He could’ve told her he was strong enough to stop—he just wasn’t strong enough right now to face the fact that the Navy had quit on him.
Instead, he said nothing, and she quietly went inside, locking her door behind her.
And he poured himself another drink.
CHAPTER SIX
MIA’S LEGS BURNED as she rounded the corner onto Harris Avenue. She was nearly there, down to the last quarter mile of her run, so she put on a burst of speed.
There was construction going on just about a block and a half from the condo complex. Someone was building another fast-food restaurant—just what this neighborhood needed, she thought.
They’d poured the concrete for the foundation, and the project was at a temporary standstill while the mixture hardened. The lot was deserted. Several A&B Construction Co. trucks were parked at haphazard angles among huge hills of displaced dirt and broken asphalt.
A little girl sat digging on top of one of those hills, her face and clothing streaked with dirt, her red hair gleaming in the sunlight.
Mia skidded to a stop.
Sure enough, it was Natasha. She was oblivious to everything around her, digging happily in the sun-hardened dirt, singing a little song.
Mia tried to catch her breath as she ducked underneath the limp yellow ribbon that was supposed to warn trespassers off the construction sight. “Natasha?”
The little girl looked down at her and smiled. “Hi, Mia.”
“Honey, does your uncle know where you are?”
“He’s asleep,” Tasha said, returning to her digging. She’d found a plastic spoon and a discarded paper cup and was filling it with dirt and stirring the dirt as if it were coffee. She had mud covering close to every inch of her exposed skin—which was probably good since the morning sun was hot enough to give her a bad sunburn. “It’s still early. He won’t be up ’til later.”
Mia glanced at her watch. “Tash, it’s nearly ten. He’s got to be awake by now. He’s probably going crazy, looking for you. Don’t you remember what he told you—about not leaving the courtyard, and not even going out of the condo without telling him?”
Tasha glanced up at her. “How can I tell him when he’s asleep?” she said matter of factly. “Mommy always slept until after lunchtime.”
Mia held out her hands to help Tasha down from the dirt pile. “Come on. I’ll walk you home. We can check to see if Frisco’s still asleep.”
The little girl stood up and Mia swung her down to the ground.
“You are dirty, aren’t you?” she continued as they began walking toward the condo complex. “I think a bath is in your immediate future.”
Tasha looked at her arms and legs. “I already had a bath—a mud bath. Princesses always have mud baths, and they never have more than one bath a day.”
“Oh?” Mia said. “I thought princesses always had bubble baths right after their mud baths.”
Tasha considered that thoughtfully. “I never had a bubble bath.”
“It’s very luxurious,” Mia told her. What a sight they must’ve made walking down the street—a mud-encrusted child and an adult literally dripping with perspiration. “The bubbles go right up to your chin.”
Natasha’s eyes were very wide. “Really?”
“Yeah, and I just happen to have some bubble-bath soap,” Mia told her. “You can try it out when we get home—unless you’re absolutely certain you don’t want a second bath today…?”
“No, princesses can only have one mud bath a day,” Tasha told her in complete seriousness. “It’s okay if they have a mud bath and a bubble bath.”
“Good.” Mia smiled as they entered the condo courtyard.
The complex was still pretty quiet. Most of the residents had left for work hours ago. Still, it was summer vacation for the few kids who lived in the building. Mia could hear the distant strains of television sets and stereo systems. Tasha followed her up the stairs to unit 2C.
The door was ajar and Mia knocked on the screen. “Hello?” she called, but there was no answer. She leaned on the bell. Still nothing.
Mia looked at the mud caked on Natasha’s body and clothes. “You better wait out here,” she told the little girl.
Tasha nodded.
“Right here,” Mia said in her best teacher’s voice, pointing to the little spot of concrete directly in front of Frisco’s door. “Sit. And don’t go anywhere, do you understand, miss?”
Tasha nodded again and sat down.
Feeling very much like a trespasser, Mia opened the screen door and went inside. With the curtains closed, the living room was dim. The television was on, but the volume was set to a low, barely discernible murmur. The air was cool, almost cold, as if the air conditioner had been working overtime to compensate for the slightly opened door. Mia turned off the TV as she went past.
“Hello?” Mia called again. “Lieutenant Francisco…?”
The condo was as silent as a tomb.
“He’s gonna be grumpy if you wake him up,” Tasha said, up on her knees with her nose pressed against the screen.
“I’ll take my chances,” Mia said, starting down the hall toward the bedrooms. She was tiptoeing, though. When she reached the end of the hall, she glanced quickly into the bathroom and the smaller of the two bedrooms. Both were empty. The larger bedroom’s door was half-closed, and she crept closer. Taking a deep breath, she pushed it open as she knocked.
The double bed was empty.
In the dimness, she could see that the sheets were twisted into a knot. The blanket had been kicked onto the floor, and the pillows were rumpled, but Alan Francisco was not still lying there.
There was not much furniture in the room—just the bed, a bedside table and a dresser. The setup was Spartan. The top of his dresser held only a small pile of loose change. There were no personal items, no knickknacks, no souvenirs. The sheets on the bed were plain white, the blanket a light beige. The closet door hung open, as did one of the drawers in the modest-size dresser. Several duffel bags sagged nearby on the floor. The whole place had a rather apathetic feel, as if the person living here didn’t care enough to unpack, or to hang pictures on the wall and make the place his own.
There was nothing that gave any sense of personality to the resident of the room, with the exception of an enormous pile of dirty laundry that seemed to glower from one dark corner. That and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey standing on Frisco’s bedside table were the only telling things. And the bottle, at least, certainly told quite a bit. It was similar to the bottle he’d had outside last night—except that bottle had been nearly full.
No wonder Tasha hadn’t been able to wake him.
But eventually he had awakened and found the little girl gone. He was probably out searching for her right now, worried nearly out of his mind.
The best thing they could do was stay put. Eventually, Frisco would come back to see if Natasha had returned.
But the thought of hanging out in Frisco’s condo wasn’t extremely appealing. His belongings may have been impersonal to the point of distastefulness, but she felt as if by being there, she was invading his privacy.
Mia turned to leave when a gleam of reflected light from the closet caught her eye. She switched on the overhead light.
It was amazing. She’d never seen anything like it in her entire life. A naval uniform hung in the closet, bright white and crisply pressed. And on the upper left side of the jacket, were row after row after row after row of colorful medals. And above it—the cause of that reflected light—was a pin in the shape of an eagle, wings outspread, both a gun and a trident clasped in its fierce talons.
Mia couldn’t imagine the things Frisco had done to get all of those medals. But because there were so many of them, there was one thing that she suddenly did see quite clearly. Alan Francisco had a dedication to his job unlike anyone she’d ever met. These medals told her that as absolutely as if they could talk. If he had had one or two medals—sure, that would have told her he was a bra
ve and capable soldier. But there had to be more than ten of these colorful bars pinned to his uniform. She counted them quickly with her finger. Ten…eleven. Eleven medals surely meant that Frisco had gone above and beyond the call of duty time after time.
She turned, and in the new light of her discovery, his bedroom had an entirely different look to it. Instead of being the room of a someone who didn’t care enough to add any personal touches, it became the room of a man who’d never taken the time to have a life outside of his dangerous career.
Even the whiskey bottle looked different. It looked far more sad and desperate than ever before.
And the room wasn’t entirely devoid of personal items. There was a book on the floor next to the bed. It was a collection of short stories by J. D. Salinger. Salinger. Who would’ve thought…?
“Mia?”
Natasha was calling her from the living room door.
Mia turned off the light on her way out of Frisco’s room. “I’m here, hon, but your uncle’s not,” she said, coming into the living room.
“He’s not?” Tasha scrambled to her feet to get out of the way of the opening screen door.
“What do you say we go next door and see about that bubble-bath soap of mine?” Mia continued, shutting the heavy wooden door to unit 2C tightly behind her. “I’ll write a note for your uncle so that he knows you’re at my place when he gets back.”
She’d call Thomas, too. If he was home, he might be willing to go out looking for the Navy lieutenant, to tell him Natasha was safe.
“Let’s go right into the bathroom,” Mia told Tasha as she opened her screen door and unlocked the dead bolt to her condo. “We’ll pop you directly into the tub, okay?”
Natasha hung back, her eyes very wide in her mud-streaked face. “Is Frisco gonna be mad at me?”
Mia gazed at the little girl. “Would you blame him very much if he was?”
Tasha’s face fell as she shook her head, her lips stretching into that unmistakable shape children’s mouths made when they were about to cry. “He was asleep.”
“Just because he’s sleeping doesn’t mean you can break his rules,” Mia told her.
“I was gonna come home before he woke up….”
Aha. Mia suddenly understood. Natasha’s mother had frequently slept off her alcoholic binges until well past noon, unknowing and perhaps even uncaring of her daughter’s private explorations. It was tantamount to neglect, and obviously Tasha expected the same treatment from Frisco.
Something was going to have to change.
“If I were you,” Mia advised her, “I’d be good and ready to say I’m sorry the moment Frisco gets home.”
FRISCO SAW THE note on his door from down in the courtyard. It was a pink piece of paper taped to the outside of the screen, and it lifted in the first stirrings of a late-morning breeze. He hurried up the stairs, ignoring the pain in his knee, and pulled the note from the door.
“Found Natasha,” it said in clean, bold printing. Thank God. He closed his eyes briefly, grateful beyond belief. He’d searched the beach for nearly an hour, terrified his niece had broken his rule and gone down to the ocean again. Hell, if she would break his rule about leaving the condo, she could just as well have broken his rule about never swimming alone.
He’d run into a lifeguard who’d told him he’d heard a rumor that a kid’s body had washed up on the beach early in the morning. Frisco’s heart had damn near stopped beating. He’d waited for nearly forty-five minutes at a pay phone, trying to get through to the shore patrol, trying to find out if the rumor was true.
It turned out that the body that had washed up in the surf had been that of a baby seal. And with that relief had come the knowledge that he’d wasted precious time. And the search had started again.
Frisco opened his eyes and found he had crumpled the pink paper. He smoothed it out to read the rest. “Found Natasha. We’re at my place. Mia.”
Mia Summerton. Saving the day again.
Leaning on his cane, he went toward Mia’s door, catching his reflection in his living room window. His hair was standing straight up, and he looked as if he were hiding from the sunlight behind his dark sunglasses. His T-shirt looked slept in, and his shorts were slept in. He looked like hell and he felt worse. His head had been pounding from the moment he’d stumbled out into the living room and found that Natasha was gone again. No, strike that. His head had been pounding from the moment he’d opened his eyes. It had risen to a nearly unbearable level when he’d discovered Tash was AWOL. It was still just shy of intolerable.
He rang the doorbell anyway, well aware that in addition to the not-so-pretty picture he made, he didn’t smell too damn good, either. His shirt reeked of a distillery. He hadn’t been too picky when he snatched it off the floor of his room this morning on his way out the door to search for Tash. Just his luck, he’d grabbed the one he’d used to mop up a spilled glass of whiskey last night.
The door swung open, and Mia Summerton stood there, looking like something out of a sailor’s fantasy. She was wearing running shorts that redefined the word short, and a midriff-baring athletic top that redefined the word lust. Her hair was back in a single braid, and still damp from perspiration.
“She’s here, she’s safe,” Mia said in way of greeting. “She’s in the tub, getting cleaned up.”
“Where did you find her?” His throat felt dry and his voice came out raspy and harsh.
Mia looked back into her condo unit and raised her voice. “How you doing in there, Tasha?”
“Fine,” came a cheery reply.
She opened the screen door and stepped outside. “Harris Avenue,” she told Frisco. “She was over on Harris Avenue, playing in the dirt at that construction site—”
“Dammit! What the hell does she think she’s doing? She’s five years old! She shouldn’t be walking around by herself or—God!—playing on a construction site!” Frisco ran one hand down his face, fighting to control his flare of anger. “I know that yelling at the kid’s not going to help….” He forced himself to lower his voice, to take a deep breath and try to release all of the frustration and anger and worry of the past several hours. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “She blatantly disobeyed my orders.”
“That’s not the way she sees it,” Mia told him.
“The rule was for her to tell me when she went outside. The rule was to stay in the courtyard.”
“In her opinion, all bets are off if Mom—or Uncle Frisco—can’t drag themselves out of bed in the morning.” Mia fixed him with her level gaze. Her eyes were more green than brown in the bright morning sun. “She told me she thought she’d be back before you even woke up.”
“A rule is a rule,” Frisco started.
“Yeah, and her rule,” Mia interrupted, “is that if you climb into a bottle, she’s on her own.”
Frisco’s headache intensified. He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. It wasn’t that she was looking at him accusingly. There was nothing even remotely accusative in her eyes. In fact, her eyes were remarkably gentle, softening the harshness of her words.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “That was uncalled for.”
He shook his head, uncertain as to whether he was agreeing with her or disagreeing with her.
“Why don’t you come inside?” Mia said, holding open the screen door for him.
Mia’s condo might as well have been from a different planet than his. It was spacious and open, with unspotted, light brown carpeting and white painted bamboo-framed furniture. The walls were freshly painted and clean, and potted plants were everywhere, their vines lacing across the ceiling on a system of hooks. Music played softly on the stereo. Frisco recognized the smoky Texas-blues-influenced vocals of Lee Roy Parnell.
Pictures hung on the wall—gorgeous blue and green watercolors of the ocean, and funky, quirkily colorful figures of people walking along the beach.
“My mother’s an artist,” Mia said, following his gaze. “Most of this is he
r work.”
Another picture was that of the beach before a storm. It conveyed all of the dangerous power of the wind and the water, the ominous, darkening sky, the rising surf, the palm trees whipped and tossed—nature at her most deadly.
“She’s good,” Frisco said.
Mia smiled. “I know.” She raised her voice. “How’s it going in bubbleland, Natasha?”
“Okay.”
“While she was out playing in the dirt, she gave herself a Russian princess mud bath.” With a wry smile, she led Frisco into the tiny kitchen. It was exactly like his—and nothing like his. Magnets of all shapes and sizes covered the refrigerator, holding up photos of smiling people, and notes and coupons and theater schedules. Fresh fruit hung in wire baskets that were suspended from hooks on the ceiling. A coffee mug in the shape of a cow wearing a graduate’s cap sat on the counter next to the telephone, holding pencils and pens. The entire room was filled with little bits and pieces of Mia. “I managed to convince her that true royalty always followed a mud bath with a bubble bath.”
“Bless you,” Frisco said. “And thank you for bringing her home.”
“It was lucky I ran that way.” Mia opened the refrigerator door. “I usually take a longer route, but I was feeling the heat this morning.” She looked up at Frisco. “Ice tea, lemonade or soda?”
“Something with caffeine, please,” Frisco told her.
“Hmm,” Mia said, reaching into the back of the fridge and pulling out a can of cola. She handed it to him. “And would you like that with two aspirin or three?”
Frisco smiled. It was crooked but it was a smile. “Three. Thanks.”
She motioned to the small table that was in the dining area at the end of the kitchen, and Frisco lowered himself into one of a pair of chairs. She had a napkin holder in the shape of a pig and tiny airplanes for salt and pepper shakers. There were plants everywhere in here, too, and a fragile wind chime directly over his head, in front of a window that looked out over the parking lot. He reached up and brushed the wind chime with one finger. It sounded as delicate and ghostly as it looked.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 58
