Some Kind of Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He sent a text. Not to her father, but to her father’s girlfriend. Shayla. Can we set up a time and place to meet and talk? Not just dad, but you, too?

  He didn’t know Maddie’s dad aside from that one encounter in the mall garage, but his own father was way less of a douche when his mother was around. Having Shayla present could well make it easier for Maddie. At least he hoped so. He pushed send, and the text whooshed away.

  The response came back almost immediately.

  Yes! Say when and where, and we’ll be there!

  Dingo looked at Maddie, still sound asleep beneath that table, and he almost typed Now, in Manzanar, but he wasn’t quite ready to betray her that absolutely. And she would see this as a betrayal.

  So instead he input both the number for Shayla and the number for “Dad” into his own phone. Just in case, after getting some rest, Maddie failed to recognize that the time had come for a full surrender.

  And then he typed, Too tired to talk right now. Will text tomorrow w location. Still safe.

  After he hit send, he turned Maddie’s phone off and put it back into the cupholder. Then he, too, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  Pete’s meeting at the base went about as well as could be expected, considering he’d been informing his CO that he was considering resigning his commission. Maddie needed her father, and this temporary leave he’d arranged was almost up.

  Commander Koehl had immediately offered to extend it. The Navy didn’t want to lose Pete.

  Likewise, Pete didn’t want to lose the Navy. But if he was going to quit, he didn’t want it to be a surprise to anyone on the Teams.

  For now, he gratefully took the extension, but he also took an envelope of paperwork—forms to fill out—should he need to resign, God help him.

  He pulled his truck into his own driveway, tucked the envelope into the pocket on the door, gathered up his cover and—clicking his truck locked—headed across the street to Shayla’s house.

  The windows were open—it was a beautiful afternoon. Pete stopped for a moment, just absorbing the sounds of life—music and laughter—spilling out of Shay’s little house. Food was cooking. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious.

  Someone was singing some top-forty pop song. Had to be Frank, and maybe Tevin, and…Hiroko?

  Holy shit, Hiroko was singing a Katy Perry song, along with…Wait. Was that Mrs. Quinn…?

  But before Pete could laugh at the absurdity, the thought popped into his head: Maybe she was lonely, too.

  Lonely. Too. As in, also lonely. As in, how absolutely different would it be for him to come home to this every day, instead of a cold, empty room in the officers’ barracks?

  A cheer went up from inside, along with whooping and scattered applause. And yes, that was definitely Mrs. Quinn saying, “More turmeric, dear! I can barely taste it.”

  And then he thought, how abso-fucking-lutely different would it feel to Maddie to come home to this every day, instead of a cold, empty house with a still-angry, too-lonely man sitting grimly in the silent kitchen?

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “You okay there, sir?”

  Pete looked up to see Hans Schlossman up on the roof, standing guard near the fireplace chimney, where he could see both the front yard and the back.

  “Yeah,” he told the kid, forcing a smile. “It’s just been a long coupla days. I appreciate your willingness to spend your downtime here, Schlossman. Especially since I know that you know it’s not going to get you any kind of preferential treatment. In fact, I’m gonna have to tell Lieutenant MacInnough to challenge Boat Squad John extra aggressively in the next phase, to make sure there’s no appearance of impropriety.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Schlossman said dryly. “Can’t wait, sir.” But then he realized what Pete had said. “Lieutenant MacInnough? Wait, where are you gonna be?” He quickly added, “Sir?”

  But Pete’s cellphone was buzzing in the pocket of his uniform pants, and he held up a finger to Schlossman as he pulled it out. It was Shayla. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey!” she said.

  And for a second, with his eyes closed, he was buried deep inside of her as she shattered around him, and Jesus, in just a few short days he’d become completely addicted.

  “Where are you?” she asked, excitement in her voice, bringing him back to here and now. “Are you still at the Navy Base? Are you in your truck? Are you—”

  “I’m back. I’m actually standing in your front yard.” Shay’s needs took priority over breaking the news to Schlossman that Pete would probably not be further involved in the rest of Boat Squad John’s BUD/S training, so he headed for the front door.

  But she beat him to it, bursting her way outside, the screen door slapping closed behind her, before she even hung up her phone.

  “She texted!” Shayla told him as she danced down the front steps. “Peter, Maddie texted me! She wants to meet; she wants to talk!”

  “Oh, thank God!”

  “But not until tomorrow,” Shay said, “except Lindsey made contact with Fiona’s mother, and well, I’m pretty sure I know where they are. Maddie and Dingo. And I think we should go there. I don’t think we should wait until morning.”

  Pete looked over at the house—the windows were filled with watching faces. Tevin. Frank. Hiroko. Tiffany. Seagull and Timebomb. And yeah, even Mrs. Quinn. The only one missing was Lindsey, who probably hadn’t been able to push herself up and off of the couch.

  “Where are they?” he asked Shay, but it was the crowd in the house who answered in unison.

  “Manzanar!”

  Shay brought Peter into her bedroom.

  Oh, honey, if only…

  “Shh.”

  “Hey, good, you’re back!” Lindsey was sitting up, supported by pillows, on Shay’s bed. Shay had moved her in here after it got too noisy in the living room. She’d needed a door that closed as she’d talked on the phone, and a seat more comfortable than the desk chair in Shay’s home office. So the bedroom it was.

  He likes it in here.

  And yeah, Shay was hyper-aware that Peter was in her room for the first time, and as she looked around she saw it as he did—with its bright white-painted furniture and soothing blue walls. Mexican tile floor. King-sized bed. Private bath. Super comfy reading chair that was big enough for two. Provided the two liked each other significantly.

  “Fiona’s mother finally called you?” Peter asked.

  “I called her,” Lindsey said. “After I saw the police report.” At Peter’s obvious confusion, she looked at Shay.

  “He just got here,” Shayla told the woman. “All he knows is that I think Maddie’s at Manzanar.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” Lindsey said as she looked up at Peter. “Full sit-rep. Right after you left for your meeting in Coronado, I ran another search through the system and discovered that the police in Sacramento just posted a B&E report for Fiona’s mother’s address. It happened this morning. The two perps: one male and one female. The homeowner—Maisy Clark, aka Fiona’s mom—described the intruders as a scruffy man, thin, average height, white, in his early twenties and a teenage girl, petite, of Asian descent. So definitely Maddie and Dingo. They also knocked on the mother’s door this morning, looking for Fiona, who apparently has been—and I quote—sent away to boarding school. Later, the mom went out, but came home to find the same two had gained entry via a house key and were fleeing the premises.”

  “Was anything stolen?” Peter asked.

  “Not that the mother knows of, no,” Lindsey said. “But several books had been moved in Fiona’s room, and one of them had the inside pages cut out. You know, a stash-hole.”

  “Fuck,” Peter said.

  “So, I called the mom again, and left a message telling her I was a private investigator working on a runaway teen case, which is not untrue, and that her description of the girl who broke and entered was similar to the girl I was looking for, and could we please talk?” Lindsey nodded at Pete. “She finally called m
e back. She’s actually really nice, but definitely exhausted both by her bullshit ex-husband and her drug-addicted—her words—daughter. I sent her a photo of both Maddie and Ricky Dingler—aka Dingo—and she gave me a positive ID. Maddie and Dingo were in Sacramento this morning.”

  “They must’ve driven all night,” Shay murmured to Peter. “After the earthquake.”

  Lindsey nodded. “Shay told me that you guys got a text from Maddie right after last night’s quake—which means they had to be close enough to San Diego to have felt it. But they were definitely in Sacramento at ten A.M.” She smiled at Peter. “Ten hundred hours for the SEALs in the room.”

  Peter was already processing the information he’d received. “So Fiona’s already off at some boarding school. Do we know where? And isn’t it likely Maddie and Dingo would go there, to get whatever it is that they think she has?”

  “Longfield Academy in Roanoke, Virginia,” Shayla told him. “It’s a lockdown facility—really more of a rehab center than a school.”

  “It’s for rich kids with addictions.” Lindsey put it more bluntly. “I called their head of security and asked them to watch for Maddie and Dingo. She promised to give me a call if they show.”

  “But we don’t think they’re going to Virginia,” Shay said. “We think they know that they’ve gotten everything they’re going to from Fiona.”

  “Her mom told me that she and her husband found drugs in their house. She believes Fiona brought them with her, from San Diego,” Lindsey reported. “The mom wasn’t helpful when it came to what kind of drugs, or quantity. She was really freaked out when she found them, and she just flushed them all. So it’s hard to say if there were twelve thousand dollars’ worth. Or eleven or ten or whatever the value was before the interest rate went up.”

  “What do we think was in the cut-out pages of the book?” Peter asked.

  “Not drugs,” Lindsey said. “Mrs. Clark told me that her husband—not her ex, her current husband—was so freaked out by Fiona that he hired a drug-sniffing dog. That’s how they found the drugs. They were hidden in his den. The dog was completely uninterested in Fiona’s bedroom.”

  “So, money?” Peter asked.

  “Or an address book with the names and numbers of high-level U.S. Navy admirals who regularly hired Fiona as a hooker,” Shayla suggested.

  Lindsey looked at her. “Your brain is a wonderfully dark and scary place.”

  Peter turned to her, too. “So why, exactly, do you think they’re in Manzanar?”

  Shayla shrugged. “To start with, it’s not that far from Sacramento—I mean, considering the size of California—and…well…bottom line, Maddie told Hiroko that she wanted to go there. It’s possible that some of what she’s said is the truth. I’ve seen the pictures, and I’m fascinated—and horrified and intrigued. If I were Maddie, I’d want to see it and…smell it, you know? Feel it. Really know where I came from—or maybe more important, where Maddie’s mother came from, since she was raised by people who’d been unjustly imprisoned there. Lisa’s gone, but there’s still a little piece of her—an echo of a moan, a wisp of a lingering sigh—in the dust of Manzanar.”

  “Does she talk this way all the time?” Lindsey asked Peter. “God, I love writers.”

  Peter glanced at his watch, and Shay knew he was calculating the time it would take them to get to Manzanar. Three-hundred-ish miles, should take five and a half hours, plus traffic….If they left immediately, with a little luck, they’d arrive well before midnight. He nodded. “All right. You sold me. I’m going up there.”

  “I’m going, too,” Shayla said.

  “Not a chance,” Peter said. “You’re safest right here.”

  Her response was to hold out her phone and show him the text that Maddie had sent. Can we set up a time and place to meet and talk? Not just dad, but you, too?

  “She wants me there. I’ll be perfectly safe,” Shayla said. “I’ll be with you.”

  Peter looked into her eyes and whatever he saw there made him nod. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t go into labor while we’re gone,” Shayla ordered Lindsey, who laughed.

  “Okay, you just pretty much guaranteed that I’m having this baby tonight,” Lindsey called after her. “Thank you!”

  But Shay was already out of the room, quickly packing her laptop and her power cord in her computer case. “Boys!” she called to Tevin and Frank. “Pete and I are heading to Manzanar. Tiffany and Lindsey and Hiroko are in charge! Do not leave this house! Be good; I love you!”

  They sang their response in their trademark tight harmony, “Love you, love you, love you, too!”

  Everyone laughed, but both boys hugged her extra tightly, and Frank looked hard at Peter, saying, “You promise she’ll be safe…?”

  “I do,” Peter said solemnly as he took Shayla by the hand and pulled her out the door.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Shayla opened her computer as the freeway whizzed beneath the wheels of Pete’s truck. “Let’s send Maddie Chapter Four.”

  “Um,” he said. “Don’t we have to write it first?”

  “Write, then send,” she agreed. “We’re gonna be in this truck for hours, and we don’t have anything else to do, unless we can figure out a way to have sex while you drive—”

  “I could definitely do that.”

  “—without getting arrested,” she pointed out.

  “That’s a little more difficult.”

  “Right. So. Chapter Four.”

  Pete sighed. “There’s really not a Chapter Four. I mean, not that I necessarily want to share with Maddie. Life with Lisa was a roller coaster. She struggled with fidelity and a need for immediate gratification. I’m also pretty sure she used sex with strangers as a way to measure her self-worth.”

  “They want me, therefore I have value,” Shay murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was what it was. And I’m the fool who kept taking her back. I should’ve walked away the first time it happened.”

  Shayla’s eyes were soft. “You loved her—enough to forgive her. That doesn’t make you a fool.”

  “Doesn’t it?” He focused on the road, stretching out ahead of them. “It happened a lot. I’m not talking twice or three times. I’m talking fingers on both hands.”

  She winced. “Ouch.”

  “She was always sorry,” Pete said. “Except for the last time. It was after Maddie. And man, that year—when Lisa was pregnant, and right after Maddie was born—it was the best, and the worst. I was scared to death. We were both so young—how were we going to take care of a baby? But then, Jesus, Maddie was this tiny little thing, and we both fell completely in love with her, and for a while it was better than it ever was. Except for the part where the only work I could find was part-time and minimum wage. I had three different jobs, I worked all the time, and I still couldn’t pay the bills.

  “So I told Lisa I was thinking about enlisting in the Navy—not just for the paycheck, but for the health insurance. I tried to talk about it, but she said, Do what you have to do, which turned out to be code for Don’t you dare join the Navy, but I was too stupid to recognize it. In the end, she accused me of running away when, Jesus, that was the last thing I wanted. I thought I was making this huge sacrifice to feed them and put a roof over their heads.

  “It was when I was gone—at sea—that she replaced me. I think I probably knew….My seabag got drenched right after I showed up for duty, and my photos of Lisa and Maddie were destroyed. This was before digital photos. I didn’t even have a cellphone back then. I emailed her and asked her to send me hard-copy replacements, but she never did. I just kept waiting, but…

  “All those other guys had been collisions. One and done. This was different, his name was George, and even though she didn’t leave me for him—they’d already split by the time I came back home—I think it made her realize just how much she didn’t need me. Or want me.

  “That day she left? It’s burne
d into my brain. We were shouting at each other, and Maddie was crying. And Lisa just kept saying it was my fault, that not only was I terrible at communicating, but that I obviously didn’t want a family—if I did, I wouldn’t’ve joined the Navy, and I’d be better off without them, and they’d be better off without me. I remember she called me hard, cold, because I didn’t seem to care who she slept with—was she fucking kidding me? But she was serious. She called me heartless. And all I could think was heartless, yes, because she took my heart with her when she walked out that door.”

  Shay’s fingers had been moving across her computer keyboard while he’d been talking, and as he fell silent, that was the only sound in the truck’s cab.

  Miles passed beneath the wheels as she clicked and tapped and backspaced and rearranged.

  Finally, she glanced up. “First off, Lisa was crazy. And probably seriously clinically mentally ill, along with being full-on stupid. I don’t know what she was talking about because you’re an expert-level communicator. You know that, right? That she was flat-out making shit up, probably to make herself feel better about leaving…? Also, you have the biggest, warmest, kindest heart of any man I’ve ever met.”

  Then why don’t you want to be more than fuck buddies with me? Things not to say at the one-hour mark of a five-plus-hour drive.

  Shay took his silence as the expert-level evasion of honest communication that it was, saying, “Okay, sorry, let’s focus on this. I pretty much took what you told me and made it Maddie-friendly.” She read aloud.

  Life with Lisa was a roller coaster. When she loved me, she loved me, and it was amazing. But when someone else caught her eye—and it happened more than once—I was brokenhearted.

  We danced that dance—on again, off again; euphoria and heartache—for years. I always forgave her—how could I not? She was Lisa, and I loved her. I knew I’d never change her, although I always hoped that someday she’d surrender.

  And that was my mistake, because I know you know your mother. Better than I ever did. And surrender was the last thing she’d ever do.