Her fate, however, was then in the hands of Dingo and Daryl’s ability to lie to her father’s grim face.
Her phone finally vibrated. All clear.
But she still hesitated. Are you sure? she quickly typed with her thumbs.
There gone. Dingo didn’t have the greatest grasp of spelling and grammar, but he was proving himself to be a good friend. Although it didn’t take much for him to be a better friend than his stupid, stupid ex—evil Fiona—who’d intentionally and malevolently gotten Maddie into this shitty, shitty mess.
It had started day before yesterday, on Monday, after “Dad” dropped her off at school. As was her father’s usual total Stormtrooper MO, they’d arrived a half hour early, so she’d wandered over to the parking lot to wait for Fiona. The older girl—Fee was a senior—had left school somewhat mysteriously last Friday morning, after which she’d completely stopped answering her phone.
On that Monday morning, Maddie had tried calling Fee again, but she’d gotten a weird This number is invalid message. Which wasn’t all that strange. In the few months since Maddie first met Fee, the girl had changed her number twice. Once because some weird guy was stalking her, and once because the old number was getting “stale.”
Whatever that meant.
So Maddie had hovered near student parking, expecting Fiona to show up in her aunt Susan’s shiny little Fiat, with a brand-new phone in hand. Instead, Fee was nowhere to be seen, and Maddie had gotten pointed at and beckoned to by a man in a black truck—one of those giant ones, with a back passenger seat—that was idling just outside of the school grounds.
She recognized him immediately. His name was Nelson and he traveled with a posse of creepy minions. He was older than his boyz by several decades—older even than Maddie’s stupid father.
She’d gone with Fee once, a few weeks earlier, to pick something up from Nelson’s auto shop—drugs probably, but Fiona didn’t tell and Maddie didn’t ask. Still, while they were there, the way Nelson looked at Maddie had grossed her out. But later, in the car, Fee just laughed and said, “He stared because he thinks you’re pretty, spaz. Lots of guys are super into Asian girls—in fact you should use makeup so you look more like your mother and less like your father—and you know what else? You actually would be pretty if you didn’t dress like an eighty-year-old homeless man.”
Monday morning, though, Maddie had backed up, fast, and run for the safety of the school. By the time classes were over, she’d come up with a rational explanation for why Nelson might’ve gestured to her—he was probably looking for Fiona, too.
So when she started her walk home, she wasn’t all that concerned at first when that big black truck pulled up alongside her and Nelson’s ugly face appeared as he lowered the window in the cab.
But she jumped as two men—bigger, older, shaved-headed men—materialized on either side of her and roughly grabbed her by the arms.
“Hey!” she said, ready to fight, but then Fee’s boyfriend, Ricky Dingler, whose nickname was Dingo because he was from Australia, appeared, too.
“It’s okay, Mads,” Dingo said in his lilting accent as he took her heavy backpack off her shoulder. She tried to hold on to it, but he gently pried her fingers free. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
The skinhead with the intricate neck tattoo said, “Mr. Nelson would like the pleasure of your company.”
Maddie wasn’t an idiot. She knew that the dead last thing she should do was get into that big black truck—talking to Nelson while standing outside of it was one thing—but somehow before she could open her mouth to scream, the man with the neck tattoo and his buddy with the nose ring had hustled her over there, with Dingo trailing behind, still holding her pack.
Nelson had gotten out so that when they pushed her up into the cab she was sandwiched between him and the XXL driver, a man she recognized because his younger clone was some big deal football-playing asshole at the high school.
As soon as Nelson slammed the door shut, the big driver jammed his truck into gear, and they were zooming away from the school.
The skinhead twins and Dingo were riding in the bed of the truck, so at least they were going wherever she was, but that didn’t make it any better. Especially when she turned to look through the back window, and realized Neck-Tattoo was rifling through her backpack.
“Hey!” she said, but then Nelson got her full attention when he put his fat-fingered hand on her knee and let it slip down to the inside of her thigh. She was wearing jeans, but still it was disgusting.
She jerked her leg away. “Don’t touch me, Grandpa! Stupid, back there, who apparently isn’t above stealing my lunch money, said you wanted to talk? So talk already.”
Fiona had told Maddie that Nelson imagined himself to be San Diego’s version of Walter White, like from Breaking Bad, but he wasn’t even close. He had graying hair and a mustache that didn’t do much for his too-fleshy face. He had a beer belly and bad breath, and he wheezed when he laughed. And he laughed now at her words.
“Feisty,” he said. He leaned across her to tell the football player’s older clone, “I like her.”
“I’d like her better naked, with my dick in her mouth,” the clone said as he looked down at her with his weirdly dead-seeming pale gray eyes. “I bet she’s good at that.”
That coldly appraising look he gave her actually scared her, but she covered her fear with an enormous disgusted eye roll. “I hope you also like vomit,” she said before turning to address Nelson directly. “I have a math test to study for. Is this bullshit going to take long?”
“Won’t take long at all,” Nelson assured her, “if you’ve got Fee’s money, honey.” He wheezed at his stupid rhyme, as if it was some kind of world-class joke.
“Fee’s money? What money?” Maddie asked, and Nelson made tsking sounds as again he spoke over her to tell Dead-Eyes, “I told you she was going to say that, that she was going to be all what-the-fuck.” He fluttered his hands in the air, as if imitating her, except she hadn’t moved her hands at all.
“You did, boss,” Dead-Eyes said.
“I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maddie said. “I don’t even know you. All I know is you’re some kind of friend of Fiona’s—”
“Fiona’s business associate,” Nelson corrected her. “Fee had to leave town unexpectedly. She said she gave you the money she owes me.”
“What? No!” Maddie shook her head. “I mean, maybe she meant to leave it with me if she told you she was gonna—” she didn’t want to get Fee into trouble “—but something must’ve happened, and…she didn’t. I haven’t seen her since Friday. Seriously.”
“She’s serious,” Nelson told Dead-Eyes. He turned to Maddie. “You are Maddie Nakamura.”
“Yeah,” Maddie said. “But I don’t—”
“Fiona said she gave it to you on Friday,” Nelson said. “In cash.”
Dingo was now holding on to Maddie’s backpack in the bed of the truck, and she glanced back at it and him as she tried to remember how much money she’d brought to school. She was pretty sure she only had four dollars left in her wallet after the tragedy that was today’s lunch—assuming the skinheads hadn’t stolen it—but she had another forty-seven hidden in the pages of The Wind in the Willows on the bookshelf in the bedroom of the bungalow. The last thing she wanted to spend it on was paying off stupid Fiona’s stupid debts to her stupid drug dealer, but if she had to…“How much does she owe you?” she asked on a heavy sigh.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
Maddie nearly choked. “Ten thousand…?”
“She said her aunt kicked her out and was sending her home to her mother. She said she stopped at your house and dropped off the cash on her way to the airport,” Nelson told her.
“But she didn’t,” Maddie insisted. “Or, if she did, she dropped it when I wasn’t there—”
“She said you were.”
“You must’ve misunderstood or…or…somehow gotten the message wrong or—”
/> “I’ll play it for you—her message—so you can tell me exactly how I got it wrong.” Nelson had his phone hooked into the Bluetooth in the truck, and as he thumbed through his voicemails and hit play, the speakers clicked on.
And yes, that was Fiona’s voice coming through with crystal clarity. “So my fucking bitch aunt kicked me out for good. She’s shipping me home tonight, and there’s not enough time to come over to say goodbye. In fact, I’m on my way to the airport right now. I managed to stop at Maddie’s house. Maddie Nakamura? Remember, I told you about her, you met her, and you said she was cute? Well, I left what I owe you with her—I had to, I didn’t have another option. But I put it into her cute little hand and she promised me she’d give it to you on Monday morning, but heads up, she’s wily and a pathological liar and you might have to chase her. Tell Dingo sorry. Oh, wait—” she laughed “—I’m not sorry. Tell him I hope he eats shit and dies. Have a nice life!”
“She was lying,” Maddie said, her head spinning. Wily and a pathological liar…? She no longer felt the need to protect Fiona. “She’s the liar—”
“She’s never lied to me before,” Nelson said.
“Well, she’s lying now,” Maddie insisted. She turned in her seat to look again into the truck bed where Dingo was sitting. “Dingo knows her even better than I do. Why would she leave that much money with me instead of her own boyfriend?”
“Because Dingler was otherwise occupied all day on Friday,” Nelson told her. “She tried, but she couldn’t reach him. And since you’ve been working with her for a while now—”
“Working with her?” Maddie was starting to feel like a parrot. “With Fiona? No! That’s not true!” She took her phone from the pocket of her cargo pants and unlocked the screen. “Look, check my history! No calls from Fiona, no texts either! Just a lot of me calling and her not picking up! She didn’t reach me on Friday, either, and she certainly didn’t stop by while my father was home!” Fiona knew better than that.
But Nelson wheezed with laughter again. “You expect me to believe you don’t have a separate burner phone for business? Fee told me about your arrangement, weeks ago. She said you were one of her best sales associates, but she also said you were devious. And, yes, deceitful. That she had to watch you closely.”
Maddie looked at him, and in that moment, she knew. This wasn’t a mistake or a mixup or a misunderstanding. Fiona had taken his ten thousand dollars, left town, and framed Maddie. Not only that, but she’d planned to do it, weeks ago. She’d intentionally brought Maddie to Nelson’s garage so he’d know both her name and her face.
“You have forty-eight hours to ‘find’ the money she gave you, and return it to me,” Nelson informed her. “And that’s me being generous, and giving you a little extra time. After that, the interest rate kicks in, and it’s another thousand dollars for each additional day you withhold.”
“So, you, like, want me to go to the police?” The words were out of Maddie’s mouth before she’d thought them through.
Nelson moved fast—faster than she’d dreamed an old, out-of-shape creeper could move—grabbing her by the throat with hot-dog fingers that were shockingly strong.
“You even think of doing that,” he said as she tried to breathe but couldn’t, so she started to flail, “and you’re dead.”
Dead-Eyes was still driving, but he moved his arm over to hold her in place, his elbow across her chest as he planted his hand directly between her legs, right on her crotch, and now she was struggling against that, too. But she couldn’t move and she couldn’t breathe.
“And I know what you’re thinking,” Nelson continued, his breath hot against her ear as she started to see stars, as his fingers dug even harder into her throat. “You’ll be safe, the police will protect you. But they won’t. In fact, they won’t believe you, especially when drugs are found in your locker, when ‘friends’ come forward and say you’ve been selling on campus. No one will believe you. And you’ll go to jail and while you’re there, I’ll have you killed. That’s if I don’t have you killed before that.”
With that, he let her go. As she sucked in air, she attempted to push Dead-Eyes’s still-groping hand away from her.
Forty-eight hours had passed extremely fast.
Maddie had gone home on Monday, after getting jettisoned from Nelson’s truck. She didn’t really know what else to do, except to keep trying to reach Fiona. And to start calling Dingo, too. But he wouldn’t answer, not at first. She hadn’t connected with him until halfway through the day on Tuesday. She’d cut school to look for him, and had finally found him at the 7-Eleven where he sometimes hung out to sell weed. That hadn’t gone all that well either, but she’d finally guilted him into helping her.
Now, hidden in the trunk of Dingo’s car, Maddie rubbed the bruises on her throat as she sent him a second text: Check again.
Please, she added, because there weren’t a lot of people in Dingo’s life who treated him with respect, including Nelson. Especially Nelson. And she knew, absolutely, that Dingo was risking more than she could imagine to help her like this, behind Nelson’s fugly back.
But instead of texting his reply, Dingo unlocked and opened the door of his car and said, “I walked down a level and up a level to check. He’s gone. You can come out.”
As Maddie pushed out the backseat cushion and wiggled through the opening into the body of the car, Dingo added, “You didn’t mention that your father was a Navy SEAL. You know, love, he might actually be able to help you.”
She climbed over into the front passenger seat as he started the behemoth of a car. “Where’s Daryl?”
“I’ll take that as a no comment,” he muttered. “I s’pose you’ve got as much to say for the shocker that you’re only fifteen.”
“Why should that bother you?” Maddie asked. “We’re friends. It’s not like we’re having sex or anything.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been sleeping in the same car,” Dingo said, maneuvering his giant vehicle out of the parking space. “And FYI, Daryl thinks we’re friends with, you know, those kind of benefits? He told me he preferred to walk home than risk death via angry Navy SEAL.”
“Daryl’s an idiot,” she pointed out. “And I’m not asking my father for anything. He’s an idiot, too. Plus he doesn’t give a flying shit.”
“I’m not sure I picked up doesn’t give a flying shit when he was all Where’s Maddie in my face,” Dingo countered. “In fact, it felt an awful lot like majorly gives a major flying shit.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a good little soldier,” Maddie said, “and he thinks he’s supposed to take care of me.”
Dingo glanced at her. “You sure, Mads? He looked pretty cool. I mean, the way you talked about him, I wasn’t expecting—”
“The whole California-surfer-dude affect is an intentional mind-fuck,” Maddie told him. “He’s a BUD/S instructor.” At Dingo’s blank look, she explained. “He’s like a drill sergeant in the world’s hardest boot camp. He teaches the idiots who want to be SEALs by trying to make them quit. And yeah, with his cool nickname—Grunge, if you can believe that, even though he doesn’t own a single CD and I’ve never heard him listen to music, not even once—he looks like the kind of dad who’d share his doobie with you after Sunday brunch, but trust me. Not even close.”
“Dad” was a Nazi when it came to schedules and curfews and keeping their new house “shipshape.” God. He’d even made lists of household chores, like she was a five-year-old, eager to earn a sticky star on her chart.
To be kept on such a short leash after her free-range childhood was maddening. And yeah, to be fair, his punctuality had been a good thing back when Maddie had used what she’d thought of as his monthly blackmail payments to pay Lisa’s bills.
Still, she understood—completely—why her free-spirited mother had kept her distance from him for all those years. In fact, her parents were such stark opposites, the very concept that they’d been together long enough to have sex and create Maddie was almos
t completely unbelievable. They must not have talked. That was Maddie’s best guess. It had been pure physical attraction and lust, after which Lisa had immediately fled.
God, she missed her mother far more than she missed her freedom. Lisa may have been a crappy caregiver—in addition to paying the bills, Maddie was also the one who cooked and cleaned and made sure her mom got to work on time. But her mother had loved her. Of that she had no doubt.
Not so the strict and scary Navy SEAL sperm donor.
“You okay, love?” Dingo asked softly. “Missing your mum again, I bet.” Despite his many flaws, he always knew what she was thinking, and he was always kind. “It’ll get easier, I promise. And this thing with Nelson? We’ll figure it out.”
Maddie nodded. Fiona had kept Nelson’s ten thousand dollars. That was a given. They just had to find her, so they could get it and give it back. “Let’s go see if Fee’s aunt Susan is home.”
Dingo didn’t look happy. Maddie had never met Fiona’s aunt, but apparently the woman had hated Dingo with the passion of a blazing supernova. “She always works ridiculously late,” he said weakly. “I doubt she’s home yet.”
Fee’s aunt Susan was a divorce lawyer, and she’d recently opened her own practice.
“We can park on the street and wait for her,” Maddie decided, and even though Dingo sighed heavily, he nodded and drove.
No one at the In-N-Out Burger had seen Maddie.
Pete had showed his daughter’s photo to everyone working the kitchen and some of the customers, too, but he came up empty.
It didn’t mean she hadn’t been there, it just made the search that much harder. It was one thing to ask to review the security cam footage if someone had seen Maddie, another entirely if the request appeared to be based purely on—how had Shayla put it? Wishful thinking.
Pete’s burger tasted like ashes. He’d gotten himself one to go, only because Shayla asked him when he’d eaten last, and he couldn’t remember. Dinner, last night? Maybe.
And as much as he didn’t want to take the time, he knew he needed to refuel. He’d only get stupider without it.
Some Kind of Hero Page 4