CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Shayla drove. Her car was small, but three passengers would fit in the little backseat, as opposed to Peter’s truck. Tevin’s long legs would be crunched and he’d probably make some noise about that, but they wouldn’t be in the car for long.

“So. This is a little awkward,” she began, glancing over at Peter.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Your friends think we’re dating,” Shay said. “But my boys haven’t even met you, and I really don’t want them to get the news that I’m your girlfriend—” she made air quotes over the top of the steering wheel “—from something someone says in passing.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, we could let everyone know that we’re keeping it on the down-low….No…?” He trailed off as she shot him a heavy Oh, really? look.

“Two operators outside, at least one in,” she recited what she’d heard him tell Seagull, Timebomb, and Hans as she’d unlocked her house and gotten the AC running and Lindsey comfortably situated inside. “And since those three boys with the ridiculous nicknames have to report back onto the base at oh-four-hundred—” She heard her stress leaking out in her voice, and took a deep breath instead of asking why they couldn’t just say four A.M. like normal people, because really, that wasn’t even close to the real issue here.

Peter took her rebalancing pause as an opportunity to speak. “Those three boys are named John, Jon, and John.”

Shayla nodded. “I know.” She’d talked to them while Peter had been giving more last-minute instructions to Lindsey. She’d brought them into the kitchen, showed them where she kept the snacks and told them to help themselves. “But they told me you have a lot of friends who were SEALs, and no one would mind helping out by rotating in for a watch—I think that’s what they called it. So letting everyone know feels like a recipe for disaster. I don’t want Tevin and Frank to be hurt, or confused, or…”

Peter nodded. “So, we tell the boys we’re dating.”

“And then what?” Shay said. She also didn’t want to lie to them. But what was she supposed to say? Hey, come meet this guy I’m sleeping with that I met two days ago. It’s just sex. But don’t you dare do what I do. Great talk. K, thanx, bye. “In a week or two from now, after Maddie’s safely home, and they start to wonder why we don’t actually go out on any dates—” She broke off. “I’m sorry. You know what? At that point, I’ll just tell them we went out a few times, and then decided to just be friends.” Which was the truth, if by we went out a few times, she meant driving to the mall searching for Maddie, and that visit to the high school office.

Peter cleared his throat. “Or…we could go out to dinner every now and then,” he said. “In addition to our daily meetings in my garage.”

Shayla laughed to cover the twisting feeling in her stomach. Dinner would mean that they’d actually be dating. She focused on the least frightening part of what he’d just said. “Oh, so we’re meeting daily now?”

“At least,” he said. “Except, I usually only go out to check the mail once a day. I suppose, in order to drop that hello code word more frequently, we could both develop an intense interest in yardwork.”

“You, me, and Mrs. Quinn. We could start a neighborhood club.”

Peter laughed as she braked to a stop at a red light. “Not quite what I had in mind.”

She smiled at him, and he smiled back, but she could see his intense worry for Maddie in his eyes.

“I’m so sorry to be focusing on this right now,” she told him softly. “I’ve just always tried to be honest with my children.”

He reached over and took her hand. “Shayla Whitman, will you date me? Please?”

And now her heart joined her stomach in its twisty, jumping dance as she nodded her answer. She couldn’t risk speaking, because she knew her voice would break.

“Good,” he said, kissing her hand before he let her go. “See, easy fix.”

Easy?

Not even close. Shay smiled grimly as the light turned green and she hit the gas. She’d written this storyline before. It was the same trope that Izzy and Lindsey referenced when teasing Adam about going to the hospital to pretend to be poor, beaten Daryl’s significant other. It even had a name—marriage of convenience—despite the fact that, in these modern times, marriage usually wasn’t involved.

But two characters were forced to pretend they were in a romantic relationship, and in the course of doing so, they fell hopelessly in undying love, and happy endings of all kinds—literal and euphemistic—ensued.

Except, in real life, it was likely that only one of them—in this case Shayla, because she was already more than halfway there—would fall hopelessly in love, and heartache would ensue.

And okay, that was overly dramatic and in need of revision. She might instead fall—happily—in undying lust, and mild disappointment might ensue. Yes, that was better. Also, who said dating had to be serious? Dating could absolutely be casual.

So stop whining, and worry instead about Maddie, Harry helpfully popped in to admonish her.

He was right. The most important thing was finding Maddie and bringing that girl safely home.

“Where is it?” Maddie looked at Dingo as he pulled off Old U.S. Highway 395. A sign announced they had reached the Manzanar National Historic Site, but…

“Maybe we have to drive further in,” Dingo suggested.

Maddie just shook her head. The mountains in the distance looked like the photos she’d seen on Great-Aunt Hiroko’s wall. But that was where the similarities ended.

Where were the rows upon rows of cabins, stretching out as far as the eye could see? There was a fence and a guard tower and signs pointing the way to the “Auditorium Interpretive Center,” and “Block 14,” the “Children’s Village,” and the “Hospital Site.” Aside from that, this was just a great big scrub-filled dusty field.

The speed limit was fifteen mph, and a woman in a volunteer shirt picking up trash along the side of the road gave them the stink eye and a slow down, you asshole gesture, because they were apparently going too fast. Dingo not only slowed, but he stopped and even backed up, rolling down his window.

“ ’Scuse me, miss,” he said in his best fake Aussie. “How far is it to Manzanar?”

“You’re here,” she said.

“No, no,” he said. “I mean, to the part with all the cabins?”

“That’s just around to the right,” she said, pointing. “Just past the auditorium, at Block Fourteen. We’ve reconstructed two of the barracks, and moved one of the original mess halls back into the camp.”

“Reconstructed,” Dingo echoed. “D’ya mean the rest of ’em are gone?”

“They were torn down or moved, immediately after the war,” the woman said. “All that information is in the Center—in the auditorium. There’s a great film, we run it every half hour. It shows what it looked like back when—”

Maddie burst into tears. She’d been holding it in ever since she’d counted the money they’d taken from Fiona’s room, ever since she’d seen the picture of Nelson’s spray-painted message, $12K NOW. And now that she was thinking about it, she realized how stupid she’d been, not only to assume that all those cabins would still be here, but that they’d be a place where she and Dingo could hide and get some desperately needed rest.

What had she expected? That they’d just drive up, and it would be deserted but preserved, like time had stood still? God, she was stupid, but it had just seemed so perfect, her seeking sanctuary in this place where Hiroko and her great-grandparents had been harmed.

“Her great-grandparents spent the war here,” Dingo told the woman as Maddie continued to sob. “It’s an emotional experience.”

“Oh my God, honey, of course!”

“Is there possibly a place, maybe somewhere in the shade, where we can rest for a bit?” Dingo asked. “Maybe a…covered picnic area?”

“I’m afraid there’s not. We’ve got picnic tables near the main parking lot, but they’re out in the open,” the woman told him.

Dingo nodded. “Thanks so much, that’ll do. Excuse us, please.”

“Of course! Oh my God! Let me know if you need anything!”

He put the car back into drive and rolled his window back up.

“I’m sorry,” Maddie said. “I fucking hate it when I cry.” But she still couldn’t stop.

“Well, love, it’s not like we’re both not exhausted,” he pointed out.

“We can’t stay here,” Maddie said. “What if my father calls, Hello have you seen a really stupid half-Japanese girl and her douchebag fake Australian boyfriend?” She answered her own question, “Why yes, as a matter of fact, they completely caught our attention when the really stupid girl burst into tears.”

“A) I’m not your boyfriend,” Dingo said as he pulled into the nearly empty lot, and parked over by a set of very sad-looking picnic tables. “And B) even if he calls, he’s in San Diego, which is like, a million hours away from here. So I think we have time to stop for a bit and figure out what the fuck.”

She looked at him. “But that’s just it. I keep thinking, What are we gonna do now? and I come up completely blank. Because we die, Ding. That’s what we do. Nelson catches up to us, and we die.”

Dingo broke his stupid rule and pulled her in for a hug.

Maddie closed her eyes, because even this—his arms around her—didn’t make it better.

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered.

“Well, good,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “That’s an excellent place to start when figuring out our Plan B.”

Shayla’s ex lived in a neighborhood similar to hers and Pete’s, but on the other side of town. This street was slightly busier, though, with a heavier flow of regularly passing traffic.

Still, the first thing Pete saw when Shayla pulled up in front of her ex-husband’s house was a little car in the driveway with $12K spray-painted in red on the back window.

“Oh, my God! That’s Tiffany’s Honda!” Shay said.

Pete was out of the car and running toward the house before she’d finished parking.

She was right behind him, though, running up the lawn as he hammered on the front door.

A tall, skinny, teenaged kid—had to be Tevin, he looked a lot like Shay—opened it, his brown eyes wide behind a pair of yellow plastic-framed glasses. He was dressed like he’d stepped from the pages of a magazine. Everything about him from his closely cropped haircut to his sneakers to those glasses screamed high fashion.

“Tevin, thank God!” Shay called as she saw him.

“Is everyone all right in there?” Pete asked.

“Yes…? Hi…?”

The kid might’ve just been reacting in surprise to their urgency, but Pete needed to be sure his questioning tone was meant to be irony instead of some kind of code. “Are you alone in the house—you and Frank?”

“Tevin, where’s Frankie?” Shay breathlessly asked as she joined Pete on the stoop.

The kid pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “He’s doing his homework in the dining room.” He looked back at Pete. “Are we alone? No, Tiff’s still home. She was going to some meeting in San Jose, but it got canceled, whoa, hey!” He laughed as Shayla hugged him, but then released him to go into the house.

“Tiff!” she called. “Tiffany?”

“Hey, Shay! I’m in the kitchen!” a female voice sang out as Tevin stepped back to let Pete in, too.

“I’m Tevin,” the boy said, holding out his hand in greeting as Shay disappeared into the back of the house. “You’re the SEAL from across the street. I mean, not this street, but…”

“Yeah. I’m Pete. Nice to meet you.”

They shook hands—Tevin had long, strong fingers and a very solid grip. He also met Pete’s gaze unabashedly, which was something that many SEAL candidates had trouble doing, and most of them were in their twenties.

“So, that was kinda weird,” Tevin remarked with a smile.

“Yeah,” Pete said as Shay and a young woman came toward them from the kitchen, with Frank—smaller and far less fashion-conscious, with those same big brown eyes—trailing behind them. “Brace yourself. It’s about to get a whole lot weirder.”

Tiffany had been home all day.

The boys had taken the bus from school. Fridays were half-days this session, and classes ended around noon. But they’d stopped for ice cream on their way back to Carter’s. Neither one of them had noticed the vandalized car when they’d arrived around 1:00 P.M.

And while it was entirely possibly for Frank to walk right past something shocking without noticing it, Shay knew there was no way Tevin would’ve not seen this.

So whoever had spray-painted that message onto Tiffany’s back windshield—Two men dressed in black with ski masks and gloves for $500, Alex—had done it some time between 1:00 and 2:30, when Shayla and Pete arrived.

They all stood out on Carter’s front lawn, just gazing at the car. Tiff was pissed. As always, her weave was perfect and her makeup was meticulously done. She was dressed in her trademark skintight pants, heels, and mega-cleavage. It really didn’t matter what color or style her top was—Tiff’s outfits always featured the copious square feet of satiny smooth brown skin from her graceful neck and throat to the tops of her perfect double-D breasts. If Shayla tried to wear a shirt that low cut, she’d live in constant fear of costume malfunction, yet she’d been with Tiffany while the woman danced and jumped and even lugged groceries in from the car, and not once had she witnessed a nip slip.

“This car is six months old,” Tiffany said. “Six! Months!”

“I’m so sorry,” Peter said, not for the first time.

Tiff turned her annoyance toward him. “Did you do it, Lieutenant? No, you did not. So stop apologizing!”

Shayla turned to Pete, too, and found him watching her, which was nice because most men tended to be unable to look away from Tiffany. “We might’ve just missed them. Do you want to take my car and drive around the neighborhood, see if they’re still in the area—maybe in a big black truck?”

Peter shook his head. “I’m not leaving you here without protection.” He reached out to pull something from her hair—yup, it was a piece of mulch from his front flower bed.

Point taken. She turned back to Tiffany. “Come with us. It scares me that they knew this address. That they knew you and Carter are connected to me, and that I’m connected to Peter and…We’re going to have round-the-clock guards back at my house—Navy SEALs. So please, stay with us, at least until Carter gets home.”

Tiffany looked at her car, and then back at Shayla, her brown eyes narrowing. “Navy SEALs?”

Shay nodded. And Tiff went inside to pack a bag.

Tevin was friendly despite their weird introduction, but Shay’s youngest son, Frank, was not happy at the news that, over the course of just a few days, his mother had started dating Pete.

“So, Pete, your daughter’s a hot mess,” the kid said as Pete unlocked the trunk of Shay’s car, so the two boys could load in their backpacks.

Shay was standing a few yards away, still waiting for Tiffany to come out of the house and exchanging texts with Izzy. He’d sent a couple of really awful photos of Daryl Middleton—his face bruised and stitched and swollen as he lay, still unconscious, in that hospital bed. She’d already emailed them to Maddie, and gotten Lindsey to text them, too, in hopes that the girl would turn her phone back on sooner rather than later.

“Well, I think it’s fair to be a mess when your mother dies in a car accident,” Pete told Frank.

“Yeah, well, if my mom died, I sure as shit wouldn’t start selling drugs.”

“Language.” Tevin policed his little brother.

“We don’t know that Maddie’s the one selling the drugs,” Pete said evenly.

“Well, I wouldn’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or even just a friend who sells drugs,” Frank insisted.

“You have no idea what you would or wouldn’t do if Mom died,” Tevin chastised his brother. “Don’t be so judgmental.”

“We don’t even know that it’s drugs that’s behind these threats,” Pete said. “We’re making an assumption.”

Frank veered into new hostile territory. “So when did you and Maddie’s mom get divorced?” he asked.

“We split when Maddie was a baby. Her mom and I weren’t married,” Pete said. “I asked, but…She didn’t want to marry me.”

“Why, because you’re, like, a serial killer?”

“Frank,” Tevin said. He rolled his eyes at Pete. “Sorry. Frankie’s in a douchey mood. He had a hot date with Dad’s flatscreen TV. Tiffany lets him watch Game of Thrones, and Mom doesn’t.”

Boom.

Fuck, was that a gunshot?

Peter sharply looked up and a truck—black, big—was at the end of the street, moving in their direction at much too fast a clip.

“Get down!” he shouted and the two boys, no doubt well trained by life in this sorry world of potential school shooters—immediately sheltered behind their mother’s car.

But Shay was still standing in the middle of the yard, her phone in her hands. She was caught up in her task and oblivious, and Pete ran toward her—it was possible he’d never moved faster in his entire life. He threw himself forward just as the vehicle went past, putting his body between her and whoever was in that truck, as he grabbed her and shielded her, and took her with him down to the ground.

Boom.

And this time, he heard it for what it was—an engine backfire. And as he turned to look, he saw that yeah, the truck that had passed was big and black, but it was far older, with sharper angles and an ancient, obviously shittier engine, than the truck he’d seen, and the truck Mrs. Quinn had described to the police.

“Oh, my God, Peter!” For the second time in just a few hours—the third time in two days—Shay’d been knocked off her feet.

This time, though, Pete hadn’t tried to do what he’d done on that sidewalk outside Daryl Middleton’s old apartment, and land between her and the ground. This time he’d landed on top of her, intentionally, to protect her from an active shooter.

She still hadn’t realized that the noises they’d heard were from a malfunctioning engine, and now she feared he’d been hit and wounded. Probably because he was lying there motionless, like a fool. She scrambled out from beneath him—it was possible he was more stunned than she was—checking for blood even as she called out to her sons. “Tevin, Frank, are you okay?”

“Yeah, we’re good, are you?” Tevin asked as Frank squeaked, “Mommy!”

“I’m okay, baby,” she called back.

Frank’s fear turned to anger. “What the hell was that?”

“Don’t be dead,” Shay muttered as she tried to roll Pete over. “Please, please, please, don’t be dead.”

“I’m not, I’m not.” Pete sat up and caught her hands, “I’m okay. Jesus, I’m so sorry.” He called to the boys, “Sorry, guys, false alarm. I’m a little on edge. The men we’ve been dealing with have a black truck. I saw that one, it backfired, and I should’ve known what the noise was, but I just reacted. Overreacted.”

“You scared me to death!” Shayla kissed him, and as he kissed her back, he heard Tevin say, “Whoa!”

Frank started to say something, but it was possible Tevin had clapped a hand over the younger boy’s mouth.

But right now was definitely not the right time for Pete to kiss Shayla the way he really wanted to, so instead he pulled back and looked into her eyes. “I’m okay,” he confirmed. “You okay?”

Shay nodded and exhaled hard. “It’s been a really intense few days,” she told her sons as Pete helped her back to her feet. “Which is why we’re going to do this whole safe house thing. Spend the weekend with our heads down, just watching movies, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tevin said. He gave her a hug.

Meanwhile, Frank was still looking hard at Pete. “You thought that whoever was in that truck was gonna shoot Mom.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I got scared. I should’ve known that sound was just a backfire, but—”

“If they had been shooting, you’d be dead,” Frank pointed out. “Doing what you did? Running toward her like that?”

“Maybe, but your mother would be alive.”

“So, you’re saying you’d die for her? I mean, you’re not saying it—you did it, and everyone’s always telling me that actions speak louder than words. It was like you’re her secret service agent, or her bodyguard. You were ready to die for her.”

“Frank,” Shay said.

“No, it’s okay,” Pete said. He looked at Frank. “You got a problem with that?”

“Shit, no!” Frank said.

“Language,” Shay said on a sigh.

He glanced at her. “Sorry, ma’am.” Back to Pete: “I’m just trying to figure it out. You’re ready to die for her, and you’re all kissing-her-on-the-front-lawn, but you just met her.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “But, look at her. She’s pretty fucking great.” He glanced at Shayla. “Sorry, ma’am.” Back to Frank: “I mean, you and Tevin both know that.”

Frank was finally smiling and he now held out his hand. “Pete,” he said. “I do believe this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

As they shook hands, Shayla said, “Pete? I think you might want to call him Lieutenant Greene.”

Frank turned his smile onto his mother and shrugged expansively. “He told us to call him Pete. I gotta do what the man says.”

“Someone please help me with this bag.” Tiffany had finally emerged from the house, oblivious to the drama as she locked the door behind her. Tevin leapt to get her luggage and wrestle it to the car. “It’s all files from work plus my laptop. Project’s due on Monday.” She smiled at Shay. “I can borrow clothes, if I need ’em, right?”

“Frankie’s more your size,” Shay said diplomatically, “but sure. Clothes yes, computer never.”

“See, I knew that,” Tiffany said.

Meanwhile, Frank had turned back to Pete. “So what was it? Like, love at first sight?”

“Oh, my God, Frankie,” Shayla said. She actually clapped her hands at her son, as if he were a misbehaving puppy. Pete tried not to laugh. “Just get in the car! Everyone into the car! Now!”

“It’s really okay,” Pete told her as they all climbed in. He turned to look back at Frank. “More like at first conversation. Don’t get me wrong. Your mother’s beautiful, but…That brain, that amazing mind inside of her brilliant head…That’s what you look for in a woman.” He glanced at Tevin. “In a person.”

“That is so sweet!” Tiffany enthused as Shayla pulled out into the traffic. “You are so sweet!”

“Nope,” he said. “Just observant. And very lucky.”

“Can we focus here, Pete?” Shayla shot him a hard look, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation, her fingers tight on her steering wheel. “Since Izzy got those photos—the money shots of Daryl—that we sent to Maddie, he figured it was okay to leave Adam alone at the hospital. He thought it was a waste of person-power to have them both sitting there, waiting for Daryl to wake up. He wanted to know what was next on your to-do list, so I asked him—Izzy—to pick up Hiroko. Will you please give her a call to tell her he’s coming?”

Pete nodded as he got out his phone. “Thank you, that’s…You’d make a great senior chief.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Shay said, “but I’m going to pretend it’s a good thing.”

“Trust me, it is,” he said, and dialed Hiroko.

Hiroko Nakamura lived in the home of Izzy’s dreams.

The house itself was nothing special, but location, location, location! The ocean was right there.

Eden sometimes claimed that Izzy would live in an underwater house if he could, and maybe that was true, but if he did, he’d miss the beauty of the above-water environs. The sea and the sky, and the sound of the constantly moving surf…Underwater, everything was muted and in slow motion. Most of the time. Sometimes, the Pacific could be a deadly monster, and that underwater house would have to be built pretty deep beneath the surface to avoid the churning and turmoil.

Izzy went up the front path, but he didn’t need to ring the doorbell. The door opened before he hit the front stoop.

Ms. Nakamura was diminutive in size, but the glare she gave him was gigantic.

He deflected it with a smile. “I’m Izzy Zanella,” he said.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You wasted a trip. I’m not going with you.” And she shut the door in his face.

Ho-kay. He knocked—ringing a bell just wasn’t his thing—and he kept knocking until she opened the door again.

“What?”

“Grunge—Peter—said you have some really rockin’ pictures from Manzanar,” Izzy told her. “Won’t be a wasted trip if you’ll let me take a look.”

“You just want to get inside, so you can talk me into coming with you.”

Izzy nodded. “Yup. But I’d rather do it while looking at photos of something I’m deeply interested in, instead of shouting through a closed door.”

She hmphed at him, but she didn’t shut the door.

He waited.

She did, too. She just stood there with that glare on heavy stun, trying to psych him out—make him speak or turn away.

But he had older brothers. There was no psych-out game on this planet that Izzy could not win. So he settled in for the duration, pasting his blandest smile on his face.

And sure enough, she cracked. “Why are you interested in Manzanar?”

“Well, there’s a lot of reasons, maybe the top one is Because I’m an American…?” He thought about it. “Yeah. That’s right. The forced internment of American citizens during World War Two is a stinking stain of dog crap on our history as a nation, and it’s important that we don’t erase it. I was eleven when I first found out about it, and I read everything I could get my hands on—even talked my brother and his wife into going on a roadtrip to Manzanar and Tule Lake, too. They had one of those pop-up campers.”

Hiroko did her silent stare-down thing again, and again, Izzy just waited.

She finally opened the door wider, and gestured for him to come in.

Twenty minutes later, he was carrying her bag as he walked her out to his truck. Because after he’d looked at her photos, he’d shown her his.

And that close-up of Daryl Middleton in his ICU hospital bed did the trick.

“I’m going to hate this,” Hiroko told him, as he pulled away from her house.

“Probably,” he agreed. “But maybe not. Shayla’s got it going on.”

“Hmph,” she said, but the tone was slightly different, so he decided to interpret it as Hmph, I agree.

The drive to Shay’s was going to take about twenty minutes, and he resisted the urge to suggest they sing their favorite show tunes, and instead opted to ride in what he chose to believe was a mutually respectful silence.