kindergarten – a background check done on a Caroline Sax, a new bank account opened to the same name. A photograph of Ms. Sax at an ATM, withdrawing money.
Separate events linked through the network, time-stamped, recorded to exist forever. Traceable.
That’s how I came to Melbourne.
Glass is old-fashioned. He’d never think to scour the online world.
That gives me a head start. Not a large one, but one nonetheless.
The sight of Dee’s face, grainy, black and white and from a low angle, sent my heart surging. It made me feel a great longing for her, an ache that could not be dulled. The embers inside me burned brighter upon seeing her face, as if someone had just blasted oxygen at them. She looked well, had put on a bit of weight, no doubt because of the pregnancy.
And… she was so beautiful. Even in that blurry footage she took my breath away. Even just the fuzzy outline of her lips, her eyes… it kicked me into sixth-gear, because every single fucking day I long to see her, long to be with her.
I stared at that image for hours. I still do, every night. I boot up my laptop, open the image file, and I just sit there, a drink in my hand, and look at her. Nothing in my life has ensnared me so completely like she has.
When we were together, I never imagined not having her in my life. I had a vague plan, built on the resources I would have.
Just a little longer.
I only needed a little longer, another couple of wins, another few big payouts, and we would have been golden. We’d have had a way out, and could have bought ourselves secrecy, could have paid to drop off the grid. Nobody, not even the best private investigators could have found us.
We could have lived without Glass’ shadow over us. We could have been happy somewhere together. I don’t know if it was naïve to assume she’d say yes, go somewhere with me, disappear with me. All I know is that she ended up disappearing alone.
It was always going to happen… always. Glass would never let go of his greasy grip on her. The only way she could have freedom was to run, leave, vanish.
I just thought that it would be with me.
But when she did leave, I was a little surprised by how much it affected me. Maybe I’m not in touch with my emotions, maybe I don’t understand exactly what I felt for her, how much I cared for her… how much being with her felt like plugging in the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.