And Shayla reached over and grabbed Pete’s hand.
Her fingers were cool against his heat, but her grip was strong. “You know, I could be the bad cop,” she said, surprising him. He actually laughed.
“I could,” she insisted. “That way, you could just hang back. No risk of accidentally punching him in the face.”
“I promise I won’t punch him,” Pete said, and kissed the back of her hand, which surprised her in turn. He then got out of the truck.
Boom.
Izzy looked up from signing his credit card receipt as the noise echoed through the Grill. He leaned over to look out the window and into the parking lot….
Boom. When it happened again he saw that it was the sound of SEAL candidate and Petty Officer Third Class Hansie Schlossman getting thrown up against the Dumpster. Hans was a big boy—tall, strapping, square-jawed, blond, like a movie poster for Das Boot come to life—and therefore made a loud noise upon impact.
But the shocker wasn’t that Hans would piss someone off to the point of them throwing him against a Dumpster—twice. The shocker was that the Hans-toward-the-Dumpster thrower was none other than Grunge, aka Lieutenant Peter Greene. Who was wearing his gleaming dress whites and looking every inch the officer and gentleman. Except for the throwing-Hans-at-the-Dumpster part, which could, in some circles, be construed as rude.
What the fuck?
Izzy was on his feet and heading for the door, even before Timebomb Jackson—as tall, strapping, and handsomely square-jawed as Hans, but black, so no room for him on any boat commanded by Nazis—launched himself in full sprint toward the restaurant, presumably to come fetch Izzy to help.
The third currently present member of Boat Squad John was Seagull—brilliant but height-challenged and usually rendered invisible by his two giant, handsome, muscle-bound besties. Seagull was standing near Hans and Grunge doing what he did best, i.e., talking everyone down. The Gull’s body language was pure referee, but he was keeping his distance, smart boy. Grunge was, after all, an officer. And enlisted guys didn’t shove back even when hitting a Dumpster was involved.
Grunge’s new pretty “friend” Shayla was there, too. Unlike the Gull, she wasn’t enlisted so she’d grabbed on to Grunge and was holding him back—not that she had the size or strength to stop him from doing whatever he damned pleased. But she’d wrapped her arms around him and seemed to be speaking directly into his ear. She, too, had cleaned up nicely since last night. She was pretty and shapely, and Izzy made a mental note to text Eden later: Grunge and the neighbor lady are definitely doing it.
Meanwhile, Schlossman was right where Grunge had left him, back against the Dumpster, hands up in a pose that was more not-hitting-an-officer-back than surrender, the look on his face not unlike that of a kid caught trying to glue Mom’s favorite coffee mug back together. Hans had done something wrong, and he knew it. His shame practically radiated from him.
“What the fuck?” Izzy asked Timebomb as they met on the sidewalk.
“There was some kinda thing, happened this past Tuesday.” Timebomb swiftly reversed course so that they were now both running toward the Dumpster. “With Schlossman and Lieutenant Greene’s daughter, Maddie.”
“What?!” Izzy’s voice went into Soprano-Land. “Are you fucking kidding me? And this is the first I’m hearing about this…?”
“Hans just told us, ten minutes ago.” Timebomb’s voice got higher, too. “After you told us that Maddie’d gone missing, he goes, Fuck, I gotta tell the LT what happened Tuesday. We went, You think? But when we got here, before anyone said anything at all—I mean, no words, none—the LT just went for Hans, like he already knew and was pissed as hell.”
“Maddie’s fifteen,” Izzy pointed out as they skidded to a stop beside Grunge and the others, who were all still frozen as if posing for a tableau entitled Hans Schlossman Dances with Death.
“Yo, man, we know,” Timebomb said. “That’s why Hans stopped her outside the Seven-Eleven. He told us, not only was it obvious she was cutting school, but she was with some stoner who was, like, twenty, who had his hands all over her, right, Hans?” He turned to his friend who nodded emphatically. “Hans was all, Hey, and the guy ran away.”
Grunge, too, had heard all that, and he now turned to ask Schlossman, “Is that true?”
Relief flashed in Hans’s blue eyes. “Yes! Sir! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Maddie was with this guy, and they were having a fight—or at least she was really angry, he wasn’t saying much of anything. And he finally just grabbed her and held on to her, and at first she looked like she wanted to get away—which was when I went over to them, because shit.” He looked at Shayla. “Excuse me, ma’am. Anyway, that’s when I realized it was Maddie—your Maddie. And I heard the guy saying It’s gonna be all right, and We’ll fix this, and he was calling her love, and I think maybe he was English, you know, British.
“And I’m all, Maddie Greene? And they kind of spring apart, and she’s like, No, but I know it’s her, so I say Yeah, but your dad’s Lieutenant Greene, right? What are you doing here? Does your dad know you’re not in school? And the guy starts backing away, and he’s all Call me, I’ll meet you later and he jumps into some piece of shit—sorry, ma’am—car and drives away.”
“Maroon?” Grunge asked as Shayla finally released her hold on him. But he didn’t let her go far. He took her hand and held on to it, intertwining their fingers. Izzy made a note to include that in the text to Eden, and he was pretty sure she’d agree. Friends didn’t hold hands like that.
Hans nodded even as Shayla took out her phone and found a photo to show him. “Is this the man you saw with Maddie?” she asked.
He took a few steps toward them to look and…“Yes! That’s him,” he confirmed.
Shayla used her thumb to find another photo and held that out, too, as she asked, “And what, exactly, is happening here?”
Hans looked at the photo and actually turned a shade whiter. “Oh, God,” he said. “Who took that?”
Izzy leaned in to look, too, and yeah, okay, suddenly all the throwing-Schlossman-against-the-Dumpster noise made sense.