Holy shit, it was. And the actor was clearly a regular in this house, because Peter greeted him with a casual, “Hey, Adam. Lindsey.” The second name was aimed with a nod at a delicately pretty dark-haired woman sitting on the other end of the sofa.
But then all three of the beautiful people spoke at once.
“Any luck?” asked Lindsey, who was Asian American and—whoa!
Yeah, I didn’t see that coming, Harry agreed. But she’s not leaping to her feet to greet him, so she’s probably just a friend.
Lindsey wasn’t leaping to her feet because she was hugely pregnant.
Or that. But the SEAL did greet her like he didn’t expect to see her in his house, Harry observed.
“Did you find her?” asked the literal movie star as the second woman—slim and ridiculously young, like barely-out-of-college young—chimed in with, “Any sign of her?”
“No,” Peter answered them all at once. “I thought I saw Maddie getting into a car, but…” He shook his head.
“Did you get my text?” demanded the college student. She was as strikingly beautiful as the pregnant woman, with long, shiny, straight brown hair and dark brown eyes in a face that was quite possibly perfect. “I just sent you a screenshot. Maddie texted me.”
“What?” Peter dug for his phone. “She did? When?”
“Just a minute ago.”
“That’s great news,” Shayla exclaimed.
“She says she’s okay, she’s with a friend and basically, you know, Leave me alone. She blocked me again, right after she sent it, so I couldn’t respond.” The young woman turned to Shayla. “I’m Eden Zanella. My husband, Izzy, is one of Grunge’s teammates.”
“Grunge?” Shayla repeated, even as she looked over Peter’s shoulder to read the text that Maddie had sent. And okay, so the gorgeous young woman was the Eden of Zanella-and-Eden that Peter had mentioned earlier, and obviously not his present-or-future soulmate. Not that Shay, as the witty neighbor, should care.
I don’t know why you concluded you’re only the neighbor, Harry complained. And by the way…Yowl? Really?
“Shh,” Shay whispered, but then smiled weakly when Peter glanced over at her. Yup, he’d definitely noticed that she regularly hushed her invisible friend. Although, in her defense, big sisters and witty neighbors were allowed to have a larger amount of quirkiness in their personalities, so he was just going to have to deal with it.
Meanwhile, Maddie’s text to Eden had been brief and to the point. “She was definitely in that car tonight,” Peter concluded after he read it. “She knows I’m looking for her.”
“Either that, or Dingo and Dumber called her,” Shay said. “Grunge?”
The SEAL glanced up again and twinkled his eyes at her as he smiled tightly. Well, he didn’t twinkle them intentionally. It just happened automatically whenever he smiled—and she was just going to have to deal with that. “Nickname. Don’t ask. Everyone, this is Shayla. She lives across the street, and oddly enough, knows me as Peter.”
“Nice to meet you, Shayla. I’m Izzy.” There was another man in the room, lurking over near the front window, but Shay hadn’t noticed him until he spoke—and then she couldn’t believe that she’d missed him. He was even broader and taller than Peter, and darkly, interestingly handsome, with midnight-colored eyes that gleamed with intelligence and amusement as he added, “And yeah, it’s a nickname, too. Izzy for I Z—my initials—Irving Zanella. Nicknames are rampant in the Teams.”
“I’m Adam,” the actor said as if she didn’t recognize him, then gestured to the pregnant woman, “and this is Lindsey Jenkins, with her soon-to-emerge plus one. So you live across the street, hmm?”
Lindsey’s got a different last name and a wedding band, and FYI, your SEAL isn’t gay, Harry noted.
Okay, but maybe Lindsey’d kept her own name upon marriage. Shayla had.
Maybe. Harry wasn’t convinced. But think about that question, with its hmm that’s loaded with subtext. Adam’s really asking “How long have you been shagging our friend Grunge?”
“Ohmigod, no!” Shay blurted. “I mean, yes, I live across the street. I do. But I just happened to see Lieutenant Greene when I was dropping my son off at the high school, and, um…”
Oh, good. Now you sound weirdly defensive, so Adam’s gotta think you’ve been sleeping with the SEAL nonstop for the past two months. And look at Grunge and Lindsey. Do they look even remotely married to each other?
They didn’t.
“Can you get your friend at the SDPD to run a license plate for me?” Peter was asking Lindsey. He hadn’t sat down on the couch next to her—instead he’d merely moved closer and stood there as he rattled off the combination of letters and numbers from Dingo’s maroon POS.
“Back in the day, Lindsey was a police detective up in LA,” Adam murmured to Shayla as Peter explained how he’d thought he’d seen Maddie getting into that car, and how Shay’d helped him follow it to the mall, where they’d met Dingo and his bearded friend.
“The timing of Maddie’s text to Eden could be a coincidence,” the SEAL named Izzy pointed out. He’d sat down in one of two easy chairs positioned on either side of a gorgeous old river rock fireplace, and pulled his beautiful wife onto his lap.
“But we don’t really think that, do we?” Shayla argued. “Peter got way up in Dingo and Dumber’s faces—” he’d left that little detail out “—and an hour later, Maddie sends that text to Eden?”
“Yeah, I’m with Shayla,” Lindsey agreed with a smile in Shay’s direction. “Finding Maddie might be as simple as running Dingo’s plates and getting his home address.”
“Assuming he keeps his registration current,” Peter said. “Which I seriously doubt. I got a heavy whiff of couch-surfer off of him.”
“Still, it’s a good place to start,” Shay said. “We should also see if we can access Maddie’s Facebook page—”
“We can.” Eden pointed to a laptop that was open and running a screen saver on a gorgeous oak coffee table. “That’s Maddie’s. But we already looked through her Facebook friends and hardly anyone’s local. Her most recent messages are to someone named Fiona, from Sacramento.”
“Oh, good!” Shay sat on the sofa between Lindsey and Adam, pulling the laptop closer so she could look at the screen.
Ahem, Harry said, and she looked up to find everyone looking at her, as Eden said, “That didn’t seem like all that much to inspire an Oh, good.”
“No no, Sacramento’s definitely not good,” Shayla explained, “but access to Maddie’s page is…I’m going to scan through her photos, see if I can find Dingo or his long-haired friend.”
If it’s okay with you, Harry prompted.
Shay cleared her throat and aimed the words at Peter. “If that’s okay with you…?”
“Hell, yeah,” he said. “It’s brilliant. Move over, Adam, I wanna look, too.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Maddie stared as Dingo said, “Holy shite.”
The condo where Fiona had lived with her aunt Susan had burned.
Badly.
It hadn’t burned literally to the ground because it was on the second floor, but the place was clearly uninhabitable. It was hard for Maddie to see the full extent of the damage in the darkness, but it looked as if most of the kitchen roof was gone. And the beige stucco walls surrounding the shattered and now-empty windows were charred and streaked with soot.
“Holy. Shite.” Dingo whispered the words again. But he laughed a little, too. “I guess Fiona finally lost it. Big time.”
Maddie turned to look at him in disbelief. “You think Fee did this…?”
“You think she didn’t?” He was already on his phone, accessing the internet. “Looks like it burned…Yep, the fire happened on Friday morning. Neighbor saw the smoke and called nine-one-one around nine. No one was injured. That’s good, at least.”
If Fiona had started the fire, that certainly explained why she’d been pulled out of class on Friday, never to return.
>
“She’s psycho,” Dingo reminded Maddie as they walked down the street, back to where he’d parked his car. “It’s psycho what she’s done—framing you like that. Nelson is fuckin’ dangerous, and Fee knows it. She wants him to hurt you. Or worse.”
“So where’s her aunt Susan living now?” Maddie asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “Although where does someone horrible who probably doesn’t have many friends go when their house burns down? A hotel, probably.”
After stopping for donuts and talking Maddie into sending that text to “Dad’s” friend Eden, Dingo had finally stopped stalling and driven them out here. Maddie had hoped to find out from Susan if Fee had gone home to her mother’s or her father’s house in Sacramento—and to get a phone number so they could call her. Although now it was entirely possible, despite what Fiona had said in her message to Nelson, that instead of Susan sending Fee home, the girl had gotten herself locked up.
“Did the article you read say anything about arson?” Maddie asked. “Was anyone arrested?”
“As in Fee?” Dingo countered. “No. It didn’t say. But if Fee is in jail, that’s a win for us. It’ll be a quick and easy way to show Nelson that she’s lying.” He paused as they got back into his car. “On the other hand, she was always talking about how loaded her da was, and how much he was paying Susan each month so that Fee could live here in San Diego. Kinda hard to imagine a scenario in which he lets his only child rot in the slammer.”
She shot him a disbelieving look. “Rot in the slammer? Really?”
“Sorry, love, have I got it wrong? It’s hard to keep up with your American slang.”
“It’s perfect—if you’re a doofus.”
Dingo laughed. “Well, I’ve never denied that, have I?” He started his car. “Lookit, it’s getting late. Shall we call it a night—find a campsite, perhaps get slightly baked before bedtime? Is baked acceptable slang for you?”
“It’s great,” she said, “but it’s not late—it’s only eight-thirty, Grandpa. Fee told me Susan didn’t usually get home from work until after eleven. If we have any shot at all of finding out where she’s staying, we need to find her law office. I wonder if she’s got a website…Will you Google her?”
“Google what?” Dingo asked. “Auntie Susan’s Law Practice?” He was grinning at his cleverness—and getting back at her for that doofus comment.
“Attorney Susan Fiera, San Diego, California,” Maddie said.
“Nope, her last name’s different from Fee’s,” Dingo said. “She and Fee’s da had different das. Hers was named Smith.”
Susan Smith. Great. There were probably dozens of lawyers in SoCal with that impossibly common name.
“But guess what,” Dingo said cheerfully as he drove down the street and signaled a left turn that would take them to the Five. “Dread Auntie Sue left a file at home once, and Fee and I brought it over to her office, so I already know where she works. No Googling required.”
“So why didn’t you just say that already?” Maddie complained.
“I do believe the correct comment from you should be, Oh, Dingo, you’re amazing—” he overdid the flat American vowels “—Thank you so much. I don’t know where I’d be without you, and I promise never to call you Grandpa again.”
Maddie laughed. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen, but…thank you. Really.”
Dingo smiled back at her, but then sobered as he said in his real voice, “Even if Fee didn’t burn her condo down, Susan won’t be happy to see me.”
“You can stay in the car,” Maddie said.
“And let you face her alone?” Dingo said. “Not a chance in hell, love.”
Pete ran his hands down his face as Shayla scrolled through countless pictures of the many friends of friends on Maddie’s Facebook profile. Maddie herself didn’t have that many contacts, but most of her contacts had hundreds and some had thousands. And nearly everyone had thousands of photos in their “albums.” Photos of teenagers at parties, at the mall, in cars, at school, in their yards, in their bedrooms, in their rec rooms. It was all starting to blur.
“I think maybe I have Dingo-madness,” Pete said.
His house had cleared out about a half hour ago. Zanella had been all but waving semaphore flags and tap-dancing Morse code to remind Pete that Eden was leaving in the morning on a trip that would keep her out of town for more than a week. His desperation to spend the rest of the evening alone with his wife was palpable. And it wasn’t long after the Zanellas departed that Adam and Lindsey had packed it in, too.
Lindsey was clearly exhausted. She hadn’t yet reached her SDPD buddy who could potentially provide an address for Dingo’s license plate number, but she’d left the woman a message. As Adam had gently pulled her out the door, she’d promised to call Pete the moment she had any information at all.
Shayla’d glanced at him then—they were only about halfway through, and they’d yet to find either Dingo or Dumber in the myriad of photos. He couldn’t tell if she was looking for permission to leave, too, so he said, “I’m sorry, yeah, it’s getting late,” right as she said, “So do you always hang out with movie stars?”
It took him a second to realize what she was talking about, and he said, “Oh, you mean Adam?” as she said, “It’s not late—it’s barely nine. And it’s not like I have a long drive home.”
“He’s a member of the Community,” Pete told her, and at her blank look, he added, “The SpecOps Community. Adam’s fiancé is a SEAL. And nine is late when you get up at oh-three-thirty for training exercises.”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.” She quickly backpedaled and started to stand up. “I’m a night owl and…I’m actually an oblivious night owl, so please, in the future don’t hesitate to simply tell me when it’s time for me to go.”
“No,” he said. “Wait. Please. I’m mostly a night owl, too. I’m usually BUD/S OIC—officer in charge of SEAL candidate training. Phase One. Hell Week’s 24/5, and I like to work at night, so I’m there. All night. But we’re between classes, plus I took emergency leave when Maddie didn’t come home last night, so…” He took a deep breath and went with full honesty. “Frankly, I’d love it if you could stay. If you don’t mind. Your help has been…Well, I’ve gone from hopeless to hope…ful’s not the right word, because I’m not exactly full of hope, but I’ve got at least a little now. Hope. That maybe I’ll be able to figure out what Maddie needs, and how I can make this dad thing work.”
Shayla’s face and eyes had shifted fully into that warm, soft, caring expression that he already loved the shit out of. “Heartened,” she said. “Is that the word you’re looking for?”
“Heartened,” Pete echoed. “Yeah. I’m heartened. Thank you for heartening me.”
She smiled at that, and he couldn’t help himself. He looked at her mouth and he even shifted slightly toward her, like his body, on autopilot, was getting ready to kiss her.
Whoa.
That would not be okay. Not after she’d friend-bombed him the way she had, back in the car.
Except now that he’d thought about kissing her, it was hard to think about anything besides where a kiss might go. And now he couldn’t stop thinking about the best way to undress her so that she could wrap her long legs around him and—missing daughter, missing daughter, missing daughter.
That worked to regain his focus.
Meanwhile Shayla didn’t seem to notice—she’d had no problem bringing her full attention back to the computer.
And despite this one little autopilot accident—which would not happen again—the fact that she stayed to help didn’t feel weird or awkward or inappropriate as the night ticked on.
It felt…
Nice. Like he wasn’t going through this alone.
“Dingo-madness,” Shayla repeated now as she continued scrolling through the zillions of photos.
Pete sighed and sat back. “At this point, every twentysomething idiot I see on Facebook looks like Dingo to me, so�
�”
“Ah,” she said. “It sounds like it’s kind of a cross between face blindness and whatever it was that the starving guy had in that Charlie Chaplin movie, you know, where he looks at Charlie and sees, what was it? A giant chicken drumstick?”
Pete laughed his appreciation. “Yeah, that’s definitely what I’ve got.”
“Aided by sleep deprivation, I bet.” Shayla glanced at him. “Why don’t you let me handle this for a bit,” she suggested, “while you close your eyes. Just for a few minutes. I mean, you might as well, since everyone looks like Dingo to you, right? You actually might be a liability if you start shrieking, There he is! every time I flip to a new photo.”
She had him there.
“I promise I’ll wake you if I find anything—or even if I need a second opinion,” she added.
So Pete put his feet up on the coffee table. With his head back against the couch cushions, he gave in and closed his eyes and the world hummed and buzzed and faded slightly. He could feel Shayla’s presence beside him and hear the sound of her quiet breathing as she used the touchpad to scroll. It was sleep but not-sleep, but then, to his surprise, darkness descended and he went with it—and checked fully out.
He woke himself up—his internal clock telling him it had been fifteen glorious minutes—suddenly aware that he’d shifted slightly toward Shayla in sleep, and that his leg was now pressed against the warmth of her thigh. Shit. He pulled back. Opened his eyes to check his dive watch. Fifteen minutes on the nose. Not bad. He cleared his throat. “Find anything?”
Shayla was hunched over the computer and she didn’t look up. “Nope, and I swear to every god out there that I’ll wake you if I do.”
“I’m good for now.” Fifteen minutes was more than enough to clear his head. Pete pulled himself up off the couch and beelined it to the kitchen’s coffeemaker. “You want coffee?” he asked. “Water? Tea? Scotch?”
She laughed. “Coffee,” she called back. “Please. I’m getting a little bleary from all the pouty-lipped selfies.”
Some Kind of Hero Page 7