“Well, I wouldn’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or even just a friend who sells drugs,” Frank insisted.
“You have no idea what you would or wouldn’t do if Mom died,” Tevin chastised his brother. “Don’t be so judgmental.”
“We don’t even know that it’s drugs that’s behind these threats,” Pete said. “We’re making an assumption.”
Frank veered into new hostile territory. “So when did you and Maddie’s mom get divorced?” he asked.
“We split when Maddie was a baby. Her mom and I weren’t married,” Pete said. “I asked, but…She didn’t want to marry me.”
“Why, because you’re, like, a serial killer?”
“Frank,” Tevin said. He rolled his eyes at Pete. “Sorry. Frankie’s in a douchey mood. He had a hot date with Dad’s flatscreen TV. Tiffany lets him watch Game of Thrones, and Mom doesn’t.”
Boom.
Fuck, was that a gunshot?
Peter sharply looked up and a truck—black, big—was at the end of the street, moving in their direction at much too fast a clip.
“Get down!” he shouted and the two boys, no doubt well trained by life in this sorry world of potential school shooters—immediately sheltered behind their mother’s car.
But Shay was still standing in the middle of the yard, her phone in her hands. She was caught up in her task and oblivious, and Pete ran toward her—it was possible he’d never moved faster in his entire life. He threw himself forward just as the vehicle went past, putting his body between her and whoever was in that truck, as he grabbed her and shielded her, and took her with him down to the ground.
Boom.
And this time, he heard it for what it was—an engine backfire. And as he turned to look, he saw that yeah, the truck that had passed was big and black, but it was far older, with sharper angles and an ancient, obviously shittier engine, than the truck he’d seen, and the truck Mrs. Quinn had described to the police.
“Oh, my God, Peter!” For the second time in just a few hours—the third time in two days—Shay’d been knocked off her feet.
This time, though, Pete hadn’t tried to do what he’d done on that sidewalk outside Daryl Middleton’s old apartment, and land between her and the ground. This time he’d landed on top of her, intentionally, to protect her from an active shooter.
She still hadn’t realized that the noises they’d heard were from a malfunctioning engine, and now she feared he’d been hit and wounded. Probably because he was lying there motionless, like a fool. She scrambled out from beneath him—it was possible he was more stunned than she was—checking for blood even as she called out to her sons. “Tevin, Frank, are you okay?”
“Yeah, we’re good, are you?” Tevin asked as Frank squeaked, “Mommy!”
“I’m okay, baby,” she called back.
Frank’s fear turned to anger. “What the hell was that?”
“Don’t be dead,” Shay muttered as she tried to roll Pete over. “Please, please, please, don’t be dead.”
“I’m not, I’m not.” Pete sat up and caught her hands, “I’m okay. Jesus, I’m so sorry.” He called to the boys, “Sorry, guys, false alarm. I’m a little on edge. The men we’ve been dealing with have a black truck. I saw that one, it backfired, and I should’ve known what the noise was, but I just reacted. Overreacted.”
“You scared me to death!” Shayla kissed him, and as he kissed her back, he heard Tevin say, “Whoa!”
Frank started to say something, but it was possible Tevin had clapped a hand over the younger boy’s mouth.
But right now was definitely not the right time for Pete to kiss Shayla the way he really wanted to, so instead he pulled back and looked into her eyes. “I’m okay,” he confirmed. “You okay?”
Shay nodded and exhaled hard. “It’s been a really intense few days,” she told her sons as Pete helped her back to her feet. “Which is why we’re going to do this whole safe house thing. Spend the weekend with our heads down, just watching movies, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tevin said. He gave her a hug.
Meanwhile, Frank was still looking hard at Pete. “You thought that whoever was in that truck was gonna shoot Mom.”
“I did,” he admitted. “I got scared. I should’ve known that sound was just a backfire, but—”
“If they had been shooting, you’d be dead,” Frank pointed out. “Doing what you did? Running toward her like that?”
“Maybe, but your mother would be alive.”
“So, you’re saying you’d die for her? I mean, you’re not saying it—you did it, and everyone’s always telling me that actions speak louder than words. It was like you’re her secret service agent, or her bodyguard. You were ready to die for her.”
“Frank,” Shay said.
“No, it’s okay,” Pete said. He looked at Frank. “You got a problem with that?”
“Shit, no!” Frank said.
“Language,” Shay said on a sigh.
He glanced at her. “Sorry, ma’am.” Back to Pete: “I’m just trying to figure it out. You’re ready to die for her, and you’re all kissing-her-on-the-front-lawn, but you just met her.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “But, look at her. She’s pretty fucking great.” He glanced at Shayla. “Sorry, ma’am.” Back to Frank: “I mean, you and Tevin both know that.”
Frank was finally smiling and he now held out his hand. “Pete,” he said. “I do believe this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”
As they shook hands, Shayla said, “Pete? I think you might want to call him Lieutenant Greene.”
Frank turned his smile onto his mother and shrugged expansively. “He told us to call him Pete. I gotta do what the man says.”
“Someone please help me with this bag.” Tiffany had finally emerged from the house, oblivious to the drama as she locked the door behind her. Tevin leapt to get her luggage and wrestle it to the car. “It’s all files from work plus my laptop. Project’s due on Monday.” She smiled at Shay. “I can borrow clothes, if I need ’em, right?”
“Frankie’s more your size,” Shay said diplomatically, “but sure. Clothes yes, computer never.”
“See, I knew that,” Tiffany said.
Meanwhile, Frank had turned back to Pete. “So what was it? Like, love at first sight?”
“Oh, my God, Frankie,” Shayla said. She actually clapped her hands at her son, as if he were a misbehaving puppy. Pete tried not to laugh. “Just get in the car! Everyone into the car! Now!”
“It’s really okay,” Pete told her as they all climbed in. He turned to look back at Frank. “More like at first conversation. Don’t get me wrong. Your mother’s beautiful, but…That brain, that amazing mind inside of her brilliant head…That’s what you look for in a woman.” He glanced at Tevin. “In a person.”
“That is so sweet!” Tiffany enthused as Shayla pulled out into the traffic. “You are so sweet!”
“Nope,” he said. “Just observant. And very lucky.”
“Can we focus here, Pete?” Shayla shot him a hard look, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation, her fingers tight on her steering wheel. “Since Izzy got those photos—the money shots of Daryl—that we sent to Maddie, he figured it was okay to leave Adam alone at the hospital. He thought it was a waste of person-power to have them both sitting there, waiting for Daryl to wake up. He wanted to know what was next on your to-do list, so I asked him—Izzy—to pick up Hiroko. Will you please give her a call to tell her he’s coming?”
Pete nodded as he got out his phone. “Thank you, that’s…You’d make a great senior chief.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Shay said, “but I’m going to pretend it’s a good thing.”
“Trust me, it is,” he said, and dialed Hiroko.
Hiroko Nakamura lived in the home of Izzy’s dreams.
The house itself was nothing special, but location, location, location! The ocean was right there.
Eden sometimes claimed that Izzy woul
d live in an underwater house if he could, and maybe that was true, but if he did, he’d miss the beauty of the above-water environs. The sea and the sky, and the sound of the constantly moving surf…Underwater, everything was muted and in slow motion. Most of the time. Sometimes, the Pacific could be a deadly monster, and that underwater house would have to be built pretty deep beneath the surface to avoid the churning and turmoil.
Izzy went up the front path, but he didn’t need to ring the doorbell. The door opened before he hit the front stoop.
Ms. Nakamura was diminutive in size, but the glare she gave him was gigantic.
He deflected it with a smile. “I’m Izzy Zanella,” he said.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You wasted a trip. I’m not going with you.” And she shut the door in his face.
Ho-kay. He knocked—ringing a bell just wasn’t his thing—and he kept knocking until she opened the door again.
“What?”
“Grunge—Peter—said you have some really rockin’ pictures from Manzanar,” Izzy told her. “Won’t be a wasted trip if you’ll let me take a look.”
“You just want to get inside, so you can talk me into coming with you.”
Izzy nodded. “Yup. But I’d rather do it while looking at photos of something I’m deeply interested in, instead of shouting through a closed door.”
She hmphed at him, but she didn’t shut the door.
He waited.
She did, too. She just stood there with that glare on heavy stun, trying to psych him out—make him speak or turn away.
But he had older brothers. There was no psych-out game on this planet that Izzy could not win. So he settled in for the duration, pasting his blandest smile on his face.
And sure enough, she cracked. “Why are you interested in Manzanar?”
“Well, there’s a lot of reasons, maybe the top one is Because I’m an American…?” He thought about it. “Yeah. That’s right. The forced internment of American citizens during World War Two is a stinking stain of dog crap on our history as a nation, and it’s important that we don’t erase it. I was eleven when I first found out about it, and I read everything I could get my hands on—even talked my brother and his wife into going on a roadtrip to Manzanar and Tule Lake, too. They had one of those pop-up campers.”
Hiroko did her silent stare-down thing again, and again, Izzy just waited.
She finally opened the door wider, and gestured for him to come in.
Twenty minutes later, he was carrying her bag as he walked her out to his truck. Because after he’d looked at her photos, he’d shown her his.
And that close-up of Daryl Middleton in his ICU hospital bed did the trick.
“I’m going to hate this,” Hiroko told him, as he pulled away from her house.
“Probably,” he agreed. “But maybe not. Shayla’s got it going on.”
“Hmph,” she said, but the tone was slightly different, so he decided to interpret it as Hmph, I agree.
The drive to Shay’s was going to take about twenty minutes, and he resisted the urge to suggest they sing their favorite show tunes, and instead opted to ride in what he chose to believe was a mutually respectful silence.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As Shayla stood in the middle of her kitchen with activity swirling around her, she realized that she was never going to be alone with Peter again.
Well, at least not until they found Maddie, and whatever danger the girl was in was finally over.
Hugely pregnant Lindsey Jenkins was parked on Shay’s sofa in the living room, trying to track down a cop friend who had a lawyer friend who knew Fiona’s aunt Susan. Apparently, Fiona’s parents weren’t picking up, and hadn’t returned the messages that Lindsey’d left. And Susan still wasn’t in her law office. Lindsey was hoping her friend of a friend might help.
Peter was “walking the perimeter” with Timebomb and Hans, while the young man named Seagull was at the kitchen table, attempting to create a schedule for guard duty from a long list of volunteers, taking into account the various times each person was available.
Tiffany, Frank, and Tevin were attempting to help, but probably making life significantly harder for the SEAL candidate. Particularly Tiff, who was leaning over from across the table to check the list of names every chance she got. Poor Seagull was going to have an aneurysm from all that boobage in his face.
Hiroko sat at the other end of the table, her own laptop open in front of her, arms crossed, earbuds in. Shay had no idea what the elderly woman was watching, but she didn’t want to get too close and find out for sure. This way, Shay could at least conjure up a small smile as she pretended that it was porn.
Izzy had dropped Hiroko and dashed back to Van Nuys—if one could call a two-and-a-half-hour drive a dash, especially since he was heading directly into the Los Angeles Hellmouth of terrible afternoon traffic. But he’d gone willingly and cheerfully to stake out the Dinglers’ house, in case Dingo and Maddie—or the bad men chasing them—showed up.
Izzy was, without a doubt, one of Peter’s very best friends.
Although, glancing at that long list of SEALs and former military personnel willing to volunteer their time to help keep them safe…
Peter had a lot of very good friends.
He came into the house through the kitchen door, filling up the room as only he could. It was funny how that happened. Izzy was taller and broader than Peter. Both Hans and Timebomb were, too. But when Peter walked in…
He smiled at her, and the room got even smaller.
“Hello.” Shay put almost no voice to the word, but he heard her.
The flare of heat in his eyes was proof of that, but it was accompanied by disbelief as he glanced over at the crowded kitchen table before giving her a Seriously? look. She also could see that he was actually doing the math equation in his head. If they snuck out now to rendezvous in his garage, could they be back inside before anyone even knew they were missing…?
But then, as he realized she had been only kidding, Shay could see his amusement and chagrin, along with that ever-present slow burn.
“Sorry,” she murmured, at a level for his ears only. “I couldn’t resist. We’ll have to somehow stay strong.”
Peter laughed as he moved in to put his arms around her, and everyone at the table looked up and over. At them.
So he backed up and pointed to the door instead. “I have, um, a, uh…question about the fence,” he said loudly. “If you don’t mind stepping outside…?”
Shay followed him out into the backyard. “You know, that fooled no one.”
“Yeah,” he said, finally pulling her in for that embrace. She wrapped her arms around his waist and enjoyed the feel of him, solid against her. “I’m sorry about before.”
“That’s okay,” she said. Was it love at first sight? “You kind of had to, you know, say what you said. I mean, Frankie was in your face.”
Peter pulled back to look down at her. “I was talking about tackling you.”
“Oh,” she said. Oops. “Well, I’d tell you that you can make it up to me by kissing my scrapes and bruises, but that’s not going to happen with our current cast of thousands.”
Peter smiled. “Safety over sex.”
“Is that, like, another Navy SEAL slogan?” she asked.
He laughed and then kissed her. Briefly. Sweetly. “You know, sadly, it might be.”
And now they were both smiling at each other.
He came back to earth first. “Any word from Adam?” he asked.
Shayla checked her phone, pulling it from her pocket. Adam was still at the hospital, with Daryl. “Just that No change text that I told you about. It’s only been ten minutes.”
Peter sighed. “Sorry. Still nothing from Maddie?”
“Not yet. She’ll contact us. I know it. Just give her time.”
He nodded.
“You know, your friends are amazing,” Shayla told him.
“Teammates,” he corrected her.
> Did he honestly think…? “Lindsey’s not a teammate.”
“She’s a teammate by marriage,” Peter said. “And yeah, everyone’s really stepping up. They are great. And speaking of the Team, I’m sorry, but I have to go over to the base. I won’t be long, but I really need to do a face-to-face with my CO. Are you gonna be okay here?”
“You know it,” she said. “If trouble shows up, Hiroko will kick everyone’s ass.”
He laughed and kissed her again. “With her sidekick, Tiffany.”
Shayla laughed, too. “We’re good here. We’re safe. We’re in extra-safety mode. You know how I know?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, his eyes doing that sparkling thing she’d loved right from the start. “Because no one’s getting any.”
“That’s right. Safety over sex. Hoo-yah! Isn’t that also what you SEALs say?”
“Hoo-yah,” he agreed as he followed Shay back inside. “Yeah. But generally not about…that.”
Dingo had put his foam mattress under the picnic table so that Maddie could curl up there, in the improvised shade, in the otherwise relentlessly barren Manzanar National Historic Site parking lot—and she’d fallen fast asleep.
He sat in the passenger seat of his car with all the doors opened wide, and he watched her for a while. People generally looked younger while they slept, and she was not an exception to that rule.
She looked maybe twelve.
Which wasn’t that much younger than the fifteen that she really was. And yeah, yeah, Juliet was fourteen or whatever, but back in Shakespeare’s day, thirty was considered old age. Also, Romeo wasn’t twenty.
Or a loser whose parents had kicked him out.
He reached for her phone—she’d shut it off and stashed it in the cupholder—and as he watched her gently breathing, he turned it on.
He knew her screen lock code—4242—not that she’d shared it, but she certainly hadn’t tried to hide it from him, either. And as the phone powered up, he both silenced it and covered it. He had no intention of looking through her personal messages—she’d gotten about a billion texts since she’d shut the thing off. He had one goal here: open up a line of communication to Maddie’s dad.
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