Of course, the SEAL couldn’t hear him, thank God. “Glad to hear it,” he said as he grabbed for the oh-shit bar, which, yes, made his muscular arm do some very interesting and attractive things to his barbed-wire tattoo. Maybe it would help if she imagined those strong arms holding a baby, except…
Noooo, that doesn’t help at all, Harry said.
Harry was married. Very married, to the man of his dreams, she thought pointedly.
He laughed. True, but I’m also very not dead, so…
Shayla hip-checked him out of her head and focused on the task at hand. “Which car are we following?” she asked the SEAL crisply, eyes on the road ahead of her. “Make, model, color…?”
“Maroon sedan. Buick, maybe?” said the real, nonfictional man sitting beside her. His voice had the vowel sounds and musical phrasing of a California surfer. In fact, he sounded a little bit like Luke or Owen Wilson, as if maybe they’d all attended the same SoCal high school. “Older model. Extra large. POS with a peeling soft-top. Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop!”
As she watched, the very stale yellow traffic light in front of her turned red, but she jammed down the gas pedal and blasted through it. Missing. If they got pulled over, hopefully the cop would be the parent of a teenager, too.
“How long has your daughter been, you know?” She couldn’t say that awful word, as if it were a snake that might bite her if she acknowledged it.
“Missing?” The SEAL said it in unison with Harry.
“Last time I saw Maddie was yesterday morning,” the SEAL added, “when I dropped her at school. She didn’t come home last night, and when I called the school to check today, apparently she didn’t make it to homeroom yesterday either, so…Yeah. It’s been about thirty-six hours. Jesus.”
“They didn’t call you yesterday when she didn’t show?” Shayla was surprised. She glanced over to find him looking back at her just as the headlights from a passing car lit his face. Eyes, neon blue. Check. But not so much with the twinkle, considering his current case of teenaged-daughter-induced grim.
“They said they did, but no,” the SEAL reported as they both continued to search the traffic for the car in question. “There wasn’t a message on the home line or my cell.”
Yikes. That was pretty extreme incompetence for the high school administration—a dedicated team that Shayla knew and trusted.
Or, Harry said, Maddie hacked the system and changed her parental contact number.
“She good with computers?” Shayla asked the SEAL.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
If she had hacking skills, he’d definitely know, Harry stated. But really all she’d need is a hacker for a friend. Or boyfriend.
“How old is she?” Shayla asked. The petite, ghostlike, dark-haired, baggy-clothes-wearing girl she’d seen drifting mournfully from the house to her father’s truck early each school day could’ve been anywhere from twelve to eighteen.
“Fifteen,” he reported.
“Mine are seventeen and fourteen,” she told him. “Both boys.”
“Boys,” the SEAL said almost wistfully. “I could probably handle a boy. I understand boys.”
“Girls really aren’t that much different,” Shayla pointed out as Harry said, Nope, nope, nope, too early in this relationship for a feminist diatribe!
What relationship? She was helping out a neighbor. And how was that a diatribe? Still, all Shayla wanted was to help this man find his missing child, so as she continued to push ahead in the still-thick traffic, she asked the SEAL, “Have you tried tracking her phone? Does she have a smartphone?”
“Yes to both but she turned off her GPS.”
“Or her battery’s run out,” she suggested.
“Nah, she took her charger.” The SEAL seemed certain of that. But then he acquiesced. “At least it wasn’t where she normally keeps it in her room. As far as her phone goes, I texted and called her nonstop last night when she didn’t come home—right up until she blocked me. I thought about shutting her down, you know, canceling her number, killing her service completely, but…I’m afraid without her phone she’ll be even less safe, so…”
Ooh, he’s a deep thinker. No angry knee-jerking. I like that in a man who can probably kill you with just his pinkie finger, Harry said.
“Also,” the SEAL continued as he glanced at Shayla again with those ocean-colored eyes, “this way I can still use someone else’s phone to text her. Although she’s already blocked Zanella—a teammate of mine, and Eden, his wife. But I figure Maddie can’t block everyone I know, right? There!”
He’d spotted the maroon car. “Where?” Shayla searched the traffic but she couldn’t see it.
“Five cars ahead, right lane,” the SEAL told her. “Damn it, they’re turning!”
And she was still in the left lane. “Hold on!” Luckily there was no one directly behind her so she hit the brakes hard and waited for the line of traffic in the right lane to open up before stomping on the gas and taking that same right turn with squealing tires.
“Nice,” he said. “Thanks. You are good.”
“If your daughter’s in that car, then we are going to find her.” It was the kind of dramatic but heartfelt line that Shayla usually let Harry say in one of her books. It felt a little weird coming out of her mouth since, unlike Harry, she was neither courageous nor daring nor a highly skilled FBI agent. But she meant it. Sincerely.
She could now see the car in question. It was indeed a piece of shit, or POS, as the lieutenant had said—a barge-like relic from the 1970s. There were two cars and a van between them, but this was a smaller road with a single lane in each direction. And there was a lot of oncoming traffic. Although maybe if she timed it right…
“Don’t even think about it,” the SEAL murmured. “No one’s that good of a driver. Also, I don’t want to get too close in case she sees me and tries to bolt. All I need is some inexperienced kid wrapping that car—and Maddie—around a tree.”
Smart, Harry murmured as Shay nodded. Have I mentioned I like him?
“Have you tried calling the parents of her friends?” she asked as they continued their now under-the-speed-limit car chase through this rather charming little neighborhood of tiny homes that had been converted into doctors’ and dentists’ offices, nearly all dark and shuttered at this evening hour. They were relatively close to the hospital and…the mall? She touched the screen of her GPS to see that…Yes, there was a mall not far from here—open until nine at this time of year. If she were a fifteen-year-old rebel, mad at the world, where would she go at 7:10 on a Wednesday night…?
She glanced up at the SEAL, because he hadn’t answered and her question hadn’t been a hard one.
He was looking at her again with those blue, blue eyes, and he finally shook his head. “I’m embarrassed because…Well, I don’t even know the first names of any of her friends, let alone their last names.”