Worth Searching For

by Wendy Qualls

  Deciding what to say to Gabriela took a lot more work. What could he tell the cousin who had saved him from being on the streets, but whom he hadn’t bothered contacting for years? She’d mentioned her boyfriend’s name was Lucas in her Christmas card. Lito had a vague memory of a rumpled-looking guy with glasses and a bit of a gut coming with Gabriela to a family get-together or two, once upon a time—that was probably him. Hopefully he’d grown up some.

  Lito finally settled on sending an actual letter back: Sorry, been gone from the area for a long time, it’d be great to see you and Lucas again, the offer of the guest room is really generous, thanks. Probably going to be apartment-hunting in Miami again soon and it might take a while. Oh, and Spot would be coming along, is that a problem? The day after he sent it, he second-guessed himself and went hunting for her on Facebook anyway. She looked gorgeous in her picture, a soft smile on her face and the wind whipping her long hair around as she posed on an overlook somewhere. Lucas didn’t look at all familiar—if it was the same guy as Lito remembered, he must have gotten contacts and lost a lot of hair—but the parts of Gabriela’s page he could see were refreshingly free of any extreme political opinions or glurgy religious memes. His own were pretty blatantly rainbow-themed, but then she already knew that about him. He sent the friend request. She accepted it almost immediately.

  Got your letter! she messaged him a few days later. Yes, we’d love to have you stay with us! Spot too. Our condo isn’t dog-proofed, since we’ve never had a dog or kids, but I’m not worried about it. You and Spot are both welcome to stay as long as you like—just let me know when you’re planning to come!

  Perfect. That was going to be perfect.

  * * * *

  “You’re late, dude.” Scooter beckoned Dave over to the picnic table with a jerk of his head. “I swear, you haven’t been yourself lately. Have you been sick?”

  Not sick, just…drained. “I’m fine,” Dave said. Rick gave him an ‘I don’t believe you but I’m not gonna call you on it now’ look, but he continued on through the team meeting agenda as if Dave’s belated arrival was a totally normal thing instead of something that had almost never happened prior to Lito leaving. Lumpy and Woozy sniffed the rest of their pack like they’d been gone for months instead of just a week.

  “Okay, anyone have any specific practice requests tonight?” Rick asked everyone. Dave had been late enough to miss the entire business meeting, apparently. Crap.

  No one did, so Rick sent the rest of the team out all at once to run each dog on multi-body finds. He kept Dave back on the pretext of going over some NALSAR tax paperwork. Dave kept his butt on the bench until everyone else had sorted out who was hiding and who was finding and who was observing, but sitting still was more difficult than it should have been. He was up and lavishing attention on Woozy before the rest of the team had even cleared the tree line.

  Rick let him pretend for a few minutes, just idly watching him while he put off the inevitable. He snapped his fingers, then, and Woozy ran to sit by his side. The traitor.

  “You’re not sick,” Rick declared. “I’ve seen you power through much worse than this without even acknowledging something was wrong. Your dogs appear to be in their usual good spirits too. You totally blew off practice last week, though, and now you’re half an hour late. Anything you want to talk about?”

  God, he so didn’t want to talk. About anything, but especially not about Lito. “It’s been busy at work, I guess. Spring coming means more to do.” It wasn’t a complete lie—he really had been spending more time in his tiny office. And doing more solo projects, so he didn’t have to deal with anyone asking him what was up. And…dammit, I guess I really have been hiding.

  Rick wasn’t buying it either. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with Lito not coming to the last few practices, would it?” He arched an eyebrow at Dave, a look which was somewhat spoiled by Woozy trying to crawl into his lap to get more attention. She backed off at Dave’s sharp cough.

  “I haven’t talked to him in a while, so I wouldn’t know.” Christ, that sounded sullen even to his own ears.

  Rick didn’t literally roll his eyes, but the implication was there. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but aren’t the two of you dating? You never made a formal announcement to the team—not that you should have to—but I damn well know I didn’t imagine all those fuck-me looks you two have been giving each other. Spot has calmed down around you too, like she’s seeing a lot of you outside practice. Or maybe you’re seeing a lot of her. Although maybe if you and Lito aren’t talking…”

  Fuck. “It’s not like that.” Rick had been his best friend for more than decade, which meant he knew exactly the right buttons to push to get Dave to spill his guts whether he wanted to or not. Might as well surrender to the inevitable. “We were seeing each other, I think, but he ended it.”

  “You think.” Rick snorted. “Seems like the kind of thing you’d notice.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I? I would have thought you meant that you and Lito were besotted with each other, totally head-over-heels, and you didn’t care who knew it. That maybe you two carpooling to and from practice together more often than not meant you were spending a lot of time in each other’s company. I recognize that look you get when you think he’s not watching you—I still get like that over Sharon sometimes. Like you can’t believe you’re so lucky and you’re terrified you’re going to fuck everything up.”

  Too late. Dave shook his head. “We never talked about ‘where is our relationship going’ or any of that crap—I just like him. Like being around him. And I thought he felt the same about me, but I guess not. I’m too protective and too country redneck for him.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since he got a promotion and is moving back to Miami, where he grew up.”

  There were several seconds of silence from Rick. Scratch and Sniff both came over to see what was wrong with their human, but Woozy was loath to relinquish her spot. “Is he already gone?” Rick finally asked.

  Dave honestly wasn’t sure. “It sounded like it was going to be soon, but I don’t know if he’s started the new job yet,” he admitted. “Miami is better for him anyway, though.”

  “How so?”

  Because he can meet someone more like himself. “Did you know he’d never actually been in the woods before joining the team?”

  Rick hmmed. “I didn’t, but I’m not surprised.”

  “He gave this a fair go, but I can’t begrudge him the chance to start over somewhere else. Somewhere life is more the pace he’s used to from Atlanta. Where there isn’t quite such a high concentration of homophobes.”

  “Oh, that’s not true.” Rick grimaced. “You can begrudge the hell out of him for it. Being silently not okay for long periods of time is one of your more developed skills. That being said…” He tossed the clipboard with the budget printout on it to Dave, who only caught it out of reflex. “Let’s get these team expenses sorted and then you can come over for a beer later tonight. Sharon’s got beef stew in the crock pot and she always makes enough to feed ten people anyway.”

  Dave would have rather gone home and moped some more, but Rick was right—he did need to get out of the house and get over himself. “As long as we don’t have to talk feelings all night,” he said, “I’m in.”

  Chapter 18

  Rick didn’t mention Lito at all that night. Or for the whole next month. He must have said something to the other team members too—usually they’d all be gabbing about news like Lito getting a promotion and moving away, but there was a pointed absence of idle chatter whenever Dave was in earshot. They worked harder when they weren’t distracted with gossip, though, so it was probably for the best anyway.

  The one bright spot in Dave’s April was that his old Army buddy Gus came to visit. They’d met during his first tour and kept in touc
h after that, even after Dave and Rick came back to the States and dropped off the Army’s radar. Gus was two years older than Dave, an equal-opportunity, varsity-level flirt, and the best damn airplane mechanic Dave had ever met. Also the cockiest.

  “I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last drove all the way down here,” Gus said, emerging from Dave’s junk-room-turned-guest-bedroom. He was dressed but barefoot and his hair was still damp from the shower. “You sure you want to take the day off just to shoot the shit with me? I’m getting old, dude. Not as many wacky adventures to talk about anymore.”

  “You and me both.” Even if they ended up saying nothing to each other all day—which had happened more than once—it would be nice to just sit by the pond and watch Lumpy and Woozy snuffle around the yard together. Fish a bit, maybe. “I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime in the last couple of weeks. It’s fine.”

  They shared a leisurely breakfast—Gus had gotten in too late the previous night for them to eat a proper dinner—and did do some idle catching up. Dave was just deciding whether to bother with the handful of dishes or leave them for later when he got the call from the Black Lake police department. Gus silently took over rinsing their plates while Dave answered the phone. Fifty-seven-year-old man with early onset dementia, lived alone, son says he went missing sometime since the previous evening. Could be hypothermic and in need of his medications if he wandered off during the night, or could be totally fine and merely lost if he disappeared more recently. Even more fun: his house was on a cul-de-sac that backed up against Black Lake’s biggest cemetery. That was a lot of acreage to cover. Shit.

  “NALSAR thing?” Gus asked after Dave had hung up.

  “Call-out.” The police had already done a drive-by around the other neighborhoods in the area, but the cemetery dated back to the 1800s and had a lot more trees than it had paved roads. “Looks like I would have been calling out from work today after all.”

  Gus turned off the water and leaned up against the counter. “You know, for all you and Rick have talked about what y’all are doing, I’ve never gotten to see you in action. Is this something I could tag along for?”

  “Yeah, I don’t see why not.” It was going to be a decent search to watch, honestly—the weather was partly sunny, comfortably warm as long as you had a jacket along, and incident command would probably be Rick, Dave, and maybe a handful of police officers. All of whom he’d worked with before, so no departmental posturing issues there. “Search gear is in the front hall closet if you want to go. I’m gonna go get changed into sturdier boots and my team shirt; you go ahead and dig through the loose stuff in the gray bin and see what you can find. Pretty sure I have duplicates of all the important things, especially for a daytime search in easy terrain like this one.”

  “Oh come on,” Gus teased. “This was your chance to talk up how big and dangerous search and rescue is. You tell me it’s easy, I’m gonna think you’ve gone soft after all.”

  “I have gone soft. Can’t scale a cliff with an eighty-pound pack the way I used to.” Dave flipped him a casual finger and headed for his bedroom. “The only hard part of this call-out is going to be searching in a cemetery, honestly.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Cemetery searches meant the cross-trained dogs were going to have a bitch of a time focusing on live scent. Especially in cases like this, when the police didn’t know for sure the search target hadn’t passed away from exposure over the course of the night—it had been pretty damn cold when Gus had pulled into the driveway a bit before midnight. Dave mentally sorted through his available team members. Scooter and Cheerio hadn’t gotten all that far into cadaver training yet, so Cheerio would probably be okay, but Nikita and Zeus were going to have problems. Lumpy would have been perfect—her live and deceased signals were unusually specific—but her nose really was too old to be reliable in a situation like this. Scratch, maybe…

  Lito. Dammit. The team couldn’t show up with one and a half dogs. Everything in him rebelled against making the call, but Dave forced himself to dial Lito’s number. It rang long enough he assumed he was going to have to leave a voicemail, but Lito finally picked up.

  “Something wrong?” he asked by way of a greeting.

  God, hearing his voice was harder than Dave had expected, even with that healthy dose of annoyance in it he’d been expecting. I miss you was out of the question, though. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” There was a shuffling of something on Lito’s end of the line. “You’re usually at work this time of the morning—why the call? I’m headed out on Friday, so I’m kind of busy getting everything packed…”

  “Sorry to interrupt, then.” Fuck. Friday. That was only three days away. It meant Lito was still in Black Lake, though. “I know you’ve quit the team, but the thing is, we’ve got a call-out. Could really use you and Spot.”

  Lito didn’t laugh in his face and hang up. Dave chose to take that as a good sign. “Why us?” Lito asked. “Spot’s not certified and she’s probably never going to be.”

  There weren’t any volunteer K9 search-and-rescue units in Miami-Dade County. Lito had said that, but during the middle of the night a few weeks earlier when Dave couldn’t sleep, he’d looked it up himself. Not that it was any of his business whether Lito liked it enough to continue or not.

  “It’s a dementia patient,” he explained instead. “Sixty-two years old, living alone. His son reported him missing this morning when he came by to bring breakfast and his father’s front door was open. Thought it was a burglary at first, but his dad’s hat and cane were gone and apparently our guy won’t leave the house without them. We’re treating this as a live find search unless we get some reason to do otherwise.”

  “Okay…and?”

  And it’s going to be a pain in the ass. Shouldn’t say that, though. “His house is just a block away from the Shady Garden cemetery. I guess you’d have no reason to have been there before, but it’s almost eighty acres. Did I ever tell you about the first time the team got a call-out like this? None of us had as much experience with this type of search yet, so here Steve and Sharon and Rick and I go, looking for this seven-year-old who ran away from home up in Meridianville. Steve’s dog—his last one, before Nikita—anyway, his dog gave a great alert right at the start. Then she ran to the nearest gravestone and started trying to dig.”

  “Well shit.”

  “Exactly. We’ve worked more on cross-training since then, to help the dogs focus on just live or just cadaver scent, but Lumpy and Woozy are the only ones currently on the team who we can be a hundred percent sure won’t go dig up someone’s grandma—and they’re both too old for this. Cheerio and Spot are the only two dogs who haven’t been through cadaver training yet. The team could really, really use you if you can come.”

  “Does the team agree?” Lito asked. “Or is this going to be awkward for everyone?”

  “We’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” I just have to be distant and polite and you’ll be leaving Black Lake in a few days anyway. It was going to suck, dealing with everyone watching them for clues for future gossip, but they were both adults. They could do this.

  “I guess I’m free,” Lito told him. “Where should I meet you?”

  * * * *

  Lito was second-guessing himself the whole drive over. Spot was mostly just excited to be wearing her search vest and riding in the car again. He’d been expecting a big, busy scene when he got to the cemetery, but incident command was maybe half a dozen people milling around Rick and Sharon’s van.

  “Thanks for coming,” Rick said, rolling himself back a little ways away from where Dave and Sharon and a police officer were talking so he didn’t have to shout. “Dave said you’re packing for your big move, so hopefully this won’t take too long. Shady Grove is old enough for the trees in the historic parts to make line of sight difficult but it’s all pretty flat
and there’s no water to worry about. You and Spot doing okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re fine.” Lito glanced back over at his car, where Spot was happily sticking her head out the passenger side window and sniffing the breeze. “Sorry I never officially told you guys I was leaving, but—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Rick cocked his head to one side, studying him. “I should ask, though: do you want me to pair you with Dave, or would you rather he be on Team Cheerio for this one?”

  “I, um.” Damn it. Rick was being super-casual about the whole thing, which meant he and Dave had probably been talking. Hopefully Dave hadn’t painted him as a complete jackass. Or maybe…hell. A second possibility occurred—maybe Dave didn’t care anywhere near as much as Lito did. Maybe Rick was being casual because Dave had totally shrugged off his maybe-probably relationship with Lito and hadn’t felt there was anything to talk about. Maybe Lito was the only one left feeling like shit. “I’m okay with either,” he lied.

  Rick put Dave with Scooter and Cheerio and one of the police officers. Sharon and the other officer took Scratch in the opposite direction, toward the part of the cemetery which was more landscaping and memorial plaques than actual graves. Lito was left with Rick, Spot, and a tall man in a well-worn t-shirt whom he’d never met before.

  “Gus,” the man said, offering a handshake. “I’m actually stationed up in Clarksville—Tennessee—but I come down to visit these idiots every once in a while.”

  “Gus was over with Dave and me in Afghanistan,” Rick explained. “Not our unit, but we ended up at the same base for a while. He’s a total jackass and has a twelve-year-old’s sense of humor, but despite those two lovely qualities I suspect you guys would get along just fine. We’re short bodies, obviously, so would y’all be okay on your own together? Cell reception all through here is good, so call me if you find Waldo or if Spot alerts somewhere inaccessible. We can get the EMTs out to you quickly if they’re needed but there was a three-car pileup on the highway this morning so they didn’t have the manpower to keep an ambulance here waiting.”