by Amy Vansant
He rolled his eyes. “No, you weren’t. What’s your name?”
The girl’s gaze darted down to the desk at which he sat.
“Jelly.”
He looked to where her attention had jumped and spotted a pack of grape jelly poking from beneath a sheet of paper.
“You just looked at that jelly.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
She shrugged “Coincidence. What’s your name?”
He scowled. “Peanut Butter.”
She thrust out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Peanut Butter.”
Mason heard yelling from the back of the station and glanced toward the room the man in the white uniform had entered. It was the same room where they’d taken his old man. His cheeks grew hot.
Jelly turned to look, too. He didn’t want her to see his father come out of the room, so he asked the first question he could think of to draw her attention back to him.
“Who’s that man you’re with?”
“My dad.”
“What is he?”
“Huh?”
“The uniform.”
“He’s Navy.”
“Oh.” Mason nodded. He’d never met anyone in the Navy before. His grandfather on his father’s side had supposedly been in the Army.
“I’m in the Navy, too,” Jelly added, shrugging one shoulder as if it were no big deal.
“No you’re not.”
“I am. I’m a Naval bounty hunter.” She peeled back the papers on the desk to further reveal the packet of jelly and an open sleeve of dayglow orange crackers. She pulled a cracker from the cellophane and took a bite.
“It’s a secret, though. Don’t tell anyone,” she added, orange crumbs raining from her lips.
He frowned and thought about his sneakers hanging from the telephone line. “I know how to keep a secret.”
“Good. Not many people can. You must be special, too.” She took another bite and held up the cracker. “Peanut butter.”
“Why’s your dad here?”
Jelly looked right and left before leaning in to whisper her answer. Something about her conspiratorial tone and the feel of her breath under his ear made him feel googily in his stomach.
“He’s looking for a man who went AWOL. They have his partner in there,” she said.
“What’s AWOL?”
“Absent Without Leave. It means he owed the Navy time but he ran off instead. That’s what Mick and I do. We find criminals and runaways for the Navy.”
“Who’s Mick?”
“My dad.”
“You call your old man by his first name?”
Jelly nodded, and Mason realized his new self did feel some things. Right now, he felt impressed. If he called his father Perry, he’d get slapped into the next county.
He looked at the door and realized what Jelly had asked.
Had his own father been in the Navy?
“Is the man with the beard the AWOL fella?” he asked.
“No. That’s his partner.” Jelly popped the rest of the cracker in her mouth. “When Mick caught up with his man, the sailor said he’d tell Mick everything if he let him go. Said they robbed a jewelry store full of diamonds and hid a body in a swamp.”
“A body?”
She nodded. “A lady.”
Mason’s skin grew clammy.
Jelly stopped chewing. Her head cocked. “When did your mom leave?”
“Two days ago.” His tongue felt dry.
The girl swallowed and lowered her hand to rest on top of the one he had on the desk. He stared at her hand on his, tremors running through his body. He wanted to jerk away, but he couldn’t.
Something about her touch reminded him of Momma.
Jelly looked at him, biting her lip, and then suddenly threw her arms around his neck.
Shocked, he clung to her, the strange girl he didn’t know.
“It’ll be okay, Peanut Butter,” she said in his ear. “Mick fixes everything.”
As if she’d invoked him, the man in the white uniform appeared behind Jelly, looking concerned.
“What’s going on, Siofra?” he asked.
Mason released her and wiped his eyes.
Shee-fra. Is that her real name?
She sounded like some kind of superhero. Like He-Man’s lady, She-Ra.
She pointed at the room where her father had been. “The man with the beard is his father.”
She lowered her voice, but not enough so Mason couldn’t hear.
“His mother is missing.”
The officer couldn’t disguise the horror rippling across his expression. He looked at Mason with softer eyes, confirming his deepest fears.
Momma’s dead. Daddy killed her.
“His name is Peanut Butter,” added the girl.
“Mason.” Mason thrust out a hand and the Navy man shook it, his grip as strong as he imagined it would be.
“Nice to meet you, Peanut Butter Mason.”
He winked and Mason offered a tight smile.
“I see you met my daughter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever think about joining the Navy?”
Mason shook his head. “No.”
“Hm. Well, if you ever do, look me up.”
The officer pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to him. Mason glanced down to read the name on it, Commander Shea McQueen.
Commander.
Mason marveled at the title.
He must be in charge of the whole Navy.
“My friends call me Mick. You can call me Mick until you’re a sailor. Then you’ll have to call me sir. Deal?”
Mason nodded. “Yes, sir. I mean, Mick.”
Mick laughed and tussled Mason’s hair with his strong paw.
“Commander? If you could come this way.”
A police officer poked around the corner, beckoning. Commander McQueen winked and turned to leave, guiding Jelly by the shoulder to follow alongside him.
She looked over her opposite shoulder as she left, smiling. “See ya, Peanut Butter.”
Mason nodded once.
“See ya, Jelly,” he said, too quietly for her to hear.
&&&
Chapter Eleven
Present Day
Shee scooped sand into a bright yellow scallop shell and poured it on her big toe as if the shell were a little excavator. The strip of dry land on which she sat shrank another inch as the surf pounded in, driven by a strong north-easterly wind. A winter squall had the temperature hovering at a nippy sixty degrees, and Shee zipped her hoodie to protect herself against the chill.
Where did Florida go?
A man walked by holding both his skinny arms in the air as if he’d won a marathon. He wore nothing but ragged-edged jeans shorts and a Russian fur cap complete with ear flaps, his exposed nipples pointed into the wind like rocket nosecones.
Ah. There it is.
She didn’t need to worry about Florida.
Shee rested her forehead on her knees.
This is it. I’m going home.
Mick had been too still. She couldn’t remember a time she’d seen her father lie so still in the middle of the day.
Something’s wrong.
The way she saw it, she had two options. She could keep sneaking around, filling the Loggerhead Inn’s airspace with spy drones.
Or...
She could sack-up and walk through the door.
Maybe no one would recognize her. She could get a room like a tourist. Angelina was probably the only person from the Inn’s original staff still working there—the only person who could make her.
Will it be safe?
If the people after her were in Jupiter Beach, they would have killed her already. Right? She’d been a ghost for fifteen years. Certainly, they hadn’t been surveilling her father’s hotel all that time, waiting for her to appear...
Shee stood and brushed the sand from her butt. A tourist couple walked by holding hands. She could
tell they were tourists because only shorts and tank tops covered their fish-belly-white skin. At sixty-five degrees, the locals were digging out their parkas. Visitors gritted through wearing their summer togs, chanting, I will be on vacation, dammit.
Shee shivered. It seemed she still had Floridian blood.
Okay. You can do this.
As the sun dipped to the west, she returned to her car and drove to The Loggerhead Inn, grateful the short trip had left little time to rethink her decision.
She pulled into the hotel’s lot and parked across from the front door. A flock of white ibis strutted nearby, poking their curved beaks into a patch of thick green grass, plucking worms and millipedes.
Eleven.
Eleven birds, ten white and one mostly white with gray speckles. The number eleven hovered over the image of the birds in her mind, like the watermark on a copyrighted photo. The tiniest glimpse at a flock of birds and she knew how many were there, but ask her twenty-two percent of sixty-four dollars and she’d spend twenty years, a redwood’s worth of paper and a thousand number two pencils working out the answer.
She hated math.
I like birds, though. Does a flock of birds become a herd of birds when walking?
Good question.
Here’s a better one.
Can I think of any other stupid ways to delay getting out of this car?
Shee cut the engine, closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Here goes nothing.
She left the vehicle and pointed herself toward the inn’s porch. The enormous man she’d seen guarding the front door during a previous drive-by had left his post.
She scanned the area, searching for the doorman. She liked to keep track of people capable of breaking her in half with their bare hands, especially after her current track record with giants, but she didn’t see him.
Good. Maybe I won’t be tempted to tackle him.
She opened the door and walked into the lobby, the air conditioning chilling her bare arms.
“Hello?”
The white granite top of the unmanned check-in desk gleamed beneath a string of modern pedant lights. Another small wooden desk, one Shee guessed belonged to a concierge, also sat empty, but for a small pile of papers, a few clear containers of local attraction brochures and a fuzzy black, bedazzled disk about the size of a dinner plate. The disc looked as if Sunset Boulevard’s aging movie queen Norma Desmond had left behind a hat.
Shee took another cleansing breath and exhaled.
You’re in. No one is watching you. This is good. You can go to Mick without having to go through anyone else.
If only all infiltrations were this easy.
She walked to the elevator, the slap of sandals against her feet deafening in the silence of the empty room.
Her attention pulled toward the ceiling, and she realized she’d been searching for speakers. The hotel needed lobby music to make guests feel welcomed. Something mellow and Jimmy Buffetty to confirm their expectations of Florida.
Heck with the music. Stationing a warm human being somewhere in the lobby would be a good start. As it was, the hotel had an after-the-apocalypse vibe. Empty. Abandoned suddenly, if the glowing iPhone on the check-in counter was any indication.
Strange.
If a zombie came shuffling down the hall toward her it wouldn’t have felt out of place.
Shut up. Go to Mick.
Shee suffered a flash of dread.
Maybe everyone else had gone running to Mick.
Maybe something happened, maybe his condition, whatever it may be, had worsened.
She hit the elevator call and, as if the lift had been waiting eons for her arrival, the doors slid open.
Shee found herself staring at a group of people and a tiny dog.
Well, hello there.
Four people in the elevator, but only three sets of eyes staring back at her, if she didn’t count the dog. All but one of the people opened their mouths a crack, as if startled to see her.
One didn’t register any surprise at all because he—judging from the men’s slippers dangling from the carpet in which he was rolled—was probably dead.
Dead, or enjoying a friendly game of human burrito.
It wasn’t Mick in there, she was relieved to note. Not unless her father had both ankles replaced by a black donor.
Shee might not have noticed the dead guy, except when the doors opened, the youngest woman fumbled her side of the rolled carpet. Feet slid out, but the fast-thinking giant holding the opposite end bent his knees to reverse the plane and stop Dead Guy’s slide to the ground.
The big man with the barrel chest and keg belly wore a tropical shirt and khaki shorts that made him look like a friendly giant. He easily supported three quarters of the rug’s considerable weight.
Doorman located. Check.
At the opposite side of the rug, the young woman recovered from her shock and propped her end. For letting her side slip, she flashed an apologetic glance at the giant and then locked her attention back on Shee.
Shee’s attention moved to the last breathing human in the group—a woman clutching an impossibly small, black-and-rust-colored dog against her bosom.
The woman looked like an older, very surprised version of Angelina.
“Angelina?” Shee heard herself say, but the word had hardly left her lips before the doors slid shut and the elevator headed back up.
Shee wasn’t sure what had kept her from thrusting her arm between the closing doors, but she’d made no effort to stop them. Her reluctance might have been caused by the shock of seeing Angelina again after so long.
It might have been the dead guy.
&&&
Chapter Twelve
Shee remained in the same spot, nose nearly brushing the elevator doors, until they slid open again to reveal only Angelina, her trademark four-thousand-watt smile outlined by blood-red lips.
A newcomer, who hadn’t just witnessed Angelina supervising the removal of a body, would have found the woman composed and relaxed, as if she’d been upstairs at a day spa.
Shee noted her old family friend had been crying. She clocked a thin smear of makeup reaching toward Angelina’s eyebrow, where she’d presumably swept her melting kohl-black eyeliner to avoid looking like a raccoon. The dark smudge on her index finger confirmed this. The sheen of sweat at her brow line suggested she’d deigned to help carry that human burrito after all. Maybe in the rush to get him off the elevator. The woman’s pulse pounded in her neck like an African djembe drum.
“Shee?” Angelina flung out the arm unburdened by a dog and clamped it around Shee’s shoulders like a toddler demanding to be picked up. Shee resisted the urge to carry her from the elevator, but tugged her into the lobby as the elevator doors bounced off her shoulder and threatened to pinch them even closer together.
“Hey, Angelina.”
The dog placed its front paws on Shee’s shoulder to lick her right cheek. Angelina planted what Shee suspected to be a smeary cherry lipstick kiss on her left.
Well. Both those things were unnecessarily wet.
Angelina gave her a bonus squeeze before taking a step back, her pointy heel nearly slipping into the metal slot between the elevator and the lobby. She tip-toed safely away from the makeshift bear trap as the doors slid shut.
“You came back,” she said. Her eyes rimmed with tears and she slid the already black-stained knuckle of her index finger upward to wipe them away.
Shee pointed at the elevator. “So that guy in the carpet—”
Angelina’s shoulders relaxed and the smile returned to her lips. Even her slow-blink stare said nothing to see here.
“Hm?”
Shee couldn’t help but smile.
Angelina. Ever the poker player.
She decided to circle back to the dead guy later.
“Once you shot my drone with a tracker I figured you wanted to see me,” she said instead.
Angelina strode to the concierge desk and pla
ced the dog into the black, sparkly disk.
Ah. Not Norma Desmond’s hat. A dog bed.
Angelina spun and shook a finger as if scolding a child. “Putting the tracker on the gopher tortoise was mean. You had poor Croix stalking that thing to get her equipment back.”
Shee scowled. “What’s a Croy? Half crow, half boy?”
“Croix. Like the island of St. Croix. I think it’s pretty.”
Shee hooked a thumb toward the elevator. “The girl?”
Angelina nodded.
Shee moved to the dog that was now standing like a miniature soldier, all eyes and bird-chested attitude. As she neared, its butt wiggled, tongue lolling. The strain of telepathically begging Shee to come pet me had apparently broken its little brain. Shee scratched the dog’s neck as if it were made of furry china, amazed something so tiny could act like a real dog.
“This can’t be Harley.”
“It is. Harley Two.”
“You named a new dog Harley?”
Angelina flicked her wrist as if batting away the question. “I didn’t want to go through getting this one registered as a therapy dog and I still have Harley One’s paperwork. Plus, I had a lot of collars and whatnot with her name on them...”
“Strangely, that makes sense.”
“Of course it makes sense. Why wouldn’t I make sense?”
Shee’s gaze shifted to the elevator as Harley’s tiny dagger teeth gnawed her thumb. She wanted to run up the stairs to see Mick, but the fact Angelina hadn’t yet mentioned her father made her nervous.
She wasn’t ready to hear he was dead or wrecked beyond repair in any way.
Speaking of dead guys...
“Is now when I ask about the body in the rug?”
Angelina pulled out her concierge desk chair and dropped into it. “Put a pin in that for a second. I think you have a more pressing question.”
Here it comes. She’s going to tell me about Dad.
Shee braced and stopped scratching the dog. Harley Two stomped her foot with annoyance.
Angelina leveled her stare. “I assume you saw him with the drone?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Angelina stood and adjusted her blouse. “I have to go.”
