by Dale Mayer
The woman came back, grabbed his plate, looked at him and asked, “Another?”
His eyes rounded as he shook his head. “No, I think I’m good with one.”
She gave him a quick nod and left.
His mind was still amazed at the question. “Do you think anybody could eat two of those things?” He glanced at Geir still working on the first half of his, trying to take it easy. Laszlo said, “If you can’t finish it, I’ll take it over.”
Geir nodded. “I’m good as long as I eat slow. Normally my system is stronger than it is at the moment. If I treat it right, it will be back to normal soon.”
Laszlo took a break and sipped some coffee. Geir still had a massive pile of fries. “I wonder how many people leave food on the plate here.”
“Never twice,” Geir admitted. “I don’t imagine they take that kindly.”
Laszlo chuckled. “Maybe not.” He returned to the issue at hand. “How do we find other people who might have known more about where Mouse went?”
“Ask Mason for whatever the military has on file. If that’s something he can’t do, then we should ask Levi.”
Lazlo stole a few of Geir’s fries and sent Erick a text, asking him to request Mason get information on Mouse’s residence in California and anything else he can find. They would head home first thing in the morning but were quite prepared to head on to California if need be afterward.
Then realizing he didn’t remember Mouse mentioning owning his own vehicle, he added a note saying, Check the DMV database if he owned a vehicle.
Erick acknowledged with a text as Laszlo watched Geir make his way through the last of the fries. “I’m surprised you’re eating as much as you are,” he said.
Geir shrugged. “So am I. It’s good.”
The front door opened, and Laszlo looked up to see Minx walk in. She’d cleaned up some, had a big smile on her face, as if knowing she was with friends. The waitress bustled over and gave her a hug. She had hardly spoken to them, but apparently Minx warranted a personal greeting. The waitress motioned to the front counter, and Minx nodded and took a seat, the two of them in an animated conversation.
As if her instincts had kicked in, she turned around to sweep the room. Her gaze landed on them, and she frowned. She got up and walked over. “What are you two doing here?”
“Having dinner.” Laszlo asked lazily, “Is there a law against that?”
She leaned forward. “Mouse used to work here. It’s the one job he did have that got him away from his mom. Agnes over there used to feed us anytime we didn’t have food that day.”
Chapter 5
Minx didn’t know how she felt about seeing the two men here. The fact that they found this café was amazing. Agnes and Bart had been running it since before anybody could remember, but they never advertised. Outside of a very worn, faded café sign on the front of the building, there was very little to suggest the food here was the best in town. But word of mouth had traveled, and the old-timers were good at not sharing in order to keep it for themselves.
It wasn’t very busy at the moment, but Minx had been here at times when there was standing room only as they waited for people to eat and to move out. People were more than happy to wait for well over an hour for a burger here.
Laszlo patted the seat of the booth beside him and said, “Join us.”
She raised an eyebrow and considered the issue. “You want to question Agnes, don’t you?” Her suspicions were confirmed when she watched him nod.
“Absolutely I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to have a meal with you.”
She motioned at his almost empty plate. “I’d be too late for that.”
“I’d have invited you if I’d had your number,” he said with a cheerful grin. “We had no idea about this place.”
“Tourists never do,” she said. “It survives by word of mouth. And the trouble is, it’s often very hard to get a seat in here.”
“They’ve been open a long time, I gather.”
“Over thirty years,” she said. “Mouse and I used to run here on some particularly rough days. Agnes always had a big smile. If you behaved yourself, stuck to the right side of life, she would support anybody. If you even make an attempt to get your life together, she’d support you any way she could. Screw her over though, and you’re done.” Minx’s tone came out low.
Just then Agnes walked toward them. “I heard my name.” She placed a large platter of burger and fries down in front of Minx. Beside it was a bowl of salad. “If I know you, Minx, you haven’t been eating properly.”
Minx flushed. “Agnes, I’m doing fine.”
She shook her head. “Like hell. You were scrawny as a kid, and you’re scrawny as a woman. You should never have left.”
“That’s definitely something I’ve considered over the years,” Minx said with a smile. “You’re all heart, Agnes.”
She nodded. “I am.” She glanced at the two men and asked, “You know Minx?”
There was a hard undertone to her voice, as in, if they messed up, she’d be on them in a heartbeat. But, if they were friends, then she’d be okay to welcome them into her inner circle of accepted patrons.
“To be honest, we only met her today,” Laszlo said quietly. “But there’s a lot to like,” he admitted. “And, no, we’re not fly-by-night visitors. We came to check into the history of a friend of ours who’s passed away.”
Agnes crossed her arms over her ample bosom and stared at him. “Cops?” she barked.
The two men shook their heads.
“We were in the navy. He was one of our unit. He passed away in an accident a couple years ago. An accident where we were all badly injured. Now that we’re finally back on our feet, we decided to come and do a memorial trip for our friend.”
“Who’s your friend?”
Minx stiffened, knowing what would come next. She turned to look at him, looked over at Agnes and decided to do it herself. “Agnes, it’s Mouse.”
Agnes stared at her in shock, her gaze going from both men back to Minx. “Mouse? He’s dead?”
Minx nodded. “According to them, yes.”
But then Agnes shook her head. “Oh no. Oh no. You guys got that wrong.”
Geir, who’d been quiet up until then, leaned forward. “Why?”
“If you’d said military—army, maybe even air force … I’m not sure about that—but the fact that you said navy … Hell no. Mouse was terrified of water.”
The two men exchanged confused glances. Laszlo said slowly, “That just doesn’t fit. We haven’t seen Mouse afraid of anything.”
They glanced at Minx. “Any chance he was just putting on that fear?”
Both Agnes and Minx shook their heads. “No, I don’t think so. He was seriously scared of water,” Minx said. “We were supposed to take swimming lessons in school. But we couldn’t even get him near the water. When he was younger, he would just scream the minute anybody tried to push him in. At one point a bigger bully picked him up and tossed him into the shallow end, and you’d have thought Mouse was drowning, even though he could stand up in the water. It was only midthigh deep. He screamed and screamed like there was no tomorrow.”
“Any idea where that came from?”
She hesitated, not really wanting to share or to open up wounds from so long ago.
But Agnes had no problem doing so. “That bitch of a mother. She tried to drown him several times.”
“Really?” Geir asked.
“She used to hold him underwater until he almost passed out, and then she’d bring him up again so he could breathe, just to do it again and again.”
Minx’s voice was low, sad. “He never told us about it until after the fact, like years later. I didn’t really believe him or realize just how serious it was until the swimming pool incident. He wouldn’t walk along a river. He wouldn’t do anything like that.” She turned to them again. “Maybe your Mouse isn’t my Mouse. Do you have a picture?”
Geir pulled his p
hone out of his pocket and swiped through images. He frowned, looking for one. “I don’t have one,” he said. “What about you, Laszlo?”
“I don’t know if I have one on my phone. I certainly do on my laptop.” He glanced at his truck. “I can grab it.”
Geir reached over, his palm up. “Give me the keys. I’ll go get it.”
Laszlo handed him the keys, and Geir hopped up, walked out of the restaurant and headed to the truck.
Minx couldn’t help but see the tight shiny skin and odd-looking fingers on Laszlo’s hand. She said nothing but noted the single black glove sitting on the table. At least he’d taken it off to eat.
“Six feet, skinny as a rail, scars all over his body, reddish-brown hair in the sun. Kind of blond sometimes, kind of red at other times.”
She jolted at the description. Slowly she said, “Yes, all of that is correct.” She glanced over at Agnes. “He really was afraid of water, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said adamantly. “But I suppose it’s possible, as he grew up, he faced his fears?”
“That’s a major one though,” Minx said. “Still he really wanted to be a Navy SEAL.”
“Well, he’d certainly had to overcome his fear of water for that,” Laszlo said. “And the Mouse I knew passed the training.”
“Do you know how he did in BUD/S training?” Minx asked. She watched him start in response to her question. She shrugged. “I like to read.”
His gaze stared at her longer than necessary.
She flushed. “Okay, so I like to read military romance novels,” she said irritably.
His gaze warmed with humor.
Irritating and yet … attractive. Damn it. She raised both hands in frustration. “Just answer the question.”
“That training is only for SEALs,” he admitted. “Some of the navy training he did struggle with. But the thing about Mouse was, he was focused. It seemed like he would get to a certain level where he figured was good enough, and then he’d stop, and he’d tackle something else. But he was smart.”
“That’s also the way he was. He needed to pass school in order to keep going, but he never did really well. Yet he was incredibly smart. He struggled with so many things in life, but he didn’t want to outshine so many people because he figured it would get him unwanted attention.”
“I wonder how much of it was a game to him? Or does he pretend to not be smart to avoid unwanted attention? Or is he really good at some things and not others?” At that Laszlo leaned forward. “Because there were some things he just wasn’t all that good at, I thought. It was almost like he was hindered in some way, or maybe it was the abuse growing up, but it seemed like some simple things he couldn’t do.” He hated to think he’d been conned, but it was possible. “Or was he putting it all on?”
“I’ve seen that before with very smart people,” Minx added. “They’re supersmart in one area, and they’re almost commonsense stupid in others. On his exams he would answer 100 percent correct on maybe ten questions, but he wouldn’t even bother answering five others. He would end up sitting right among the average of the class. He told me about it one time. When I tried to question him, he said, Life’s too dangerous if people know what you can really do.”
Silence filled the restaurant as if understanding something odd was coming. A big man, almost as big as Agnes, but taller, a big apron around his waist, came out with a towel in his hand. “What’s going on?” His voice was just below a bellow.
Agnes turned to him. “This man and his friend came looking into Mouse’s history. They think he was one of their own unit who was killed, but we think they have the wrong Mouse.”
“Except that the man does fit the same description of our Mouse,” Minx said quietly. “Bart, you’re looking as healthy as ever.”
Bart grinned, showing his missing two front teeth. He patted his overwhelmingly large belly and said, “That’s because of Agnes. She takes good care of me.” Almost immediately the smile dropped away as he said, “I hope we’re talking about a different man. Mouse had a shit life already. He deserved to have something good happen in his life, not an early death.”
Just then Geir came back with the laptop. He handed it to Laszlo.
Laszlo quickly booted it up. When it went live, the others stood silently beside him. He shifted through the images he kept on file. As soon as he had a good one of Mouse, he flipped around his laptop so the others could see the photo.
Silence descended.
Minx’s voice, choking on tears, whispered, “Yes, that’s Mouse.”
Agnes nodded as did Bart. “Best damned mixed-up kid I ever had here,” Agnes said.
Bart nodded his agreement. “We were here for him as much as we could be. He was always hungry, always starved, his body always trying to heal from whatever recent beating that bitch gave him.” He shook his head.
“That’s the thing. He ended up in the navy,” Agnes emphasized.
Bart’s gaze, which had been sharp before, now narrowed to knife points as he stared at the two men. “Navy? Our Mouse?”
Laszlo slowly nodded. “He was one of our unit.”
Bart studied him for a long moment. “I don’t want to call you a liar, son, but our Mouse wouldn’t have gone anywhere close to water.” At that he looked down at the plate in front of Minx. “You better eat all that. You’re getting skinnier every time I see you.” He turned and headed back to the kitchen.
Laszlo didn’t know what to think. They’d identified his Mouse was their Mouse, and yet, at the same time, it couldn’t possibly be him because of his fear of water. With Agnes now returning behind her counter, Laszlo looked at Minx who was plowing through her burger. “How can Bart possibly eat burgers when he has no front teeth?”
She shook her head. “I wondered that myself. But don’t you dare ask him.”
“No, wouldn’t do that.”
She motioned with her head toward the photo as she chewed. “I don’t suppose I could have a copy of that, could I? I haven’t had a photograph of him since he was sixteen.”
Geir straightened, looking at her intently. “If we give you a copy, will you give us a copy of when you knew him?”
She nodded. “Deal.”
“Do you have many photos from back then?”
She shook her head. “No. None of us had cell phones or cameras. I think that’s the most recent picture I have of him. He gave it to me himself. I think it was from one of those machines that you sit in and take pictures for a dollar. He wanted me to have it before he left.”
“We’d really like to see that.”
She nodded. “It was years ago, but I scanned it into a photo imagery program, then saved it. So, it’s not great in terms of quality, but you’ll see the resemblance.”
“And you’re sure he had no siblings?”
“As sure as we can be,” she said. “You can check birth records and any other family tree information. But, as far as I know, his mom only had one child. And that was a damn good thing. Although there was talk of a stepfather when he was little. But he didn’t talk about him much, and I never saw such a person.”
Laszlo agreed, but it was a conundrum. “He either has a twin brother, or he learned to deal with his fear of water.”
“Honestly, from my perspective,” she mumbled, her mouth still finishing off a bite of food, “neither works. Because it seems far-fetched he’d have a twin, but it seems equally far-fetched he overcame such a major traumatic episode in his life.”
“True, but people have done that.”
She nodded. “They do. And, if he did, I’m really proud of him. That he actually made it to where he wanted to be is huge.”
The two men looked at each other, and Laszlo realized they were both wondering if they should tell her about Mouse becoming a SEAL and then decided no. He brought up his email program. “What email do you want me to send the photo to?”
She gave him her email address. He attached the photo, and, while she watched, he hit Send. She
beamed. “Thank you.” She picked up a french fry and popped it into her mouth. Then said, “And do you want me to attach Mouse’s picture too?”
“Sure, that would be perfect.”
Her fingers clicked through her phone. She lifted her gaze. “Sent.”
His phone pinged. He brought up the email and clicked on the attachment. Instantly a young teen’s face filled the screen. Laszlo studied it intently. There was a resemblance but not clear enough to be sure. However, there was also a hint of the mark on his neck. Only it wasn’t big enough to be sure. It was more of a shadow though. He passed the phone to Geir.
“Did he have a tattoo on his neck and shoulder?” Geir asked studying the photo before he handed the phone back with a shrug. “It could be our Mouse.” He studied her face and reiterated, “Did he?”
She frowned. “He had a birthmark, but it wasn’t a tattoo.”
But a birthmark might have been tattooed to cover it up. There was just enough resemblance to think they were talking about the same man. To change the subject, he looked at Minx and asked, “Can you eat all that?”
“I haven’t eaten all day,” she confessed.
“That’s not cool,” Laszlo said, quickly forwarding the message and attachment to Erick. “You should know better than that.”
“I do know better, but I can’t say I’m very happy at the moment, so there’s a tendency to not give a shit.”
“Have the police followed up with you at all about your complaint?”
She nodded. “I’m supposed to go in tomorrow morning and talk to them.”
“Good. That will help.” Laszlo watched the emotions cross her face. He’d always been sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. In her case, there wasn’t a whole lot of deduction needed. Her face was an open book. She hated her job and was angry at the situation she was in. She wanted justice but didn’t believe she would get it. And he could relate to that.
“Not really. I’m afraid I’ll just get more repercussions. I’ve already been shunted into a dead-end job in a dead-end part of town. They can’t dock my pay, but I’m sure, if they could find a way, they’ll do that too.”