But she’d made the mistake of reporting, with perhaps too much detail, that the man who’d assaulted her had lowered his body mass to hit her where it would be most effective—very much like a football linebacker. Whoever he was, he’d played football, probably in his high school glory days. But the police had taken that and gone with the theory that he played high school football now.
It was easy, while under stress, they’d said, to get a lot of details wrong. A flash of a face before a mask got pulled down could be deceptive. Most of the time, witness reporting was inaccurate.
“I’m a Navy SEAL,” Peter had said flatly. “I’m trained to get the details right.”
At that point the two police officers had exchanged a knowing glance, and Shay knew they were thinking, But dude, you’d just had sex in your garage with the cougar-next-door. It was likely your brains were still scrambled.
Damn it. She should’ve kept her mouth shut.
“The obvious is that it’s an invoice,” Shay said now, pointing back to the writing on the wall. “Or more accurately, a payment due notice. And whatever it was before, it’s twelve thousand dollars now.”
“What costs twelve thousand dollars in high school?” Izzy asked. “When I was a kid, those fancy Trapper Keeper notebooks—even the Star Wars ones—were only twelve ninety-nine.”
“Drugs,” Peter said tightly.
“I don’t know, man,” Izzy said. “That’s a lot of weed. Twelve K is more the price tag of a mafia-style hit.”
Peter turned to him. “Z. Please.”
“Sorry.”
Unless it’s not just weed, and Maddie’s actually dealing, Harry said. Cocaine, meth, ecstasy…These days, biggest money’s in oxy.
“The drugs thing would be easier to believe if Maddie was twenty instead of fifteen,” Shayla pointed out.
“Her boyfriend is twenty,” Peter said.
Oh. Yeah. Yikes.
But then Shay brightened. “And there’s a possibility,” she said. “What if this message isn’t for Maddie? What if it’s for Dingo? If whoever he owes this money to is having as much trouble tracking him down as we are…? It makes sense that they’d reach out to him however they could—like, via his girlfriend…? That fits with my black truck theory, too.”
Peter hadn’t thought there was any kind of a connection between the black truck that Mrs. Quinn had seen in front of his house and the black truck from whence yesterday’s shit bucket had been thrown.
He still didn’t buy it. “I don’t know, Shay, there’s a lotta black trucks in San Diego,” he said. “I mean, were they following us all day yesterday? I would’ve seen them. No way those guys could suddenly be that stealthy.”
Unless the shit bucket hadn’t been intended—created, shall we say?—for you, Harry said. Think about where you were.
“We were trying to track down Dingo’s friend,” Shay said. “What’s his name. Daryl Middleton. Hoping Daryl would lead us to Dingo. What if they were doing the exact same thing? What if that bucket was really for Daryl? Like, Tell us where Dingo is, or next time you’ll get far worse than a bucket of shit in your face!”
“Oh,” Izzy exclaimed. “Fuck!”
Shay was warming to the idea. “Because what if Dingo and Daryl are in business together? Selling weed, selling meth, selling whatever the market demands. It helps to have a girlfriend who’s in high school, right? There’s a big potential client base there.”
“Whoa,” Peter said, but she could tell from his eyes that he both liked and hated the idea.
“You guys, you guys, you guys!” Izzy was practically jumping up and down. “I came over, specifically to tell you—but it blew right out of my head with all the drama in the garage—”
“The drama was in the house,” Peter corrected him in his naval officer voice.
Yeah, but the house drama’s not what blew Izzy’s mind, Harry noted dryly.
“Sir,” Izzy responded. “Yes. Right. Sorry. But Lindsey Jenkins called. She must’ve called you right when, ahem.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, she called me and asked me to tell you, specifically, about Dingo’s friend, Daryl Middleton. He was brought into the hospital ER last night—severely beaten. He’s still in ICU—unconscious, with a head injury.”
“Jesus,” Peter breathed.
“Lindsey said she’d call if he wakes up,” Izzy added.
“When,” Shayla corrected him. “When he wakes up.”
“Right,” Izzy said. “That’s what I meant. I’m sure he’ll be fine…?”
Peter’s not an idiot, Harry said. His daughter’s in serious danger. She’s no longer just some troubled kid who ran away because she maybe got knocked up by her inappropriately older boyfriend. This is a whole new level of pain. It’s not just a bucket of shit; it’s a raging river.
Shayla dug for her phone. “I’m texting Maddie. This has gone too far.”
“Block,” Maddie said as she did just that. She’d started to get a string of obnoxious texts from “Dad’s” girlfriend. The woman had started with a photo—clearly some of Nelson’s boys had broken in and tossed Maddie’s room, and when they hadn’t found the money, they’d written “$12K NOW” on her wall.
Her father must’ve been freaking out, but she so didn’t want to hear about it, so—expecting a flood of texts from his friends—she shut her entire phone off as Dingo drove them both south and east.
Not toward Virginia, although they might as well go there as anywhere. She’d counted the money they’d taken from Fiona’s room. It was just shy of four thousand, which was not enough.
“Maybe I should call him,” Dingo said now, glancing over at her. “Bob Nelson. Maybe if I explained—”
“What, he’s suddenly going to listen to you now?” Maddie scoffed. “Seriously, Ding, what’s he gonna say? He’s gonna say, Yes, absolutely, I’ll take the four thousand dollars and we’ll call it even. Come on over to the garage, I’ll order you a pizza and we’ll all have a good laugh. Except when we show, he’ll kill us both. Bullets to the head, buried in the desert. No, thanks. Let’s just get to Manzanar, so we can get some sleep before we figure out what to do next.”
“She must’ve turned off her phone.” Pete was filled with frustration as Maddie failed to respond to any of their texts. “God damn it.”
“She’ll turn it back on eventually,” Shay told him. “She’s a teenaged girl. And when she does, the first thing we want her to see is a photo of Daryl in that hospital bed. Any ideas how we can—”
Izzy stood up. “I’ll go.”
“Oh.” Shayla looked over at Lindsey Jenkins, who was sitting on Pete’s sofa rubbing her beachball of a belly, her feet up. Concerned, as always, with the details, Shay asked the former police detective, “Except…doesn’t the hospital have rules about visitors to the ICU? Don’t they have to be family members?”
“Trust in the Zanella,” Lindsey said with a smile and a shrug, even as Izzy said, “I’m pretty sure he’s my nephew. My sister-in-law just called, she’s so distraught….”
“Good,” Pete said. “See if you can manage to still be there when he wakes up. We have a lot of questions for him.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”