“And I know what you’re thinking,” Nelson continued, his breath hot against her ear as she started to see stars, as his fingers dug even harder into her throat. “You’ll be safe, the police will protect you. But they won’t. In fact, they won’t believe you, especially when drugs are found in your locker, when ‘friends’ come forward and say you’ve been selling on campus. No one will believe you. And you’ll go to jail and while you’re there, I’ll have you killed. That’s if I don’t have you killed before that.”
With that, he let her go. As she sucked in air, she attempted to push Dead-Eyes’s still-groping hand away from her.
Forty-eight hours had passedextremelyfast.
Maddie had gone home on Monday, after getting jettisoned from Nelson’s truck. She didn’t really know what else to do, except to keep trying to reach Fiona. And to start calling Dingo, too. But he wouldn’t answer, not at first. She hadn’t connected with him until halfway through the day on Tuesday. She’d cut school to look for him, and had finally found him at the 7-Eleven where he sometimes hung out to sell weed.Thathadn’t gone all that well either, but she’d finally guilted him into helping her.
Now, hidden in the trunk of Dingo’s car, Maddie rubbed the bruises on her throat as she sent him a second text:Check again.
Please,she added, because there weren’t a lot of people in Dingo’s life who treated him with respect, including Nelson. Especially Nelson. And she knew, absolutely, that Dingo was risking more than she could imagine to help her like this, behind Nelson’s fugly back.
But instead of texting his reply, Dingo unlocked and opened the door of his car and said, “I walked down a levelandup a level to check. He’s gone. You can come out.”
As Maddie pushed out the backseat cushion and wiggled through the opening into the body of the car, Dingo added, “You didn’t mention that your father was a Navy SEAL. You know, love, he might actually be able to help you.”
She climbed over into the front passenger seat as he started the behemoth of a car. “Where’s Daryl?”
“I’ll take that as ano comment,” he muttered. “I s’pose you’ve got as much to say for the shocker that you’re only fifteen.”
“Why should that bother you?” Maddie asked. “We’re friends. It’s not like we’re having sex or anything.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been sleeping in the same car,” Dingo said, maneuvering his giant vehicle out of the parking space. “And FYI, Daryl thinks we’re friends with, you know, those kind of benefits? He told me he preferred to walk home than risk death via angry Navy SEAL.”
“Daryl’s an idiot,” she pointed out. “And I’m not asking my father for anything. He’s an idiot, too. Plus he doesn’t give a flying shit.”
“I’m not sure I picked updoesn’t give a flying shitwhen he was allWhere’s Maddiein my face,” Dingo countered. “In fact, it felt an awful lot likemajorly gives a major flying shit.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a good little soldier,” Maddie said, “and he thinks he’s supposed to take care of me.”
Dingo glanced at her. “You sure, Mads? He looked pretty cool. I mean, the way you talked about him, I wasn’t expecting—”
“The whole California-surfer-dude affect is an intentional mind-fuck,” Maddie told him. “He’s a BUD/S instructor.” At Dingo’s blank look, she explained. “He’s like a drill sergeant in the world’s hardest boot camp. He teaches the idiots who want to be SEALs by trying to make them quit. And yeah, with his cool nickname—Grunge, if you can believe that, even though he doesn’t own a single CD and I’ve never heard him listen to music, not even once—he looks like the kind of dad who’d share his doobie with you after Sunday brunch, but trust me. Not even close.”
“Dad” was a Nazi when it came to schedules and curfews and keeping their new house “shipshape.” God. He’d even made lists of household chores, like she was a five-year-old, eager to earn a sticky star on her chart.
To be kept on such a short leash after her free-range childhood was maddening. And yeah, to be fair, his punctuality had been a good thing back when Maddie had used what she’d thought of as his monthly blackmail payments to pay Lisa’s bills.
Still, she understood—completely—why her free-spirited mother had kept her distance from him for all those years. In fact, her parents were such stark opposites, the very concept that they’d been together long enough to have sex and create Maddie was almost completely unbelievable. They must not have talked. That was Maddie’s best guess. It had been pure physical attraction and lust, after which Lisa had immediately fled.
God, she missed her mother far more than she missed her freedom. Lisa may have been a crappy caregiver—in addition to paying the bills, Maddie was also the one who cooked and cleaned and made sure her mom got to work on time. But her mother had loved her. Of that she had no doubt.
Not so the strict and scary Navy SEAL sperm donor.
“You okay, love?” Dingo asked softly. “Missing your mum again, I bet.” Despite his many flaws, he always knew what she was thinking, and he was always kind. “It’ll get easier, I promise. And this thing with Nelson? We’ll figure it out.”
Maddie nodded. Fiona had kept Nelson’s ten thousand dollars. That was a given. They just had to find her, so they could get it and give it back. “Let’s go see if Fee’s aunt Susan is home.”
Dingo didn’t look happy. Maddie had never met Fiona’s aunt, but apparently the woman had hated Dingo with the passion of a blazing supernova. “She always works ridiculously late,” he said weakly. “I doubt she’s home yet.”
Fee’s aunt Susan was a divorce lawyer, and she’d recently opened her own practice.
“We can park on the street and wait for her,” Maddie decided, and even though Dingo sighed heavily, he nodded and drove.
No one at the In-N-Out Burger had seen Maddie.
Pete had showed his daughter’s photo to everyone working the kitchen and some of the customers, too, but he came up empty.
It didn’t mean she hadn’t been there, it just made the search that much harder. It was one thing to ask to review the security cam footage if someonehadseen Maddie, another entirely if the request appeared to be based purely on—how had Shayla put it? Wishful thinking.
