by Amy Vansant
Mick sat her on the bed and fished his pockets for change. “I’m short on change. How about twelve and a half cents? We’ll split the difference.”
“Deal.”
A dime and two pennies sat in his palm but as she reached for them, he closed his fist and held it to his chest. “Whoa. You can’t give in that fast. You need to counter with another option.”
“Like what?”
“Like twenty cents. See?” He pulled another dime from his pocket, the jingle of more change alerting her to the depth of his deception.
“You said you didn’t have enough.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Do people always tell the truth?”
“No.”
Mick opened his palm again and added the second dime to the collection. “This is my counteroffer.”
Shee counted the money and took a moment to process. “Somewhere between what you owe me and what you tried the first time?”
“Right. A counteroffer.”
“Oh wait, wait.” Shee waved her hand in front of her as if she were erasing the last few minutes. “I have an idea. Put all your change on the bed.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Mick retrieved the rest of the coins from his pocket and dropped them in a pile on the bed. “There.”
Seventy-three cents. The number flashed in her head as soon as she saw the different shapes on the faded floral bedcover.
Shee scooped up the money and held it behind her back, staring at him, silent.
“So what’s your idea?” he asked.
“The idea was I get all the money in your pockets.”
Mick laughed again. Shee fought to remain straight-faced and smug.
“You think you’re so smart, smarty-pants.” Mick pinched the top of her knee until she squealed with laughter and struggled to get away.
“Stop!”
“Okay, sorry, sorry. Careful, you’re going to mess your costume. Come here.”
With breathy laughter Shee rolled off the bed to her feet and returned to the spotty floor-length mirror. Her father searched through the black box that once served as his shoeshine kit. He called it Prestidigitation Pete’s Box of Pranks and Ploys.
She hadn’t found a dictionary to look up prestidigitation yet. She wished motels put dictionaries in the drawers instead of bibles. They were more useful in the short-term.
Mick pulled a stick of brown eyeliner from the box and used it to add the freckle above her eyebrow.
“There. Perfect. Anything else?” he asked.
Shee compared herself in the mirror to the photo again.
“Dead ringer,” she said, smirking.
Mick shook his head. “You’ve got a sick sense of humor, girl.”
Her grin faded as she watched his expression grow serious. He leaned down to place a hand on each of her arms.
“You understand we’re doing this for her, right?”
She nodded. “For Vicki and her mom.”
He nodded. “Right. Good. You shouldn’t laugh at people’s pain.”
Shee swallowed. She hadn’t meant to be cruel.
Her father sniffed and clapped his hands together. “At least not if they can hear you. In private, humor isn’t a bad way to make horrible things feel less horrible.”
He grinned and she felt better. She didn’t even point out that the day before he’d called a man burned to death in a car wreck a crispy critter.
She admired herself in the mirror again.
I am a dead ringer, though.
She turned to find her father gone.
“Dad?”
Shee scanned the room. There were only a few places he could hide.
She guessed the opposite side of the far single bed.
Giving the furniture wide berth, she jumped forward, fists up in a fighting stance.
“Hi-ya!”
The space behind the bed hid nothing but the hideous carpet.
Hm. Not there.
Shee heard something rustle behind her and spun as her father burst from the closet, roaring.
“Arrrrr!”
She blocked his attempt to grab her, punched him hard on the inner thigh and ducked to slip from his grasp.
He dropped to one knee to pantomime how he would have reacted had she hit him in the groin as he’d taught her to hit a real attacker. Seeing her watching, he collapsed to his back, rolling on the floor, howling in mock pain.
She giggled. “It can’t hurt that much.”
He popped to his feet. “You have no idea.”
Mick wrapped his arms around her and squeezed.
“I love you, Shee.”
Shee’s cheeks warmed.
“You better not embarrass me like this in public,” she mumbled.
He held her at arms’ length, squinting one eye, his mouth twisted like an angry pirate’s. “Are you kidding? Hugs in public? My reputation as a cold stone killer would be ruined.”
“Exactly. Yours and mine.”
He chuckled and stood. “Deal. We’ll never speak of this again. We’ll get some chow and then our man.”
Shee danced away as he released her, whooping. “Pancakes!”
&&&
Shee and Mick entered the diner to the sound of a tinkling bell and sat in a booth behind the stools lining the counter. Beneath the frilly dress Shee’s father insisted she wear as her Vicki costume, the cracked leather of the seat scratched the back of her legs. She shifted to find a smoother perch.
Mick scanned the room before leaning forward to speak in a muted voice. “The guy we’re looking for eats at the counter every day at thirteen hundred hours.”
Shee checked her watch.
Five to one.
“Got it.”
“You know what to do?”
She nodded. Her stomach tightened, but the sensation felt more like excitement than fear. She knew the difference. He father had been MIA for twenty-four hours once when she was six. She’d sneaked downstairs and overheard the babysitter discussing her father’s disappearance on the phone.
Shee remembered her stomach tightening then, too.
That had been fear.
Mick sat back and then leaned in again. He had a strange, strained look. “Remember to get out of there. Don’t let him grab you.”
“If he grabs me, you’ll have to kill him.”
Her father scowled. “Why would you say that?”
“Because that’s what you told me when you got back from the bar last night.”
Mick cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you think I was at a bar?”
Shee ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “You smelled even more like cigarettes than the motel room already does. You put a slip from The Buckhead Tavern on the nightstand. You had red marks on your forearms from leaning against the bar. Your breath smelled like—”
Mick held up a hand. “Okay. I get it.” He shook his head. “I think I’ve created a monster.”
“—and you said you’d have to kill the man if he hurt me and you don’t say things like that when you’re not drinking.”
Her father poked a finger in her direction and she could tell she’d reached her favorite place—the fine line between amusing him and out-foxing him. “I got it. Now pay attention or I’ll have to kill you.”
She giggled.
That counted. She’d made him laugh five times already in one day. It might be a personal record.
The waitress arrived to hand them shiny, yellowing menus and place two red, plastic glasses of water on the table. Cracks spidered across the surface of the glasses, giving them a well-worn appearance. Shee imagined a million lips kissing their rims. Her lip curled.
Who drinks water, anyway?
“I’d like pancakes with blueberry syrup,” she said without looking at the photos of food scattered across the menu.
The waitress grimaced. “We don’t have blueberry syrup, just regular.”
Shee glared at her father.
Really?
/>
His eyes went dead and she knew she’d just been told to swallow her disappointment with regular syrup.
Shee answered with a tiny nod of resignation.
All the diners in the world and their mark had to come to one without blueberry syrup?
The waitress smiled, her dark red lipstick feathering into the lines etched around her mouth. The wrinkles, the ashy smell enveloping her like a fog, and the yellowing of the gray hair around her temples told Shee the woman had spent a good part of her life smoking.
“You knew what you wanted before you got here,” the waitress said in a scratchy baritone, pulling a pad from the big pocket stitched to the front of her apron. “You’re one of those breakfast-for-dinner girls, huh?”
Shee nodded and looked away to end the chit chat. She had nothing to say to a woman who didn’t have blueberry syrup.
Mick glanced at the menu and then put it down. “I’ll take a bowl of chili.”
“Anything to drink?”
“Two cokes.”
“I want a milkshake,” piped Shee.
Mick frowned, but she held his gaze, hoping her expression said, maybe a milkshake will make up for the syrup. When he didn’t immediately respond, she scratched at her wig as if she were about to rip it off, which wasn’t far from the truth.
His shoulders dropped a notch. “Fine. One Coke and a milkshake.”
Shee grinned at the waitress. “Chocolate.”
The woman nodded and left.
“That was blackmail,” said Mick.
“What?”
“Scratching at your wig like that. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing when you’re doing it.”
Shee smirked.
The tarnished brass bell above the diner’s door tinkled again and a lone man entered. He carried himself as if he were tired; black smears crisscrossed his blue t-shirt as if he’d been whipped with licorice.
“Is that him?” she whispered.
Mick put his finger over his lips and pretended he was rubbing them. His opposite hand hovered at the edge of the table. He rapped the top, motioning for her to slump down.
Shee stopped craning her neck to see and slouched to make herself small.
The man clomped in heavy work boots to the counter and sat directly across from them.
A different waitress, this one thinner and hawkish, approached the newcomer from the opposite side of the counter.
“Hey, Gerald.”
Shee knew the name. It had been in the dossier she’d insisted her father make for her for the mission. He’d been right. The staff knew him here. Gerald was a regular.
Gerald muttered something she couldn’t hear and the waitress moved away.
“Now?” she whispered to her father.
She saw him reach down and knew he’d just unstrapped his service weapon with a flick of his thumb.
“Now. Just like we practiced. And then get away.”
Shee nodded, her body alive with electricity. This was the first time her father had let her help with the in the field portion of his job. If she messed it up she’d be relegated back to his research department.
She slid from the booth as smoothly as possible with the ragged leather biting at her flesh and stepped behind the man. With a measured inhale, she shaped her eyes wide and soft. She’d practiced the look in the mirror for an hour the day before, imagining sad puppies in her mind.
Here goes nothing.
She tapped Gerald on the spine.
He twisted to look down at her.
“Daddy?” she asked.
Shee had read the phrase went white as a sheet in books before, but this was the first time she’d seen it in practice.
“Vickie?” Gerald whispered the word.
He reached for her, his eyes glassing over, lower lip trembling.
Shee jumped back and caught motion at her nine. With one long stride, her father appeared between her and the man.
“Richard Chapman, you’re AWOL and wanted for the murder of your wife and daughter.”
The man didn’t seem to register Mick’s presence.
His gaze remained locked on her.
“Vickie?”
Shee’s giddy elation over the completion of her mission suddenly felt like a ball of snakes in her chest. She didn’t know what the man was thinking, but she could feel something had snapped in him. He vibrated, seemingly unbound by the laws of nature, as if he could will himself to her, over oceans and through mountains.
“Vickie?”
Richard dropped from his stool and struggled against her father as if Mick were a wall he needed to climb, straining, reaching for her.
“Vickie?”
Shee jerked at the pins holding the wig to her head. She knew her dark hair had escaped its prison when the man’s expression shifted from hope to horror.
He recoiled, seeming to notice her father for the first time.
“You sonofabitch. You—”
Mick jerked the man’s hands behind his back and shoved Richard’s hips against the table where they’d been sitting, bending him over it.
“Hold still. Don’t make this worse than it is.”
“You’re a monster!” screamed Richard, his face red, spittle flying.
Mick pressed his prisoner’s head against the table. “Right. I’m the monster.”
The man broke into wracking sobs, looking very much human now. Shee found herself out of air and gulped a breath. Looking down at her side, she noticed her hand shaking and balled it into a fist.
“Outside,” said her father.
She led the way out of the diner. Behind her, Mick alternated between pushing the man in front of him and holding him up when he threatened to collapse to his knees.
I did it.
Captured. Richard Chapman, alias Gerald Toomer. Fugitive. AWOL. Killed his wife with a shotgun while on leave from the Navy and accidentally killed his daughter with a second blast as the girl ran to help her mother.
My first collar.
Her father pushed his captive outside, where shore patrol waited to take Richard Chapman to the Naval brig in Jacksonville, Florida.
The master-at-arms, a tall bald black man, glanced at Shee and did a double take. His gaze shifted to Mick.
“Did you have your daughter dress up as his dead daughter?”
Mick shrugged. “Seemed the easiest way to make him show his hand.”
The man chuckled, shaking his head. “Damn, Mick. That’s cold.”
Shore patrol led raving Richard Chapman away. Mick smiled down at Shee, his hand outstretched to shake.
“Good job, sailor.”
She reached out, her grin fading as she noticed her own hand still shaking. She looked to see if her father noticed.
“It’s adrenaline. It’ll stop,” he explained. His voice dropped to a mutter. “It’s scarier when it doesn’t happen anymore.”
He squatted to pull her tight to him and she threw her arms around his neck, suddenly unashamed to hug in public.
“You know I’d never let anything happen to you, right?” he asked.
“I know.”
“Good.”
He stood and she glanced back at the diner.
“Can I go back in for my milkshake?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “How ‘bout we find a place with blueberry syrup?”
She grinned. “That would be—”
Shee stopped, recalling the faces of the women in the restaurant as they’d walked out the prisoner. The male patrons had watched Richard. The women stared at her, and then let their gaze drift to her father.
Disapproval.
She squinted at Mick. “You’re afraid if we go back in, they’ll yell at you for bringing your daughter to catch a bad guy.”
Mick guided her toward the car. “Blueberry syrup it is, Seaman Recruit.”
Shee frowned. “I want to be an officer. I deserve a higher rank.”
He laughed. “You want pancakes. You want blueberry syrup. You w
ant a promotion. You want everything.”
“So?”
He shut the door, but she heard him laughing as he rounded the car to the driver’s side.
Shee clicked in her seatbelt, flush with joy.
She’d made him laugh six times.
&&&
Chapter Seven
Present Day. Jupiter Beach, Florida
“We got a hit.” Croix stumbled from the room located behind the front desk of The Loggerhead Inn, her shoulder clipping the door frame in her haste to deliver news. Dark ringlets danced around her face like bouncing black springs.
Angelina looked up from her concierge desk. “Easy there, spaz.”
Croix slapped her hands on the reception desk to stop her momentum. “We got a hit on the tracker.”
“What tracker?”
Silent, the young woman squinted from beneath a lowered brow.
Angelina grimaced. “Don’t look at me like you’re crowning me Miss Slow-on-the-Uptake, missy. Talk.”
“The tracker in the gun you had me setup on the roof outside Mick’s window. Something triggered it.”
“You actually did that?” Angelina stopped petting the Yorkshire terrier curled in the fuzzy black dog bed sitting on her desk. The pup grunted her disapproval.
“Yes. We talked about it, remember?”
“Sure, but it sounded like Star Wars stuff to me. Pie in the sky. I didn’t know you could actually do it.”
“Pie in the—” Croix shook her head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“So you’re saying you hit something?”
“I’m saying the gun did. Yes. That’s what we got a hit means.”
Angelina raised a hand, pantomiming her intention to slap. “Don’t think I can’t reach you from here.”
Croix grinned. “Oh please. I’d break you into so many pieces Harley would eat for a year.”
At the sound of her Yorkie’s name, Angelina resumed petting. “My baby wouldn’t gnaw my bones. Would you, baby?”
Harley licked her momma’s fingers.
Croix pointed. “See? She’s tasting you.”
“She’s kissing me. So your contraption is tracking her?”