CHAPTER NINE

They did the coffee-and-bagels-to-go thing, at Shay’s favorite local mom-and-pop coffee shop. She could tell, without even asking, that Peter wouldn’t’ve been able to bear a sit-down breakfast.

And it was a good thing, too, because when they got back into Peter’s truck, Shay realized that Tevin had texted her.

It was a long message—segmented into four, no, five long paragraphs, and she scrolled back to read aloud, “Fiona’s last name is Fiera, and she’s def crazy and gone for good. But biggest rumor via Bobbie Ramone—I’m not sure who that is—is that Maddie’s got a much older BF. That’s boyfriend.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” Peter muttered as he unwrapped his bagel and took a bite.

Shay obliged as she continued reading. “More than one member of Bobbie’s gossip-head gang—oh, she’s that Bobbie. Tevin sometimes refers to her as APB because, well, right. Anyway, going on. More than one member of the aforementioned gang saw her with him last Tuesday after school; rumor is he’s a SEAL.” She looked up, filled with pride. “My son is possibly the only teenager in the universe to use a semicolon—correctly—in a text.”

Peter, meanwhile, was choking. “A SEAL…? There’s no way that that Dingo kid…No.”

He was right. Not even in Dingo’s wildest dreams was anyone going to mistake him for a Navy SEAL. In response, Shay read on. “He’s big and blond and kinda hard to miss. Definitely not Dingo. Ooh, Tevin says, Janet Lundgren took these photos. I don’t know who she is, but thank you, Janet!”

Tevin had forwarded two photos to her. Shayla peered at the first one. It was blurry, but yeah, that was definitely Maddie talking with great intensity to a hulking giant of a crew-cutted blond young man outside of what looked like a convenience store.

“This is definitely not Dingo,” she told Peter, who leaned over to look, too, his shoulder pressed against hers. In a friendly manner, because they were friends. Friends, friends, friends, she emphasized to herself, because for once Harry wasn’t present to argue, thank God.

She forced herself to focus. The young man in the photo was wearing a U.S. Navy SEAL tank top over a well-muscled body, but that didn’t mean anything. You didn’t need to be a SEAL to wear a shirt advertising the Teams.

And frankly, there was no law against a man of any age talking to a girl on a public sidewalk.

“That’s Hans fucking Schlossman,” Peter said, his voice tight.

“So you know him,” Shayla said as she scrolled to the second photo. Eek.

That one was far more damning.

In the second photo, Maddie was encircled in the big blond man’s giant arms. He was holding her tightly, her head tucked under his big Dudley Do-Right chin, and she was clinging to him, too, and yeah. Shay realized that it was entirely possible that she and Peter had gotten it wrong. Maybe Dingo wasn’t the girl’s inappropriately older boyfriend—and this SEAL was.

They weren’t kissing but they were definitely glued tightly together—and the emotion in their body language was off the charts. In fact the SEAL’s face—Schlossman’s face—was twisted, as if he was trying not to cry.

Peter saw the same whatever-it-was that she was seeing, and he made a sound, low in his throat, that was close to a growl. “I’m gonna fucking kill him.”

“He’s really one of your SEALs?” she asked. That made him likely even older than Dingo, since these days most SEALs were college graduates.

“No, he’s a candidate,” Pete said tightly. “He’s not a SEAL yet, and now he’s never gonna be. Motherfucker.”

“So he’s one of your students,” she clarified. “Do you think that’s how he and Maddie met?”

“I have no idea how they met,” he said. “No idea. Maddie’s never even come to the base with me, so…Jesus, he must’ve gone after her—targeted her. Son of a bitch.”

“That’s pretty creepy,” Shay said. “Do you really think he’s capable of—”

“He went through phase one of BUD/S under me—Hell Week—and I was hard on him.” Peter paused. “No, I was brutal. I didn’t think he’d make it, but he surprised me, and…he did. But now he hates me. He’s made that pretty clear.”

Shayla used her fingers to expand the photo on her phone’s screen, enlarging Schlossman’s face. His expression was one of anguish. “Whatever this is, whatever’s going on, he’s not happy about it.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

She looked up and into Peter’s eyes. His anger was mixed with frustration and his own darkly private pain.

“How can I help?” she asked him in response. “What do we do next? Okay, here’s an idea. How about if I go and talk to this young man?”

He laughed as he jammed his truck into drive, and pulled out of the parking spot and then out of the lot. “Nah, I’m gonna take you home.”

She made a high-pitched hmm sound. Where was Harry when she needed alpha-male-wrangling backup? But he didn’t appear, so she went with, “That’s not a very good idea.”

Peter pretended his reasons were logistical. “Yeah, actually, he’s probably on the base, so it’ll be faster and easier just to drop you home, instead of checking you in as a guest.”

Shayla took a deep breath and refused to cosign his bullshit. “I’m calling you on that, Lieutenant,” she said flatly. “Will you please think with your brain for a second—instead of cavemanning this? I mean, I have kids, so I get it. I do. But there’s a reason good cop, bad cop is a thing. If you want to get info from this man, it simply makes more sense to bring me along. Of course, if your real goal is to just beat the hell out of him…or have him beat the hell out of you—” She pointedly looked at the photo again. “This young man is big, and maybe deep down you think that his kicking your ass would be well-deserved—”

She’d purposely stomped on his alpha-male button and he responded as expected with a flash of frost in his blue eyes. “Yeah, no way can that idiot kick my ass. Just let him try.”

“So you do want to start a fight,” Shay said as he braked to a stop at a traffic light. She sighed, maybe a tad too dramatically. “Well, that’s disappointing. I thought you wanted to find your missing daughter.”

Peter’s hands were so tight around his steering wheel, his knuckles were white. As she gazed pointedly at him, he closed his eyes and inhaled a long, slow, deep breath. “I do want to find her,” he said on his exhale, opening his eyes to look at her. “But I also really want to punch Schlossman in the face. If he used Maddie to get back at me…” He shook his head.

“The key word there, Lieutenant, is if,” Shayla pointed out. “And if he used Maddie that way, well, he’s going to have bigger problems, don’t you think? Why muddy it by giving him a reason to play the victim card?” She pretended to be a blubbering Schlossman. “Yeah, I know she’s only fifteen, Detective, but Lieutenant Greene punched me in the face!”

He actually laughed at that—good that he could still laugh—but then his phone rang. It was connected to the Bluetooth in his truck, and it was up so loud they both jumped. The name Zanella appeared on the dash’s screen, and Peter said, “I’m gonna take this,” even as Shayla told him, “You should answer that.”

“Zanella, you’re on speaker. I’m in the truck with Shayla,” Peter curtly said as a greeting.

“Ah, you’re still with Shayla-the-neighbor.” Izzy Zanella’s voice was loaded with That’s interesting innuendo.

“Not still.” Peter didn’t try to hide his annoyance. “Again.”

“We made a plan to go over to the high school early this morning,” Shay explained.

“Any luck?” Izzy asked.

“Not much,” Peter said. “A few leads—best is from Shayla’s son. We’re kind of in the middle of it. What’s up?”

“Drove the fam to the airport and on the way home, it occurred to me that I have this spacious rental van for another fifteen hours,” Izzy’s voice cheerfully said. “I thought I could bop on over to the storage space in Palm Springs, bring all that stuff back and stash it in your garage for you, save you the road trip. I just need the key or the combo to the padlock—oh yeah, and the storage unit number would be helpful, too, so I don’t have to wander the place, weeping as I try to open every lock.”

“Wow, that would be great,” Peter said. “Thanks, man, but…you really wanna do that drive all by yourself?”

“Noooo,” Izzy said. “No, no, no. I tried Lopez, but he’s busy—” somehow he managed to make air quotes with only his voice “—but then I remembered da boyz in Boat Squad John have today off, and I figured, hey, they were prolly looking for something to do, am I right? And since those young’uns owe me a giant-ass favor in the vague shape of humping boxes into a van—”

Peter cut him off. “Boat Squad John is going to Palm Springs with you? Today?”

“Well, not all of ’em,” Izzy said. “Five more guys in the van would take up a lot of space and kinda defeat the purpose. But Seagull volunteered, bless him. The rest of the idiots drew straws and Hans won.” He paused. “Or maybe he lost. Nah, I’m gonna go with won.”

“Hans Schlossman?” Shayla asked and Peter looked at her sharply, shaking his head in a very clear Say nothing more.

“That’s right,” Izzy confirmed. “What? Wait, let me guess—Grunge has been regaling you with the timeless tale of the mighty, mighty Boat Squad John. Oh. And no wonder. Those tadpoles did us proud during Phase One, but the biggest surprise of all prolly had to be when Hans—”

Peter cut him off. “Where are they meeting you—or are they already there? Where the fuck are you?”

“Well, you’re sure interested in the minute details, G. I’m the fuck at the Grill—I just had breakfast. Timebomb Jackson’s gonna drop off Seagull and Hans in about ten, but we’ll need to get that unit number and key from you before we hit the road. Breakfast was delicious: blueberry pancakes with sides of scrambled eggs and—”

Peter did a U-turn right in the middle of the street even as he cut Izzy off again. “I’m five minutes from you, I’m bringing the key, don’t go anywhere.” He punched the end-call button and looked again at Shayla. “Good cop, bad cop it is.”

“What, or maybe I should be asking who, exactly, is Boat Squad John?”

Pete glanced over at Shayla as he grimly drove toward the Grill and his confrontation with Schlossman. “It’s a long story, and we’re almost there.”

“Give me the log line.” At his blank look, she added, “Describe it in a tweet.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not on Twitter—not a big surprise. Okay, remember back when you were a kid, did your grandma get TV Guide?”

“Neither Grandma nor TV Guide made it to the island,” he told her. “But yeah, pre-island. TV Guide was on her coffee table.”

“Those little blurbs—a single short sentence—about a show or a movie are called log lines,” Shayla told him. “Friendly alien encounter turns ugly when a plan to enslave humanity is revealed. Man discovers his biological father is a notorious serial killer. Quirkily named boat squad of Navy SEAL candidates…what?”

“Surprise instructors with their grit and determination and unswerving loyalty to their misfit teammates,” he finished for her. “They started out as total underdogs, and finished up Hell Week at the very top of the class. It was…inspiring.”

“And Hans Schlossman was one of them?” she asked, but then answered her own question. “Hans is German for John. Were they really all named John?”

Pete nodded again. “Or a variation. The squad’s de facto leader was an enlisted kid named John Livingston. His nickname’s Seagull, for obvious reasons. His swim buddy was Jon Jackson—nicknamed Timebomb. There’s Q—John Pilkington. Doe—John Capano. And finally John Schlossman—his nickname’s Hans. He was the squad’s great big whining clod of dogshit stuck to their proverbial boots. He learned a lot that week, and, well, certainly impressed me the most.”

“Ouch,” Shayla said, giving him that soft-eyed look of empathy that made his chest feel tight. “So if he did mess with Maddie, that’s gotta hurt even worse, because you liked him so much. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I liked him,” Pete said. “But I liked that I was wrong about him. Or that I thought I was wrong about him. I don’t like that this proves I was right, you know, from the start—and yeah, you’re right, I’m lying. I liked the asshole. Fuck.” His stomach hurt.

“You’re an extremely interesting man,” Shay said with a laugh but then asked, “What exactly did he do? Hans.”

“He requested to be medically rolled, to keep Boat Squad John intact.” Pete knew she had no clue what that meant, so as he braked to a stop at yet another endless red light, he expounded. “One of his squadmates got hurt, so he pretended he was hurt, too. When a SEAL candidate gets injured, he’s not kicked out of the program, he’s rolled back, into a newer class, so he’s allowed to heal before he continues with the training. The catch is that he’s got to do Hell Week all over again. So if a man gets rolled on the last day of Hell Week, he’s particularly screwed. That’s what happened to Timebomb. And the entire rest of Squad John—led by Seagull, but including Hans—they asked to be rolled, too. They were all willing to do Hell Week again, simply to keep Boat Squad John together. That’s a pretty huge thing.”

Shayla nodded. “I can only imagine.”

“It’s what we want—what we’re looking for during BUD/S,” Pete told her as the light finally went green. “Men who understand what it means to be part of a team. That kind of loyalty is…” He shook his head. “Hard to find.”

“Loyalty’s a lot like love,” Shay murmured. “And love is…crazy. It happens or it doesn’t. You can’t force it—or control it. Love just is. Trust me, I’m a romance writer—I’ve given this a great deal of thought. People can’t make themselves fall in love, and they also can’t stop themselves from falling in love. And sometimes it’s awkward and inappropriate—like if one person’s only fifteen and the other’s twentysomething. But that age difference is pretty meaningless if they’re twenty-five and thirtysomething.”

“So you think it’s okay for Maddie to date a grown man?”

“Of course not,” she said. “There’s a reason we have laws about age of consent. She’s a child in the eyes of the law. But truthfully, neither one of us knows her very well. It’s possible she’s mature beyond her years. It’s also possible that she’s completely messed up, and using sex for power, or as a way to prove to herself that she’s of value. But whatever the case, it’s also possible that she truly loves this guy. And if she does, if it’s real, then she’ll still love him when she’s eighteen. And if he’s got any kind of moral compass, he’ll recognize that and behave accordingly.”

As Pete signaled to make the left turn into the parking lot for the Grill—it was nearly full, but there were a few spots near the Dumpster—Shayla continued, “Remember Dingo’s reaction to finding out Maddie’s only fifteen. If telling people—men—that she’s older is part of her MO, it’s entirely possible that she approached Hans. Which brings us back to your personal experiences as a young man, asking for ID when a pretty girl implied that she wanted to get busy with you in the back of your car.”

He smiled grimly as he pulled into the lot and backed into the space. “I’ve never had sex in the back of anyone’s car.”

She rolled her eyes, thinking he was being cute with semantics. “In the back of your truck, then.”

“Car, truck, motor vehicle,” he said. “Nope. Well, an RV once, but it had a king-size bed, so I don’t think that counts.”

“Definitely not,” she said. “So, wait. You had a car, but you and Lisa really never…?” She quickly backpedaled. “I don’t mean to pry or be creepy. She just seemed like…” She started again. “Her character, at least in the way you’ve been telling the story, with her just showing up in your car—taking what she wants…I just thought…”

Pete shook his head. “We didn’t hook up until we were both in college, and by then, we lived in dorms. And after Lisa, I was…well, careful. And older. Sex in cars is a teenaged thing.”

“Yeah, you don’t read enough romance novels,” Shayla told him. “It’s not just a teen thing. It’s a symbol of I want you and I can’t wait. It’s hot.”

“Yeah, but that’s fiction,” he argued. “In real life, don’t you get, like, a cop shining his flashlight through the car window, which—maybe it’s me—feels like a mood killer.”

She laughed and her eyes sparkled, and she even blushed a little, and his body shifted—just slightly with a Hello, I’m alive—as he realized they were sitting here talking about sex. And he’d forgotten for that brief moment that they’d come to the Grill to find out if Hans fucking Schlossman was sleeping with Maddie.

But then Timebomb Jackson’s pale blue late-model sedan—a remarkably sedate method of transport, considering Jackson’s love of both state-of-the-art weaponry and technology—pulled into the parking lot and took the spot on the other side of the Dumpster.

And Shayla reached over and grabbed Pete’s hand.

Her fingers were cool against his heat, but her grip was strong. “You know, I could be the bad cop,” she said, surprising him. He actually laughed.

“I could,” she insisted. “That way, you could just hang back. No risk of accidentally punching him in the face.”

“I promise I won’t punch him,” Pete said, and kissed the back of her hand, which surprised her in turn. He then got out of the truck.

Boom.

Izzy looked up from signing his credit card receipt as the noise echoed through the Grill. He leaned over to look out the window and into the parking lot….

Boom. When it happened again he saw that it was the sound of SEAL candidate and Petty Officer Third Class Hansie Schlossman getting thrown up against the Dumpster. Hans was a big boy—tall, strapping, square-jawed, blond, like a movie poster for Das Boot come to life—and therefore made a loud noise upon impact.

But the shocker wasn’t that Hans would piss someone off to the point of them throwing him against a Dumpster—twice. The shocker was that the Hans-toward-the-Dumpster thrower was none other than Grunge, aka Lieutenant Peter Greene. Who was wearing his gleaming dress whites and looking every inch the officer and gentleman. Except for the throwing-Hans-at-the-Dumpster part, which could, in some circles, be construed as rude.

What the fuck?

Izzy was on his feet and heading for the door, even before Timebomb Jackson—as tall, strapping, and handsomely square-jawed as Hans, but black, so no room for him on any boat commanded by Nazis—launched himself in full sprint toward the restaurant, presumably to come fetch Izzy to help.

The third currently present member of Boat Squad John was Seagull—brilliant but height-challenged and usually rendered invisible by his two giant, handsome, muscle-bound besties. Seagull was standing near Hans and Grunge doing what he did best, i.e., talking everyone down. The Gull’s body language was pure referee, but he was keeping his distance, smart boy. Grunge was, after all, an officer. And enlisted guys didn’t shove back even when hitting a Dumpster was involved.

Grunge’s new pretty “friend” Shayla was there, too. Unlike the Gull, she wasn’t enlisted so she’d grabbed on to Grunge and was holding him back—not that she had the size or strength to stop him from doing whatever he damned pleased. But she’d wrapped her arms around him and seemed to be speaking directly into his ear. She, too, had cleaned up nicely since last night. She was pretty and shapely, and Izzy made a mental note to text Eden later: Grunge and the neighbor lady are definitely doing it.

Meanwhile, Schlossman was right where Grunge had left him, back against the Dumpster, hands up in a pose that was more not-hitting-an-officer-back than surrender, the look on his face not unlike that of a kid caught trying to glue Mom’s favorite coffee mug back together. Hans had done something wrong, and he knew it. His shame practically radiated from him.

“What the fuck?” Izzy asked Timebomb as they met on the sidewalk.

“There was some kinda thing, happened this past Tuesday.” Timebomb swiftly reversed course so that they were now both running toward the Dumpster. “With Schlossman and Lieutenant Greene’s daughter, Maddie.”

“What?!” Izzy’s voice went into Soprano-Land. “Are you fucking kidding me? And this is the first I’m hearing about this…?”

“Hans just told us, ten minutes ago.” Timebomb’s voice got higher, too. “After you told us that Maddie’d gone missing, he goes, Fuck, I gotta tell the LT what happened Tuesday. We went, You think? But when we got here, before anyone said anything at all—I mean, no words, none—the LT just went for Hans, like he already knew and was pissed as hell.”

“Maddie’s fifteen,” Izzy pointed out as they skidded to a stop beside Grunge and the others, who were all still frozen as if posing for a tableau entitled Hans Schlossman Dances with Death.

“Yo, man, we know,” Timebomb said. “That’s why Hans stopped her outside the Seven-Eleven. He told us, not only was it obvious she was cutting school, but she was with some stoner who was, like, twenty, who had his hands all over her, right, Hans?” He turned to his friend who nodded emphatically. “Hans was all, Hey, and the guy ran away.”

Grunge, too, had heard all that, and he now turned to ask Schlossman, “Is that true?”

Relief flashed in Hans’s blue eyes. “Yes! Sir! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Maddie was with this guy, and they were having a fight—or at least she was really angry, he wasn’t saying much of anything. And he finally just grabbed her and held on to her, and at first she looked like she wanted to get away—which was when I went over to them, because shit.” He looked at Shayla. “Excuse me, ma’am. Anyway, that’s when I realized it was Maddie—your Maddie. And I heard the guy saying It’s gonna be all right, and We’ll fix this, and he was calling her love, and I think maybe he was English, you know, British.

“And I’m all, Maddie Greene? And they kind of spring apart, and she’s like, No, but I know it’s her, so I say Yeah, but your dad’s Lieutenant Greene, right? What are you doing here? Does your dad know you’re not in school? And the guy starts backing away, and he’s all Call me, I’ll meet you later and he jumps into some piece of shit—sorry, ma’am—car and drives away.”

“Maroon?” Grunge asked as Shayla finally released her hold on him. But he didn’t let her go far. He took her hand and held on to it, intertwining their fingers. Izzy made a note to include that in the text to Eden, and he was pretty sure she’d agree. Friends didn’t hold hands like that.

Hans nodded even as Shayla took out her phone and found a photo to show him. “Is this the man you saw with Maddie?” she asked.

He took a few steps toward them to look and…“Yes! That’s him,” he confirmed.

Shayla used her thumb to find another photo and held that out, too, as she asked, “And what, exactly, is happening here?”

Hans looked at the photo and actually turned a shade whiter. “Oh, God,” he said. “Who took that?”

Izzy leaned in to look, too, and yeah, okay, suddenly all the throwing-Schlossman-against-the-Dumpster noise made sense.

Hans immediately recognized his question was irrelevant, because he quickly followed it up with, “Oh, my God, sir, when you saw that you must’ve thought…but no! No! God, no! See, Maddie told me that Angus McFeeney—the man in the photo?” He looked from Grunge to Shayla and back. “Okay, yeah, that doesn’t sound real, so his name’s probably not really Angus McFeeney, but she told me he was from Palm Springs—that he was a really good friend of her mom’s.”

He stopped, and had to collect himself. “I’m so sorry,” he told them. “My mom died when I was around Maddie’s age, and I was shipped off to live with my dad, who I barely knew, and it was really hard. And I was trying to tell her that I was here if she needed someone to talk to, and I’m pretty sure I started to get choked up—because shit. She hugged me, and really, LT, that was all that it was. I was just trying to help, but I fucked it up, because I believed her about Angus McWhatever. And she asked me not to tell you—she begged me not to say anything about her cutting school, too. She said everything sucked because she missed her mom so much, and…I gave her my cellphone number, and she promised she’d call if she needed to talk more or…” He exhaled hard. “I should’ve called you, sir. I guess I was hoping that if I didn’t, you know, say anything and she didn’t get in trouble, then she’d know she could trust me and maybe she’d, I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s stupid when I say it out loud.”

“No, it’s not,” Shayla murmured. Grunge, however, clearly agreed with that stupid.

“I should’ve called you right then, sir,” Hans said, “and made her wait with me until you got there, but I didn’t. And I’m so, so sorry.”