Free Noah's Rainy Day by Sandra Brannan

lines.”
    “Consider us the dynamic duo. Local police and the feds.”
    Gates heard Streeter’s cell phone buzzing. Before answering, Streeter offered Gates a sad smile. Gates recognized the expression on his friend’s face, a sign that Streeter didn’t think this case would have a happy ending. And Gates couldn’t argue with his intuition. Missing children cases rarely did.
    “And on Christmas Eve. Damn it, anyway.”

CHAPTER 9
     
    “WE TOLD YOU, WE don’t know where he is. What do you want us to say?” BlueSky regional manager Toby Freytag asked. “And I’m not supposed to talk with anyone until the lawyers get here from Chicago.”
    Gates shot out of his chair in the manager’s small office. Streeter was quick to follow, if only to hold his friend back from pummeling this policy-spewing suit. Wiry, but with the deadly accuracy of a professional flyweight boxer, Gates stepped toward Freytag and leaned over the cheap desk, gripping the edges until his normally dark-skinned knuckles turned light brown.
    Freytag leaned back in his chair as Gates growled, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about what any lawyer said. What I want you to say is that you actually give a damn that a child’s missing. That you and your company were responsible for the child’s safety. That your missing employee, Kevin Benson, was responsible for escorting the boy from the New York City flight to his Los Angeles connection. That you are doing everything humanly possible to find Benson and the boy. That’s what I want you to say.”
    Streeter noticed the muscles in Gates’s neck bulge and ripple with every word. He hadn’t seen his friend this angry in years.
    “Chief Gates, we are working on it. I assure you,” said Freytag, hishands patting the air, perhaps in an effort to calm Gates’s anger. Or perhaps they were held up in defense as Freytag sensed how close Gates was to the edge.
    “Don’t you dare tell me you’re working on this when I know for a fact that you only arrived a few minutes before me, hours after the boy disappeared. No one seemed to care that the kid missed his flight to LAX, and airport pages for the escort to report aren’t enough. Neither was the feeble attempt to call his contact numbers. Someone should have screamed bloody murder hours ago that the boy was unaccounted for.”
    “But the gate check did,” Freytag insisted. “They flagged the passenger as a no-show, and like I told you, the procedures for a passenger missing the flight—”
    “I don’t give two shits about your procedures,” Gates spat, the dark lines on his forehead deepening between his furrowed black brows. “And this is a child, a little boy, not just any passenger who missed his flight. What the hell are you thinking? What’s wrong with your employees that they wouldn’t follow up on an unaccompanied minor, a child, who missed his scheduled flight?”
    “At the risk of angering you further, let me say, it happens all the time. You just don’t understand,” Freytag said, bracing himself for Gates’s fury.
    “Oh, I understand. You probably just didn’t want to be bothered on Christmas Eve. Right?”
    “I don’t get many holidays, Chief.”
    Gates took a step toward Freytag. Streeter put a hand on Gates’s shoulder and eased him back. Gates pointed a long finger at Freytag and warned, “You get Kevin Benson in here in the next half hour or I’ll tear this place apart looking for him, starting with your asshole.”
    Freytag blinked, glancing around his tiny space as if imagining what it would look like after Gates was through with it, trying not to picture the police chief climbing up his rectum, which Streeter knew Gates would do if it meant finding the boy.
    Streeter touched Gates’s elbow. Gates pointed menacingly at Freytag and repeated, “Half an hour.”
    Streeter followed Gates out of Freytag’s private office, through the BlueSky complex, and into the long hall that led to the down escalator and the main