Some Kind of Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Well, good,” he said, except now that he’d said all that, he was oddly discontent. Or maybe that was just his—what did she call it? Animal-brain. His animal-brain was stuck on the image of him Googling her while she Googled him. And his animal-brain was fourteen years old and thought that Googling sounded more like something one did to another person with mouths, hands, and genitals rather than alone with a computer.

  “Yeah,” Shayla agreed, “it is good. In fact, it’s great. For someone who claims to be communication challenged, you’re doing really well. So, where to now? What’s next on the Find Maddie to-do list? And please say, Now is when we get coffee.”

  Pete laughed as he closed her door and humped it around the front of the truck. “Coffee sounds lifesaving,” he told her as he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine with a roar. “Breakfast sounds even better—if you’ve got the time. When do I need to get you home?”

  “I’m yours for the day—really for the entire weekend—if you want me,” Shayla told him. “The boys’ll be at Carter’s, starting tonight, through Sunday. And I thought while we’re waiting—to hear from Lindsey, and for Susan Smith’s office to open—maybe we could work on Chapter Two. You know, to send to Maddie? How Peter Met Lisa.”

  Her generosity made Pete’s words catch in his throat. At least he thought that was what made his throat feel tight, but his animal-brain had finally stopped toying with Google and was now replaying her words I’m yours…for the weekend…if you want me.

  Pete’s animal-brain said, Woof, but he smacked it down and cleared his throat, and said, “Thank you. So much. That would be unbelievably great.”

  “Why are you really here?”

  Great-Aunt Hiroko’s words made Dingo look up warily from his eggs and toast, but Maddie didn’t even pause. She just kept shoveling the food into her mouth.

  It tasted good, although Dingo had hoped for more interesting spices than mere salt and pepper. In fact, he’d expected a far more Japanese feel to the entire cottage, but not only had they kept their shoes on as they’d gone through a slider into the house, but the living room had a regular sofa and chairs, and the art on the walls was sharp and bright and very modern. The kitchen they were sitting in now was just a normal kitchen. Old-fashioned, for sure, but there wasn’t even so much as a wok in sight. Was that racist? Fack, it was—subtle for sure, but he was guilty of that stupidity. He hated when people looked at him and made idiotic assumptions, and here he’d gone and blithely done the same.

  Maddie finally swallowed and started in again with her spiel about the school history project, but the old woman cut her off. “No, why are you really here?”

  There was silence for a moment as the question seemed to hang there in the air.

  Maddie surprised the crap out of him when she put down her fork and said, “I miss Lisa and I thought…”

  Dingo held his breath as Hiroko locked gazes with Maddie. The old woman didn’t speak—she just stared, waiting for the girl to finish her sentence. The only sound was that of a clock ticking from its perch above the door that led into the dining room. Tick, tick, tick.

  Maddie’d hunched so far in on herself that her shoulders were nearly up to her ears, and her eyes had actually filled with tears. Dingo wanted to reach for her, to comfort her by taking her hand, but his new rule was No touching the fifteen-year-old. He knew himself well enough not to allow any exceptions. Never, ever.

  As he watched, Maddie seemed to shake herself. “But she’s gone, and you’re not her—you’re not even close.” She gave a huge whatever shrug with a massive eye roll that was supposed to telegraph just how little she cared, but Dingo knew better as she added, “Also? I thought maybe you could lend me some money.”

  “Ah,” the old woman said as Maddie went back to eating.

  “No, wait, she meant it—what she said,” Dingo spoke up. “Yeah, we’re low on funds, but really we’re here because she misses her ma.”

  “Dingo, shut up.” Maddie glowered at him.

  He spoke over her, leaning across the table toward Hiroko. “And her father just told us the story of how he met Lisa here, that you and him became chums because he stopped to help when you had a flat tire.”

  “Dingo!” Now Maddie was shooting daggers at him with her eyes. “Just finish your eggs, and we’ll go. She doesn’t want us here—”

  “Did you know that? That he met her—Lisa—right here, in your yard?” Dingo asked the old woman, who’d calmly risen to her feet to carry her plate to the sink. “He was taking a rinse in your outdoor shower-thingy, and there she was.”

  “I did know, yes.” Hiroko turned to face them and her mouth was tight. “I didn’t approve of their relationship.”

  Maddie was intrigued despite her desperate need to look and sound disaffected, so her tone was combative. “Why, because he wasn’t Japanese?”

  Hiroko made a raspberry sound. “That may have been Kiyo’s—your great-grandmother’s—thinking, but I couldn’t’ve cared less. I liked the boy.” She looked at Maddie. “Peter was different, and Lisa was, well, she wasn’t good for him.”

  Maddie was not in a place where she was willing to hear any negative talk about her mom. She stood up, the chair screeching against the linoleum floor. “Well, screw you! She wasn’t good enough? Look who’s talking. If you’re so freaking perfect, you’d visit Gram in Palm Springs, instead of letting her rot all by herself in that stupid nursing home—”

  “I visit her every other month,” Hiroko said curtly. “I have for years—since she hurt her hip. And if you’d listened, you’d know that I didn’t say your mother wasn’t good enough—”

  Maddie was already making a disgusted sound. “Lisa and I lived there for nearly a year, so…”

  Hiroko widened her eyes as if waiting for her to continue.

  “I never saw you visit,” Maddie said.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” Hiroko asked.

  “Of course she’s not,” Dingo said hastily.

  “I’m just saying, all those months, I never saw you, not even once.” Maddie crossed her arms.

  “I don’t drive at night. I had to leave early enough to get back to San Diego before dark, because your mother made it very clear that I wasn’t welcome in her home,” Hiroko informed her. She looked from Maddie to Dingo. “How much money do you need?”

  “Three hundred dollars’ll do it,” Dingo said because Maddie had finally been silenced.

  “That much?” Hiroko said as she took both Maddie’s and Dingo’s plates and brought them to the sink.

  “His car is big and stupid.” Maddie finally spoke as Hiroko gestured for them to follow her out into the living room. “The gas mileage is for shit.”

  “And where, exactly, are you going?” the elderly woman asked.

  There was a series of black-and-white pictures on the wall, Dingo now saw, that were obviously that internment camp where Hiroko had spent a chunk of her childhood. Long rows of barrack-type housing stretched out into the distance.

  Maddie saw those photos, too, and now pointed to them. “Well, Manzanar,” she lied. “Of course. We need to see it. I mean, photos are well and good, but, we need to smell it. Feel it. And since it’s four hundred miles there, four hundred back…”

  Hiroko’s eyebrows lifted. “And your car gets…three miles to the gallon?”

  “We also have access to more primary source materials further north in…Reno,” Maddie lied.

  “Reno,” Hiroko repeated as Dingo leaned in to get a closer look at a photo that had to be Hiroko as a child, standing in front of an exquisite garden, barbwire fencing in the background.

  “Yes. Reno.” Maddie stood there, looking at her great-aunt as if daring her to call out her lie.

  There was silence then, as Hiroko just looked out her living room window, unperturbed.

  And sure enough, Maddie cracked first. “She was embarrassed,” she said. “Lisa. We had this really tiny, shitty studio apartment in a really shitty part of P
alm Springs, and she was working as a waitress at this total crap bar, and she hated it, and…There was barely enough room for the pullout sofa. I don’t know where you would’ve slept—in the bathtub? And yes, I wish she’d told me, I would’ve cut school to come to see you at the nursing home when you came to visit Great-Grandma. Because I’ve always thought of you as a superhero, and I really, really wanted to meet you again, because I was, like, five, that one time we did meet. And I’m sorry that you hate me now, I am.”

  Maddie started to cry, and Dingo did, too, because God. And he broke his rule and took her hand and she held on to him so tightly even as she pulled them toward the sliding door.

  “I don’t hate you,” Hiroko said, surprising them both into stopping and turning back. “I didn’t hate Lisa. She was braver than I ever was. I both resented and admired her…and…I just knew she and Peter wouldn’t…fit. That he was too traditional, too…sane for her.” She shook her head. “Neither of them could bear to hear that, so they stayed away from me, which I suppose was just as well, because I couldn’t bear to watch her break his heart. I don’t carry much cash, but I can write you a check.” She paused. “Do you have the ID you need to cash it?”

  Her question was aimed more at Dingo than Maddie, and he nodded even as he wiped his eyes.

  “Good,” she said curtly. “Wait here, I’ll get my handbag.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  They did the coffee-and-bagels-to-go thing, at Shay’s favorite local mom-and-pop coffee shop. She could tell, without even asking, that Peter wouldn’t’ve been able to bear a sit-down breakfast.

  And it was a good thing, too, because when they got back into Peter’s truck, Shay realized that Tevin had texted her.

  It was a long message—segmented into four, no, five long paragraphs, and she scrolled back to read aloud, “Fiona’s last name is Fiera, and she’s def crazy and gone for good. But biggest rumor via Bobbie Ramone—I’m not sure who that is—is that Maddie’s got a much older BF. That’s boyfriend.”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” Peter muttered as he unwrapped his bagel and took a bite.

  Shay obliged as she continued reading. “More than one member of Bobbie’s gossip-head gang—oh, she’s that Bobbie. Tevin sometimes refers to her as APB because, well, right. Anyway, going on. More than one member of the aforementioned gang saw her with him last Tuesday after school; rumor is he’s a SEAL.” She looked up, filled with pride. “My son is possibly the only teenager in the universe to use a semicolon—correctly—in a text.”

  Peter, meanwhile, was choking. “A SEAL…? There’s no way that that Dingo kid…No.”

  He was right. Not even in Dingo’s wildest dreams was anyone going to mistake him for a Navy SEAL. In response, Shay read on. “He’s big and blond and kinda hard to miss. Definitely not Dingo. Ooh, Tevin says, Janet Lundgren took these photos. I don’t know who she is, but thank you, Janet!”

  Tevin had forwarded two photos to her. Shayla peered at the first one. It was blurry, but yeah, that was definitely Maddie talking with great intensity to a hulking giant of a crew-cutted blond young man outside of what looked like a convenience store.

  “This is definitely not Dingo,” she told Peter, who leaned over to look, too, his shoulder pressed against hers. In a friendly manner, because they were friends. Friends, friends, friends, she emphasized to herself, because for once Harry wasn’t present to argue, thank God.

  She forced herself to focus. The young man in the photo was wearing a U.S. Navy SEAL tank top over a well-muscled body, but that didn’t mean anything. You didn’t need to be a SEAL to wear a shirt advertising the Teams.

  And frankly, there was no law against a man of any age talking to a girl on a public sidewalk.

  “That’s Hans fucking Schlossman,” Peter said, his voice tight.

  “So you know him,” Shayla said as she scrolled to the second photo. Eek.

  That one was far more damning.

  In the second photo, Maddie was encircled in the big blond man’s giant arms. He was holding her tightly, her head tucked under his big Dudley Do-Right chin, and she was clinging to him, too, and yeah. Shay realized that it was entirely possible that she and Peter had gotten it wrong. Maybe Dingo wasn’t the girl’s inappropriately older boyfriend—and this SEAL was.

  They weren’t kissing but they were definitely glued tightly together—and the emotion in their body language was off the charts. In fact the SEAL’s face—Schlossman’s face—was twisted, as if he was trying not to cry.

  Peter saw the same whatever-it-was that she was seeing, and he made a sound, low in his throat, that was close to a growl. “I’m gonna fucking kill him.”

  “He’s really one of your SEALs?” she asked. That made him likely even older than Dingo, since these days most SEALs were college graduates.

  “No, he’s a candidate,” Pete said tightly. “He’s not a SEAL yet, and now he’s never gonna be. Motherfucker.”

  “So he’s one of your students,” she clarified. “Do you think that’s how he and Maddie met?”

  “I have no idea how they met,” he said. “No idea. Maddie’s never even come to the base with me, so…Jesus, he must’ve gone after her—targeted her. Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s pretty creepy,” Shay said. “Do you really think he’s capable of—”

  “He went through phase one of BUD/S under me—Hell Week—and I was hard on him.” Peter paused. “No, I was brutal. I didn’t think he’d make it, but he surprised me, and…he did. But now he hates me. He’s made that pretty clear.”

  Shayla used her fingers to expand the photo on her phone’s screen, enlarging Schlossman’s face. His expression was one of anguish. “Whatever this is, whatever’s going on, he’s not happy about it.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  She looked up and into Peter’s eyes. His anger was mixed with frustration and his own darkly private pain.

  “How can I help?” she asked him in response. “What do we do next? Okay, here’s an idea. How about if I go and talk to this young man?”

  He laughed as he jammed his truck into drive, and pulled out of the parking spot and then out of the lot. “Nah, I’m gonna take you home.”

  She made a high-pitched hmm sound. Where was Harry when she needed alpha-male-wrangling backup? But he didn’t appear, so she went with, “That’s not a very good idea.”

  Peter pretended his reasons were logistical. “Yeah, actually, he’s probably on the base, so it’ll be faster and easier just to drop you home, instead of checking you in as a guest.”

  Shayla took a deep breath and refused to cosign his bullshit. “I’m calling you on that, Lieutenant,” she said flatly. “Will you please think with your brain for a second—instead of cavemanning this? I mean, I have kids, so I get it. I do. But there’s a reason good cop, bad cop is a thing. If you want to get info from this man, it simply makes more sense to bring me along. Of course, if your real goal is to just beat the hell out of him…or have him beat the hell out of you—” She pointedly looked at the photo again. “This young man is big, and maybe deep down you think that his kicking your ass would be well-deserved—”

  She’d purposely stomped on his alpha-male button and he responded as expected with a flash of frost in his blue eyes. “Yeah, no way can that idiot kick my ass. Just let him try.”

  “So you do want to start a fight,” Shay said as he braked to a stop at a traffic light. She sighed, maybe a tad too dramatically. “Well, that’s disappointing. I thought you wanted to find your missing daughter.”

  Peter’s hands were so tight around his steering wheel, his knuckles were white. As she gazed pointedly at him, he closed his eyes and inhaled a long, slow, deep breath. “I do want to find her,” he said on his exhale, opening his eyes to look at her. “But I also really want to punch Schlossman in the face. If he used Maddie to get back at me…” He shook his head.

  “The key word there, Lieutenant, is if,” Shayla pointed o
ut. “And if he used Maddie that way, well, he’s going to have bigger problems, don’t you think? Why muddy it by giving him a reason to play the victim card?” She pretended to be a blubbering Schlossman. “Yeah, I know she’s only fifteen, Detective, but Lieutenant Greene punched me in the face!”

  He actually laughed at that—good that he could still laugh—but then his phone rang. It was connected to the Bluetooth in his truck, and it was up so loud they both jumped. The name Zanella appeared on the dash’s screen, and Peter said, “I’m gonna take this,” even as Shayla told him, “You should answer that.”

  “Zanella, you’re on speaker. I’m in the truck with Shayla,” Peter curtly said as a greeting.

  “Ah, you’re still with Shayla-the-neighbor.” Izzy Zanella’s voice was loaded with That’s interesting innuendo.

  “Not still.” Peter didn’t try to hide his annoyance. “Again.”

  “We made a plan to go over to the high school early this morning,” Shay explained.

  “Any luck?” Izzy asked.

  “Not much,” Peter said. “A few leads—best is from Shayla’s son. We’re kind of in the middle of it. What’s up?”

  “Drove the fam to the airport and on the way home, it occurred to me that I have this spacious rental van for another fifteen hours,” Izzy’s voice cheerfully said. “I thought I could bop on over to the storage space in Palm Springs, bring all that stuff back and stash it in your garage for you, save you the road trip. I just need the key or the combo to the padlock—oh yeah, and the storage unit number would be helpful, too, so I don’t have to wander the place, weeping as I try to open every lock.”

  “Wow, that would be great,” Peter said. “Thanks, man, but…you really wanna do that drive all by yourself?”

  “Noooo,” Izzy said. “No, no, no. I tried Lopez, but he’s busy—” somehow he managed to make air quotes with only his voice “—but then I remembered da boyz in Boat Squad John have today off, and I figured, hey, they were prolly looking for something to do, am I right? And since those young’uns owe me a giant-ass favor in the vague shape of humping boxes into a van—”