“No,” Peter said.
“Excuse me?” she countered.
He looked at her and said it again. “No. And no, I’m not going to pretty it up with aplease,baby.”
He’s completely, totally freaked out that Daryl died.
Shayla took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. She didn’t need Harry’s voice in her head to know that.
“Okay,” she said.
Peter glanced at her again—clearly she’d surprised him.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll pretend you saidplease,and I’ll go with Izzy. But if you want me to be honest, I’d feel safer waiting for you. I mean, isn’t it likely that you’ll be heading down to San Diego after you talk to the Dinglers? And I have faith in Izzy’s abilities—heisa Navy SEAL—but…I’m not sure he’d, for example, take a bucket of shit for me.”
He smiled—but briefly—at that. “Yeah, he would. Because he’d take one for me, and he knows how important you are to me.”
“He thinks he knows,” Shayla corrected him.
“Nope, he knows.” He kept his eyes on the road. “As long as I’m laying down orders and ultimatums, I might as well tell you that I’m coming for you. And as long as you’re pretending things, you can keep on pretending it’s only about the sex in the garage, or in the tent, or in the cheap motel room, or wherever it happens next. Because it’s gonna happen again. And again. And again. And it’s just gonna keep on being fucking great.”
I’m not sure what the right response to that is,Harry said.Maybe “Thank you”?
But Peter kept going before she could speak. “But it’s not just the sex that’s great. It’s all of it. All of you. We fit—not just when we’re making love. We’re fitting right now. This fits. So I’m gonna just keep showing up. I got Lisa to admit that I was an important—and real—part of her life bynothaving sex with her. I’m gonna do the opposite with you. Partly because I think it’ll work—if I just keep showing up—but mostly because I can’t keep my hands off you. And eventually the pretend-dating thing will turn real, and we’ll go places together and sometimes even have sex in our beds. Jesus, that’s gonna be good. And I recognize that it might sound crazy for me to say that I’m going to marry you, four days after we met, but Iamgonna marry you.”
Fuuuuuuck,Harry said.
But Peter wasn’t done. “Maybe not right away, because our kids might not want to get all Brady Bunched. But I’m okay with long-term plans, and I’m thinking in three years, after we get Frank and Maddie safely off to college, we’ll do it, and then go on a honeymoon. So yes, I want you safe while I find Maddie. I’d love for you to help—you’ve already helped so much with this latest goatfuck, helping me figure out what to do next, and I know you’ll continue to be brilliant—but I want you to do that from the safety of your well-guarded home. Your skill sets and mine areverydifferent, so…I think that’s everything I wanted to say—oh, except, I always thought I was broken. I believed Lisa when she said it was all my fault and…having you help me write the story, you know, of what happened with her…It makes me see it differently, and that’s why I think, you know, that I actually might deserve someone as great as you in my life.” He nodded. “That’s what I wanted to say.”
As Shay was sitting there, trying to figure out what to say—Okay. Please keep showing up?OrYeah, it’s definitely batshit crazy to talk about getting married mere days after you meet someone,orAre you sure there’s not like, three more little words that you might want to add to that whole long speech?—her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
It was from an unidentified number, sent to both her and Peter’s phones, and it was…She clicked on the message and looked more closely. “Peter, we just got what looks like a screenshot from an LA area code. It’s some kind of GPS tracking app—something called MapMyRun. Oh, my God! I think this is from Dingo.” She looked up at Peter. “It starts at the Dingler address in Van Nuys, and it ends at what looks like some kind of industrial complex, in a town called Clarence, just south of Pearblossom, on this side of the mountains. We passed the exit for it, about four miles back!”
Maddie was terrified.
She was going to die here, in this run-down garage in the middle of nowhere.
She knew that her captors—Dead-Eyes and the skinhead clones—were going to kill her because no one had bothered to cover her head or her eyes during the drive.
At first, she’d thought they were stupid. She was just sitting in the truck’s backseat, between the clones, where anyone traveling past them on the freeway could see that her arms were awkwardly positioned behind her back, and that her mouth was covered by a piece of duct tape.
But then she realized the windows were so darkly tinted, and she was so far back from them, that no one could see in.
Instead of heading south to San Diego, they’d gone north, along the same route that she and Dingo had taken from Manzanar. But they didn’t go that far—only about an hour, although it seemed like forever.
During the trip, the skinheads and Dead-Eyes had told Dingo that Nelson had another garage out here—and that he was on his way up from San Diego to “deal with the girl.” It was only slightly more remote than his garage in San Diego, but there were far fewer problems with noises that might be overheard by neighbors—because there currently weren’t any neighbors. The recession had left this garage surrounded by empty buildings, on a dead end that didn’t get much traffic.
Dingo had then changed the subject, prattling on about handguns. He was thinking about using his reward money to get himself one. What kind did they have? Did they like it? Could he see?
He sounded like a fanboy, trying to suck up to his personal heroes, and they brushed him off and even mocked him, just like the mean kids in high school.
Maddie had gone back and forth, several thousand times. If he was Good Dingo, he was attempting to get one of them to hand him their gun. At which point he’d use it to free Maddie, steal the truck, and drive to safety.
Or he was Bad Dingo and just another ass-kissing idiot….
They’d pulled up to the garage, and it was as deserted as they’d described.
It was also a piece of shit—it looked as if it was on the verge of falling down. Although the giant garage bay door was working just fine. It went up so Dead-Eyes could pull his truck inside. And it went back down, too.
