Some Kind of Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She didn’t answer right away, which wasn’t all that good of a sign. She was choosing her words again, but she was still running her fingers through his hair, so it wasn’t all bad. “I’ve done long-distance,” she finally told him. “Carter traveled a lot, as a musician. That’s partly what split us up. It’s not easy.”

  “The only easy day was yesterday.”

  She smiled at him. “Hoo-yah!”

  He nodded. “Hoo-yah.”

  “You SEALs can be pretty freaking pompous.”

  “Maybe,” he said, laughing, “but we’ve earned it. You should come see what BUD/S training looks like, up close.”

  She looked startled. “Are you inviting me to visit you at work?”

  Pete nodded, but then shrugged. “Assuming I’m not in Palm Springs.”

  “Yes, that,” she said. “How does one day at a time sound?”

  Pete nodded. “It sounds good,” he said, shifting off of her and carefully pulling himself free.

  She made a little noise—a little murmur of dismay—and he had to smile as he quickly disposed of the condom he’d been wearing. “And that sounds even better,” he said as he came back to her and kissed her. Her lips, her throat, her breasts—he got distracted, but only temporarily, because he was a man on a mission.

  Shayla shivered as he kept going, all the way to the soft insides of her thighs. He stopped there to say, “You know, the woman in your book—Loretta—she’s missing out. Jack’s magic penis means that he never has to go down on her.”

  She laughed and propped herself up on her elbows. “Has to go down on her,” she repeated. “Not the best collection of words in the Giant Lexicon of Romantic Words. I have to go down on you, Jack told Loretta as he checked his to-do list of weekend chores. But first I have to clean the refrigerator, pick up the dry cleaning, and wash the dog.”

  Pete smiled as she laughed. “You’re just saying it wrong,” he told her, and lifted his head. He met her gaze and just held it and held it and held it until she finally stopped laughing. And when he spoke, he didn’t have to work very hard to make his voice low and rough. “I have to go down on you. I have to. See?”

  Shay’s laughter was now breathless. “I was definitely saying it wrong,” she agreed, and then sighed when he lowered his head and kissed her. “As far as the book goes…Jack and Loretta get there. Keep reading.”

  “I will,” he murmured. “But I’m a little busy right now.”

  One day at a time meant not worrying about tomorrow—about what the future might bring.

  So Pete surrendered to right now—which was pretty fucking great.

  Dingo picked a national chain over one of the more quirkily named mom-and-pop-type motels. The Ride On Inn. The Desert Flower. Nope. Not going to stop there. But the chain with its bored-to-death, minimum-wage-earning night clerk behind the front desk…?

  “I’ll be right out,” he told Maddie as he parked by the doors. As he got out of his car, he patted his pocket to make sure he was still carrying the wad of bills they’d taken from Fiona’s room. He was holding it for Maddie, for safety’s sake. Right.

  He had to hit a buzzer—and really lean on it—to get into the motel office due to the “night lock.”

  A man finally appeared behind the desk—middle-aged, balding, puffy-faced—and looked hard through the glass at Dingo and then over at Maddie, who was visible in the car. Whoops, maybe it was a mistake parking there.

  She was his adopted sister; they were traveling together to meet their dad. Yeah, that would work.

  The lock finally clicked open, and Dingo went inside. The scent of industrial-strength insecticide didn’t quite cover the musty blend of ancient mildew and dust. God, working here would be a living hell.

  He cleared his throat and prepared his smile. If the clerk had been a woman, he would’ve automatically gone Australian. But the accent didn’t always work with men—sometimes it did, but sometimes it really backfired. So Dingo stayed silent as he approached the desk, looking at the obviously cranky man with his swollen eyes, sagging jowls, and disheveled, barely there graying hair.

  “How can I help you, mate?” The man’s voice was thick with a Down-Under accent that had to be real.

  Didn’t it? Or…? Wait…

  Dingo’s first coherent thought was that he was encountering himself, from some terrible and depressing future. Oh, God, he looked awful.

  “Well, speak up! You woke me—best make it worth it. Come on!”

  “Yes,” Dingo said, in standard Southern Californian. “Sorry, dude, it’s late, and you…remind me of someone. Is your name Rick, by any chance?” Okay, that was stupid, as Maddie would say. This man was definitely not him, from the future. That kind of technology didn’t exist. Still, morbidly curious, part of him wanted to know. “Or Richard…?”

  The man sighed heavily. “You want a room, but you don’t have a credit card. Well, it’s your lucky day, we take debit cards, here at Bedbugs R Us.”

  Okay, that wasn’t good. But since they only wanted to use the shower…“I have cash.”

  “That we also take,” the man said. “With two forms of ID.”

  “Two forms?” Dingo said. “I have a driver’s license, but…” Nothing else.

  “Credit or debit card’ll do it.”

  “Well, that’s stupid. If I had those I’d use them to pay, and I wouldn’t need a second ID,” Dingo pointed out.

  “No, you’d still need your driver’s license,” the man said. “Can’t have criminals and ne’er-do-wells checking in.”

  “Do I look like a criminal or a…?” Dingo stopped himself. Okay, stupid question, particularly smelling the way he did.

  Future Dingo looked at him hard, then pointedly turned to look at Maddie, waiting out in the car. “How old’s your lovely little morsel out there, twelve or maybe thirteen?” He laughed. “Oh, I know, I know, she just looks young, right? Or wait, she’s your sister.”

  Sis-tah. His accent was awesome, but then again, with another few decades of practice, Dingo’s would be, too.

  He tried straight-up bribery. There was little he wouldn’t do for a quick fifty bucks. “Look, I’m sorry. Can we bend the rules? We’re not going to stay long—an hour, at most—”

  “Hourly rental, eh? Fuck her and run?”

  “Nope,” Dingo said. “Don’t want bedbugs, aren’t gonna—nope. We just want to use the shower.”

  “Off-the-books hourly rate is five hundred, cash, the timer starts now.”

  Dingo choked. “Five hundred…? An hour?”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “Dude, come on. We just want to get cleaned up. We’ve been living in the car, and we’re meeting her father for breakfast—”

  “God, you’re a terrible liar.”

  “It’s the truth!”

  The man smiled. “Clock’s ticking.”

  “Five hundred dollars is insane,” Dingo said. “I’ll give you a hundred, and we’ll be done in a full hour, with the clock starting only when we walk into the room.”

  The man laughed in his face. “Price just went up to six hundred, mate, with fifty-seven minutes left on the clock.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Seven hundred.”

  “God, you’re a douchebag!”

  “I’m the douchebag?” The man suddenly seemed to expand and get taller and broader. “I’m the douchebag? Said the pathetic little man-boy who messes with children?” He reached for the phone. “Deal’s off, I’m calling the police.”

  Fuck! Dingo ran for the door.

  “Yeah, run, run, as fast as you can, pathetic little man-boy!” his future self called mockingly after him. “But you can’t run fast enough, because wherever you go, there you are! Give my love to your sister!”

  Dingo jumped into the car, turned it on with a roar.

  Maddie was startled. “What happened?” she asked as he pulled out of the parking lot with a spray of gravel.

  “They don’t take cash,” he sa
id flatly.

  “What? Who doesn’t take cash? Wait, we should try someplace else—maybe one of the smaller motels…Where are you going?” she asked as he blew past both the Desert Flower and the Ride On Inn, heading south on 395. “Dingo!”

  “It’s you, all right?” he said. “The guy took one look at you, and said he was calling the police. He looked at you, and then he looked at me, and just like the entire rest of the motherfucking world, he thinks I’m a loser and a creep. So, no, I’m not going to try someplace else, thanks.”

  “I want a shower!” Maddie said.

  “I fucking know that you fucking want a fucking shower!” he shouted back at her. “I’m gonna get you your fucking shower at a place where I won’t be arrested, and then I’m going to bring you to your father and be done with you! For once and for all!”

  “You said you love me,” she whispered, and when he glanced over, her eyes were filled with tears, her face aghast in the dim glow from the dashboard’s light.

  Dingo hardened his heart as he blasted toward his parents’ house in Van Nuys—the one place he knew he could get her cleaned up without having to run a gauntlet of shame, derision, or scorn. His folks were out of town—his mother had emailed to let him know.

  “There are limits, love,” he told Maddie quietly. “To everything. And I think I’ve finally hit mine.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Saturday

  “Can you imagine it?” Shayla murmured.

  “No,” Peter said. “I can’t.”

  They’d woken up before dawn, showered, had breakfast, and then climbed into Peter’s truck—but there was still no word from Maddie.

  A brief text to the girl—We’re awake—also got no reply.

  So, as the sun rose, they’d driven the last few miles north to Manzanar, and just as it was promised on the former internment camp’s website, the gates were wide open. Admission was free—as it rightfully should be for a National Historic place of shame.

  They’d driven through—the visitor center and barracks wouldn’t open until later—to the cemetery where they’d been told that Maddie had been, just a day earlier.

  The mountains in the distance were beautiful but starkly forbidding. Shay and Peter stood there, in the middle of that flat desert plain, with the mostly barren earth stretching as far as the eye could see.

  Shayla looked around them, doing a full 360. She was going to come back here, with the boys. Rent a van, bring as many of their friends as they could fit and…

  Her phone buzzed. Yes!

  “It’s Maddie!” she told Peter. “She texted, We won’t go to San Diego. In LA. Oh, my God, they’re in Los Angeles? That’s hours from here!” They both started to run toward his truck, as she finished reading, “Will text soon with place to meet.”

  As they climbed in and Peter started the engine with a roar, he said, “Text her back and tell her not to go to Dingo’s parents’ house in Van Nuys!”

  “Oh, I’m on it,” Shay said, doing just that.

  “Why would they go all the way back to LA?” he muttered as he tried to call Maddie’s cellphone directly, even as he broke the speed limit leaving the compound.

  But the girl didn’t pick up. There was no response to Shay’s text, either, so Peter punched in Izzy Zanella’s phone number.

  “Good morning, Away Team,” the big SEAL’s cheerful voice filled the truck cab. “Did you have a pleasant stay at the lovely sounding Desert Flower Mo—”

  Peter cut him off. “Where are you?”

  “In Shay’s kitchen, with Hiroko. Uh-oh. With the frying pan. That sounds disturbingly Clue-like. I hope I’m not the murder vic—”

  “Who else is over there?” Peter demanded.

  “Lopez and Jenkins. All three of us are here for the day. Assuming Lindsey’s baby behaves. If she pops, Jenk’s going with her, of course, but that’s okay because Boat Squad John just called in. Their dive was canceled, so they’re on their way. I plied them with the promise of pancakes.”

  “I need you to go to Van Nuys, to the Dinglers’, ASAP. Take Seagull, Hans, and Timebomb, if they get there in time, if not, just get up there.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s your lucky day. They just pulled up.”

  “Go,” Peter ordered. “Now. Call me when you’re on the road. Oh, and Z? Cowboy up.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Peter punched off the connection.

  “We should call Dingo’s parents,” Shayla said. “I’ve got the number. It’s early, but…” She input it into the dashboard’s Bluetooth screen.

  Peter nodded, so she pushed the button that would dial the call, and as it rang, she said, “Maddie said LA, not Van Nuys. It’s possible that Dingo has friends in the city. His parents’ house, in the suburbs, is probably his last choice in terms of places to go.”

  “Unless she said LA because she didn’t know how to spell Van Nuys,” Peter countered as the line continued to ring.

  “And then there’s that,” Shay had to agree.

  The landline was ringing and ringing and ringing. Who even had a landline anymore? And wasn’t it overkill to put an extension—fully corded—in the bathroom?

  Maddie stood naked in front of the mirror in the shitty bathroom of Dingo’s parents’ shitty little house, using a hair dryer to attempt to dry the underwear she’d rinsed out in the sink while she was in the shower.

  She’d made the mistake of hooking her cellphone into Dingo’s parents’ wi-fi shortly after they’d arrived, and it had instantly begun to install an update to her operating system, which had rendered it useless. To make things worse, the wi-fi was sketchy so the upload was taking forever. For the past twenty minutes, it had been promising her it would be done in eight.

  Maybe she’d been sucked into a different dimension.

  It had certainly felt that way during the endless drive to Los Angeles.

  Well, they weren’t in LA, they were in the Valley—the burbs, north of the city. Dingo wasn’t even close to Australian. He was a Valley boy. Although boys and men probably didn’t get labeled like that. It was probably just the women and girls who were given that meant-to-be-insulting name.

  But Dingo hadn’t uttered the classic Valley girl Oh my God as they’d approached his parents’ house. In fact, over the entire course of the drive, mired in this new, awful dimension that Maddie was currently trapped in, neither of them had said much of anything.

  I’m going to get you your fucking shower…and then I’m going to bring you to your father and be done with you. For once and for all.

  They’d driven past the house, and everything was still and dark even though the sun was starting to rise.

  “We’re good, they’re gone.” Dingo had finally spoken.

  At Maddie’s questioning look, he’d grudgingly explained. “My mother sends me emails, so I know where they are, partly in case they die in a fiery ten-car pile-up. They have an RV and they travel a lot. They just got home from a long trip east—my sister had a baby—but then my dad wanted to go to some asshole festival in Arizona, so…She said she wasn’t sure if they were leaving last night or this morning, but the RV’s gone. She hides bags of food for me in the spare room, and sometimes money, too. We’ll have to be careful not to move anything or leave anything out of place, because I’m sure my dad checks. So we’ll want to wash and fold the towels after we shower.”

  He’d gone around the block, and parked on the next street over. “Just in case Dad forgot something—like his official I’m an Asshole hat—and they come back. That’s happened before. If they do, we’ll have to hide. And maybe pray.”

  Once inside, Dingo had raided some boxes that were neatly stacked in the corner of that spare room he’d mentioned. They were all marked Throw Away, but they held what had to be his belongings. “This used to be my room before my father attempted to erase me,” he’d told her as he handed her a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. “You can wear this until your clothes dry.”

  With the exception o
f her underwear, Maddie had put her dirty clothes outside of the bathroom door, and Dingo had immediately started a load in the washing machine—she heard it thumping and swishing from what must’ve been a laundry room on the other side of the shower wall. It was clear that he’d come here often when his parents were away, and he’d learned to be efficient with his time.

  The phone finally stopped ringing, but only a few seconds passed before it started up again.

  “Don’t answer that!” Dingo shouted through the door. “It’s probably my father. I think he suspects that Mom helps me out, because whenever I’m here, the phone rings off the hook, like he’s trying to catch me or something. So just…don’t.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Maddie shouted back.

  Dingo was in the living room when the black truck pulled up in front of the house. It was Nelson’s man Cody—with the pale eyes and total lack of soul. He didn’t even try to approach with stealth. He just parked and started up the front path.

  The hair dryer was still buzzing in the bathroom—Maddie wasn’t even close to being able to run. Still, Dingo went into the kitchen where—fuck!—the skinhead twins, Stank and Eddie, had just dropped over the back fence, into the dust bowl that was his parents’ backyard.

  He ducked down behind the counter, so that they couldn’t see him through the windows.

  Running was not an option. That left hiding, or fighting….He quickly opened the junk drawer, rummaging for something, anything….A jackknife…But all he found was a fold-up corkscrew that had a little knife on the end. Better than nothing, except, really? It was sharp as shit, but only three quarters of an inch long. Fighting wasn’t much of an option either.

  Still, he pocketed it, but then pulled out his phone. With shaking hands he went to his list of texts and found…Yes. Nelson had texted him just last night. Where you at?

  Fist time in days that M hasn’t been watching me, Dingo typed. Recovered some $$$, but now at end of rode. Will bring her to you ASAP.

  He hit send, pocketed his phone, and took a deep, steadying breath as he heard the glass break in the back door.