atamagaii:
Levi was indeed correct, none of what he said about this Griffin guy meant anything to him. It didn’t escape his notice that this guy was supposed to be Interpol, but he had dealt with more than one officer gone rogue at this point to even question it. He had pulled the phone away before Yoichi got a good enough look at what he assumed to be a bomb that was strapped to her.
His head was swimming and he felt a bit sick; he was only able to half pay attention to the Houndoom who had appeared in his living room to get a tracking scent. This Griffin guy worked with Levi – who was supposed to be dead – and had kidnapped Lucy to…what? Did he know that Levi was alive? Was this a way to pull him out of hiding? There were too many questions with zero answers available to him; Yoichi was slightly disoriented as Levi directed a question at him.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. She jogs most mornings. I can’t say for sure if she did this morning…but it would make sense, I guess. I don’t see any other way they’d be able to catch her off guard.” He was contemplative for a moment before speaking again. “I don’t know if we even need to worry about the whole route. There’s this massive hill that’s nearby the theme park. She runs up that thing every single day and I can hardly keep up with her because it’s so steep. You can’t see anything on the other side of the hill until you’re basically at the very top so someone could sit just barely on the other side of the hill and grab her.”
Yoichi nodded, more so to himself than Levi. “Yeah, I think that’s our best bet. I’m sure your Houndoom would pick up something around there.” Without another word, Yoichi yanked his shoes on and grabbed the keys off the hook next to the door. “I’m going to need to know more about this Griffin guy on the way over, though.”
“It’s a long story and we don’t have much time.” Jax rubbed the back of his neck as a soul-deep sigh of frustration escaped him. “I’ll tell you what I can. You deserve to know, since you’re tangled up in this now. But first I want you to understand that I’m not the villain everyone thinks I am. And this was never supposed to reach Lucy. I stayed away all this time because I was trying to keep her safe.”
He nearly laughed at himself. All of this just sounded like excuses, and definitely something that an actual bad guy would say. Nash stayed on his heels as they followed Yoichi out into the hall and waited for him to lock the door. “I guess you’ll have formulated your own opinion of me by the time all of this is over. I go by Jax now, by the way. It just makes things easier.”
He waited for Yoichi to lead the way and followed beside him. “So, about Griffin. He was my partner at Interpol, and a seasoned agent. I guess by now he’s been serving for nearly forty years now. I don’t know exactly when he went corrupt, but from what I had been able to dig up, he’s been building up this criminal empire for at least the past decade. Through Interpol he’s been able to create a huge network of criminals and other crooked cops, and when I say huge what I mean is, he’s practically untouchable. Anyone who tries to cross him ends up six feet under. When I planned to expose all of this all I ended up accomplishing was getting my friend killed, being framed for his murder, and my name added to the top of Interpol’s blacklist.”
They had been walking for a short time, but Jax felt that they must have been getting close because Nash lowered his head to sniff at Lucy’s scent on the sidewalk with increasing frequency.
“I staged my death to throw them off my trail, but that only worked for a little while. Griffin’s been trying to track me down for years. He hasn’t been able to use my family to find me because they don’t even know I’m alive, and he’s not dumb enough to bring innocent people into this mess when it could easily backfire on him. Which is why I don’t really get why he would take Lucy now, after all this time. He could just be desperate to catch up to me, but this really isn’t his MO.”
He paused for a moment, his expression grim. “He’s going to kill Lucy if we don’t stop him, though. That is his MO. He’s using her as bait, but after that she’s just another lose end that needs to be tied up. Even if I agree to the exchange, she’s as good as dead if we don’t find her.”
















