“Tell us something wedon’tknow,” 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’sthatBobbie. Tevin sometimes refers to her as APB because, well, right. Anyway, going on.More than one member ofthe aforementioned gangsaw 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 yourstudents,” she clarified. “Do you think that’s how he and Maddie met?”
“I have no idea how they met,” he said. “Noidea. Maddie’s never even come to the base with me, so…Jesus, he must’ve gone after her—targeted her.Sonof abitch.”
“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 wasbrutal. 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 ifIgo 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-pitchedhmmsound. 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 reasongood cop, bad copis a thing. If you want to get info from this man, it simply makes more sense to bring me along. Of course, if yourrealgoal 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 isbig,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 kickmyass. Just let him try.”
“So youdowant 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 yourmissingdaughter.”
