“She’s special, you know? She’s a daddy’s girl, but she’ll tell you where to stick it if she doesn’t like what you have to say. She’ll slap a giant to protect the honor of her best friend. She hates good-byes. She wears this little gold cross around her neck and cusses like a sailor. She’s my happily ever after.”
“She sounds like a firecracker. Maybe she said no to make sure you’re not going to leave at the slightest sign of rocky shores. I’m surrounded by girls, and I’ll tell ya … sometimes, they take shots at you to see if you’ll run.”
“I was fooling myself.” My voice broke.
Chief got quiet. “I wouldn’t say—”
“When I find her, I’m going to ask her. I’ll ask her as many times as it takes, but just being with her is enough. I had to literally be ripped away from her to understand that.”
Chief chuckled. “You wouldn’t be the first man to need a knock on the noggin.”
“I have to find her.”
“You will.”
“She’s okay. Right?”
Chief looked over at me. I could see he didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep, so he simply nodded, the wrinkles around his light eyes deepening.
“You’d better find a garden hose first, or she won’t recognize you. You look like you lost a fight with a pottery wheel.”
I laughed once. I tried to resist the urge to rub the dried mud from my face, not wanting to make a bigger mess in Chief’s truck than I already had.
“You’ll find her,” Chief said. “And you’ll marry her.”
I offered an appreciative smile and then nodded once before turning to look out the window, searching the faces of everyone we passed on the way to the hospital.
America
Reyes was tending to a grandmother and her teenage grandson who’d crawled out of the wreckage of their double-wide trailer home. Reyes had been patrolling up and down the highways and byways within a two-mile radius of where he’d picked me up, but we hadn’t come across Shepley or anyone who had seen him. I was pissed that I didn’t even have a picture of him. They were all on my phone, and my phone was drowning somewhere in the river. The battery had been in the single digits when I checked the weather, so it was probably dead.
Explaining what Shepley looked like was difficult. Short brown hair, hazel eyes, tall, good-looking, athletically built, six foot with no distinguishing marks made my description of him fairly vague even though he was anything but. For the first time, I wished he were a tattooed giant like Travis.
Travis. I bet he and Abby were so worried.
I returned to the cruiser and sat in the passenger seat.
“Any luck?” Reyes said.
I shook my head.
“Mrs. Tipton hasn’t seen Shepley either.”
“Thanks for asking. Are they okay?”
“A little banged up, but they’ll live. Mrs. Tipton is missing her terrier, Boss Man.” His words were hollow, but he wrote everything down on his clipboard.
“That’s awful.”
Reyes nodded, continuing his notes.
“All this going on, and you’re going to help her find her dog?” I asked.
Reyes looked at me. “Her grandsons visit twice a year. That dog is the only thing between her and lonely. So, yeah, I’m going to help her. I can’t do much, but I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“It’s my job,” he said, continuing his scribbling.
“Highway patrol helps with missing animals?”
He glared at me. “Today, I do.”
I raised my chin, refusing to let his size and intimidating expression get to me. “Are you sure there’s no way to get a call out?”
“I can take you back to headquarters.”
I scanned the disaster that had been left of the trailer park. “After dark. We have to keep looking.”
Reyes nodded, turning off his lights and pulling the gear into drive. “Yes, ma’am.”
We pulled back onto the turnpike, and for the second time, Reyes drove toward the overpass to check with the emergency crew on the scene to see if they’d seen Shepley.
“Thank you again. For everything.”
“How’s your arm?” he asked, peeking over at my bandage.
“Sore.”
“I can imagine.”
“Do you have family here?” I asked.