Page 56 of The Presidents Shadow

“YOU ALL FIGURED out by now that I’m not police. I’m just an ordinary person like the rest of you.”

Kailyn immediately interrupts.

“Don’t go spoiling everything by starting to lie, girl. You’re no ordinary person. We just saw you wipe out one of New York’s ugliest, toughest groups of scumbags ever. So don’t go saying—”

“Okay, so I have a few special skill sets,” Maddy admits. “I want to use those skills to do something that needs doing. To help you. All of you.”

She takes a big gulp of Sunnytime’s particularly lousy coffee, then continues talking.

“I know that some kids in your line of work have disappeared. Two of them that I know about are a girl named Chloe and a boy named Travis.”

Interruption time again. A girl Maddy vaguely remembers—a tall, skinny red-haired girl with a concerned look on her face—speaks up: “They’re only the tip of the hot dog. And don’t fuck with me, I’m being funny. I know it’s supposed to be ‘iceberg.’”

“Shut it up,” says one girl. “This is serious stuff. Plus your joke sucks.”

“The only person here that sucks hot dogs is me,” Mama-Girl says, her fork in the air. “But Jacine is right. It ain’t just Chloe and Trav. There’s been Rosella, Jada, and Melissa and maybe even five or six more.”

She leans in toward Maddy. “I could go on and on. Listen, I try to watch out for these girls, but the men who run this show are brutal, and the woman at the top is even worse. You want to know where Trav and Chloe are? Try the cemetery. Try the Gowanus Canal. Try heaven.”

It suddenly seems that no one is interested in their food anymore. All forks are down.

With all the very real sincerity that’s inside her, Maddy says, “Then, help me. I can’t do anything to protect you if I don’t have information.”

And they do. Slowly at first, with one girl speaking, then another nudging her friend, who also chips in. The group gains momentum, and soon they are interrupting one another, contradicting and teasing. But they are talking.

They all agree that right around the time Chloe and Travis disappeared, there was a Cadillac that had been driving around the bridge for quite a few days. Not one of their regular drivers or drop-offs.

“And not any of the usual johns,” Mama-Girl chimes in.

“Was it a big Cadillac?” Maddy asks.

“No,” says one of the girls. “It was a small SUV, like the Cadillac XT4 from back in the 2020s.”

“How do you know so much about cars, girl?” says someone.

“There’s lots of stuff I know that you don’t know I know. Ask me state capitals. Go ahead. Ask me. Nevada, Carson City…”

Maddy jumps in. “What color was the car?”

No arguments. Everyone agrees that it was dark green. And, no, no one thought to write down the license plate. And, no, since the car windows were shaded dark, no one has any idea what the driver looked like.

Or so it appears, until a pretty girl with a southern accent says, “I don’t exactly know what the man looked like.

But I was kneeling behind a pile of stacked-up traffic cones one night, trying to hide from that piece of shit McCarthy.

I saw the car door open up, and some white guy stepped out and took a pee. ”

“Can you tell me what he looked like?” Maddy asks, but the girl only blushes. Kailyn is the first to catch on.

“Since you were kneeling you saw his dick, but not his face, am I right?”

“Wonder if I would’ve recognized him,” Mama-Girl says, brow furrowed in concentration.

“Yeah. That’s right,” says the southern girl, still blushing. “But I heard him talking on his cell. He had, like, a French accent.”

“Like, how’d it sound? Try it out on me,” says Mama-Girl.

The southern girl tries on a French accent. She ad libs, “I’m on my way back now, or something like that.”

“You sound like you always do, like a girl who just got off the airplane from Atlanta,” says Kailyn.

The southern girl says, “Well, shit, I don’t know. Maybe it was more like German?”

French? German? Maddy knows she’s not going to get an accurate sound description.

“It’s okay,” says Maddy quietly. She can see that the girl is embarrassed that she can’t mimic the accent. “You’ve all helped a lot. I’ve got way more to go on now than I did a few hours ago.”

A green car. A man with an accent.

It’s not a big start. But it’s something.