Beachcomber Baby

by Stephanie Queen

  “A couple months into it I was sent away undercover domestically at Camp Lejeune on a sting operation involving missing weapons. The gang buying was from California—the Mongols—I was backup for a short time for a guy who’d been embedded by the ATF for a year. During the buy, just as the bullets flew, one of the guys from California made me. He was someone I had known as a teenager from my surfing days. He was one of those lost boys—that’s what we called him. He had no father, but he went bad—really bad. I’d lost track of him.

  “After the buy—I knew he’d made me when he—”

  “This guy have a name?” Peter asked in a hard voice.

  “Not in this story. Not since his mother passed.” Dane closed his mouth in a grim line and meant to keep it that way. He hated thinking about Charlie. Hated talking about him even more. But Peter stared, then crossed his arms and widened his stance as if he were settling in for the duration.

  “Goddamnit. His name was Charlie. We had been friends when we were younger—mostly grade school, junior high. Sometimes in the summer we’d surf. We were both without fathers in a community where that was an oddity. But the teenage years separated us. His mother drank and mine didn’t. He needed to prove himself in ways that were destructive. I didn’t. He didn’t get that. I had to prove to him that we weren’t going to be friends anymore.” Dane took a breath. What happened next was still painful for him to remember. Still hurt. He didn’t tell them that Charlie had been more like a brother than a friend up until that day; that he’d wanted to teach him a lesson and convince him not to go through with his plan; that the betrayal had cost him almost as much as it had Charlie. On that day. He’d gotten over it since. Knew there was nothing on this earth that could have saved him. Charlie was no longer Charlie. He’d sunk into the realm of crazy and had been closing in on sociopath. Between his lack of parental guidance or love, his experimentation with drugs and desperation to be someone, Charlie had sold his soul and had none left.

  “There was a girl in school. Charlie wanted to ‘date’ her. Or rape her—made no difference to him. I knew it. I’d told him I wasn’t going with him on his planned raid. Threatened to do something about it if he tried it. He figured he could rob the house where she baby sat and ‘get some action’ while he was at it. His words. Funny I still remember.” He stopped talking. Wished he could stop remembering.

  “What happened?” Peter’s voice was quieter, but still commanded a response.

  “I caught him with his pants down. Literally. Or I should say a whole crowd of us caught him. I took my friends with me for back up. His friends had deserted him—ran. I didn’t call the cops—didn’t think of betraying him—just wanted to—”

  “Change him?” Madeline said.

  Dane nodded. He felt foolish now. But he’d been seventeen years old at the time and Charlie had been like a brother for too many years. They’d surfed together the previous summer, though they hadn’t hung out in school. He took a deep breath and continued.

  “I tried reasoning, but my timing had been bad so naturally Charlie had to redeem himself and challenge me to a fight. In front of everyone, the girl, and half the football team, I beat the shit out of him. We both knew I could. I’d done it before.

  “But this time I humiliated him. We dragged him out of there and dumped him on the beach—where we used to surf—and left him. I knew his mother wouldn’t bother, so I called 911 to have him picked up. He spent some time in the hospital I’d heard. He never came back to school or to the neighborhood after that. I kept tabs on him through his mother until she left town with some guy. Last I’d heard he lived in LA and took up pimping and dealing in prescription drugs. He’d been deceptively clean-cut, but his soul was as black as the worst gang leader and blacker than most. Didn’t take the locals long to figure that out and I wasn’t surprised when I found out he had a leadership role.”

  “Is he still alive?” Peter asked.

  “No.” Dane paused a beat and met Peter’s eyes and his friend nodded. He hadn’t even gotten to the horror yet. Dane took another cleansing breath, felt Shana slide against his arm and touch his back causing a frisson of cold to run through him. He shouldn’t subject her to this story. But she would argue that he shouldn’t try to protect her from things, that she was tough enough.

  He risked a glance at her. She smiled at him again. Her smile seemed bright and out of place—but she meant it, couldn’t help it. He almost wished she would scowl, wished she’d arm herself. He shook her off then and the scowl appeared. He stepped away and repelled her hand when she would have touched him. Within a breath the concern on her face was coated by a sheet of ice. She was very talented at protecting herself from bad. He’d forgotten. No need to worry. He continued.

  “Charlie contacted my mother later—about a month after the bust. He’d been sprung on bail. He called her. She hadn’t realized he had been arrested, so she talked to him—remembered him from his younger preteen days. She remembered his mother. She told him all about my law enforcement career—not knowing she’d compromised me. Of course she told good old Charlie where I lived. Where I worked. My phone number. And who I lived with.” The stab at remembering took Dane by surprise and he stopped. Shana reached out and he withdrew violently, giving her a hard look. But she was still armed and she scowled back at him, lifting her chin.

  “Get on with your story,” she said. “It’s late.” If he hadn’t been nursing the stabbing coil in his gut he would have laughed at that. The physical pain now was a surprise, but it was nothing.

  “By then I was back in Chicago and back with my girl and my baby, who was taking her first steps. I heard no threats or backlash—just the mention from my mother that Charlie had called. I reported the contact and they kept me in low profile work—which ordinarily would have been boring, but not with my baby girl.” He saw the question in Shana’s eyes and said, “She was mine in every way except biologically.”

  Joe refilled Dane’s coffee mug and he took a sip. Peter wrapped his arm around Madeline as she leaned into him, both watching him like concerned doctors would eye a patient on the verge of—something. He was on the verge. He was on a cliff. He was about to jump off and relive the horror. He had no idea what it would do to him. He hoped to hell his safety net—his heart and his fortitude—would keep him. So he went on.

  “Then it happened. Out of the blue. I knew Charlie had been sentenced to some hard time so it took me unawares,” he confessed and brutally shoved aside the what-if that jumped into his head—the one he’d been fighting with every time he lost his battle to keep it all from his mind, to keep the nightmare of it at bay. What if he’d taken precautions? What if he’d moved or lifted even a finger to evade detection? He hadn’t. He hadn’t realized how dangerous and powerful Charlie had become.

  “I got the call from my girl—she was well on her way to drunk and drugged out because she couldn’t find the baby.” A twist of tension wrenched his gut. He clenched his jaw and continued.

  “I knew. Instantly I put everyone in my unit on alert—called in favors—didn’t call you, Peter, because you were District Attorney at the time and busy considering a run for governor—so I left you out of it. But I did call Sam and Acer from the old unit.

  “They tracked Charlie down in prison and checked all his visitors and narrowed it down to one guy who was in Chicago—who also knew me from the beach. He was one of the guys on the fringe of the surfer crowd. I knew then it was personal.

  “We ran it like a kidnapping. We had everything set up at the house. We got the call from his man in Chicago, Zero they called him. He said he had a message from Delilah. The next voice on the line was Delilah’s,” he paused, remembered, heard her baby voice. He forced himself on. “She was saying ‘daddy’ through tears. Zero was wild, yelling at her. I was enraged, I yelled back.” He pushed himself into the comfort of distance and behind the iron wall where no feeling could penetrate.

  Until Shana spoke. “Dane I’m so …”

&nbs
p; “Don’t,” he snapped. His distance vanished. The gut-twisting pain sharpened.

  “I demanded—then begged—to meet him and give him whatever he wanted. Zero laughed.” Dane stared off into the distance, past the stricken faces of his friends and took a deep breath, preparing himself as best he could, knowing it wouldn’t be enough, and continued.

  “The next thing I heard was the cries and the blood-curdling screams of my baby. Then bashing sounds like someone was beating a piñata. Except it wasn’t a piñata.” His words were rushed now and his voice tight and he ignored the horror on his friends’ faces and Shana’s clench of his arm and Madeline’s involuntary cry of pain as she clamped her hand over her mouth. He pushed on, now compulsively, not able to stop, like the rush of words would ward off the pain.

  “The line stayed live long enough for us to track the call and race there. It was a deserted warehouse. Zero was long gone, although they ended up picking him up at the airport. They—my unit—wouldn’t let me near him for my own good. They didn’t want to see me put away for murder. But they didn’t put him in solitary right away. And they did spread some pictures around.

  “The pictures were of Delilah taken when we found her—what was left of her small body and smashed skull. Her face had been preserved as if they wanted to make sure I knew it was her for sure. I’d rushed into the warehouse and smelled the death and saw the stream of blood before I saw her body. And the pipe next to it covered in blood and brain matter.”

  He heard a strangled cry and turned to Shana then and saw the tears streaming down her face. Dane told the story for everyone—Peter, Madeline, Joe—but it was meant mostly for her. And they all cried as he kept a stone face. He put his cup down on the coffee table and stood, almost surprised his body was mechanically sound. He was not wracked with the strangling pain that had been creeping in on him—not yet anyway. He waited for it, backing up a step, away from them. He was finished telling them his story and he needed to be gone—to be alone when the pain shut him down. But for this moment he felt like he had that night—like a cold force had suddenly turned him into a petrified hulk.

  Shana reached out to him when he stood and felt him retreating and couldn’t stand it. When he backed away she stood up and hugged his unrelenting solidness, felt his stony reserve. She held on because she felt a tremor, a small one underneath the reserve and knew he would crack. She pulled him from the room insisting that she—they—needed some air. No one questioned her.

  By the time she got him outside, she was the strong solid one with the stony determination. And he dissolved.

  He collapsed onto the cold cement patio and dragged her with him and cried in her hair until it was soaked with his tears and he begged her forgiveness—when he was really begging the forgiveness of Delilah. She held onto him and spoke soft reassuring utterances—not even words except she said love more than once in sorrow and pain and wanted to rip her heart out and give it to him right then to replace his broken one. His heart had been torn to pieces all those years ago and she’d made him relive it as if it were yesterday. She cried with him and held onto him fiercely for an eternity—everything suspended—trying to send her healing energy to him through sheer force of will. She wasn’t one to be into New Age voodoo, but she hoped to heaven whatever strength she had she could give to this man. Right here and now. After minutes that seemed like forever, as she stroked the hair from his face, his pained, handsome, legendary face, and her chest squeezed one more time, he pulled back. His sobs let up. She still held on. When he met her eyes, thoughts flooded her mind.

  Shana didn’t want to ask what happened to the baby’s mother but, damn her, she burned to know. Was she a jealous competitive woman even at this moment? But Dane had been more in love with the baby than the mother, he’d made it clear—or it could have been, in retrospect, how he wanted to remember it.

  His eyes held hers with an intensity that made her feel like it was her in all that pain. The pain was so raw…

  Then she realized he’d never let it out before. The stream of her tears trickled to a stop. She forced herself to speak. Her voice felt and sounded raspy, like rock scraping against rock.

  “You—what did you do—when you saw her?” She gritted her teeth and steeled herself to go through the catharsis with him. He didn’t speak. One tick and then two, then three went by and she felt her heart beat harder and louder, insisting in a visceral way that he speak, that he go through this all the way to the end. She squeezed his shoulders, gripping hard, digging in her fingers and saying nothing, but willing him to continue from a level too deep inside to give voice to. Until now.

  He cleared his throat as though he’d emerged from a smoke-filled dungeon and she saw some spark in his eyes along with the anguish. He spoke in a rusty, stricken voice.

  “When I saw her…” He bowed his head and she grasped his chin with one hand and pulled it up to force him to look at her, still saying nothing.

  “I stopped short. I just stopped. It was like I turned to stone. Once I saw her face. It was like I turned into a hunk of stone and had not one shred of humanity in me from that moment.” He stopped and put his hand over hers and she slipped it off his face with reluctance. But he didn’t look away. Tears streamed from his eyes again but she doubted he noticed it. It almost killed her to watch, but she forced herself not to react. Except her chest tightened so that she could hardly breathe, so she forced herself to breathe deeper, trying not to be obvious.

  He’d stopped talking for a couple of beats so she gave him a raised brow to prompt him along. He responded.

  “At some point, I unfroze, though I still felt like a hunk of stone—or a robot. I approached her very slowly like if I didn’t step carefully the whole world would crack under my feet and I’d be swallowed up. I made it to her side—her eyes were open.” He lowered his head, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.

  Shana leaned in and hugged her arms around him with a terrible fierceness while she gritted her teeth and made a futile effort to keep her own tears at bay. The horror gripped her gut and twisted so she held him tighter and let the feel of him in her arms and against her chest console her.

  Shana was almost surprised when he pushed away, tears still streaming, and continued.

  “I remember bending down and closing her beautiful baby blue eyes. And then she looked peaceful—like she’d always looked when she slept. And that was the last I saw her. I didn’t go to the funeral. I left town.” He rubbed his hands across his face and then his sleeve and blinked away the last tear until when he looked back at her he was a semblance of the hardass he’d always been. The hardass with the stricken lost boy under the layers of toughness. The essence of Dane Blaise, the legend, that kept her by his side.

  “Didn’t they make you see a shrink after that?” She needed to know. “What happened to you?”

  “I self-medicated for a long while. And I hardened—yes, even harder than I had been before, which was damn tough.”

  She prompted with her eyebrow raise again.

  “And I decided I was never, ever, ever going to have children of my own. Ever.”

  She decided to let that issue lie. It wasn’t of any consequence to her, was it?

  “What finally got you out of your… funk?”

  She watched a contrite look of boyish vulnerability pass over his face and he said, “My mother.”

  She nodded.

  He said, “But not how you think.”

  “I think your mother felt guilty as hell and you knew you had to get your act together to help her get rid of her guilt.”

  Dane stared at her with that look he gave her sometimes—as if she were Wonder Woman.

  He said, “It was easier that she never knew… Delilah.” He still choked on the baby’s name and Shana thought instantly of Paulette. He continued. “Never knew the gory details, never saw the pictures. No one ever saw the pictures outside of our unit—except a few prison guards and prisoners.” He gave her an evil, satisfied
smile that was not a smile.

  “Not her mother.” Shana knew the answer. He nodded. She once again resisted asking what happened to Delilah’s mother. “And you vowed you would never take a baby case. Ever.”

  He nodded. “This is not the first baby case I’ve refused. It’s my Achilles’ heel.”

  Then he swiped at his face and said, “Every legend has an Achilles’ heel, don’t they?” He gave her that smile and her own tears subsided and he pulled her in for another hug.

  “But I have you, Shana, girlie. I have you, don’t I?” He whispered it into her ear with an edge of desperation under the charm.

  “Yes, damn it. You have me.”

  He laughed. Then he unfolded himself from the heap and stood and held a hand to her.

  “What now?” she said.

  “We…” he collected himself and almost gulped before finishing, “we protect Paulette until we hand her over to the FBI.”

  Shana turned away. She didn’t want him to see her tears now. They were tears of disappointment.

  She walked back inside with Dane a few steps behind her and wasn’t surprised to see Joe, Peter, and Madeline still there, still drinking coffee.

  “I’ll have more of that coffee,” she said. She wouldn’t sleep this night anyway.

  “Make that two coffees,” Dane said from behind her. “We’ll be turning Paulette and this case over to the FBI tomorrow, but the night isn’t over yet.”

  Shana whipped around. Peter stood and they all converged around the coffee pot. Dane felt drained and energized at the same time, but he knew from experience it was the adrenaline talking and it wouldn’t last. He’d have to make it last long enough.