“That is so sweet!” Tiffany enthused as Shayla pulled out into the traffic. “You are so sweet!”
“Nope,” he said. “Just observant. And very lucky.”
“Can we focus here, Pete?” Shayla shot him a hard look, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation, her fingers tight on her steering wheel. “Since Izzy got those photos—the money shots of Daryl—that we sent to Maddie, he figured it was okay to leave Adam alone at the hospital. He thought it was a waste of person-power to have them both sitting there, waiting for Daryl to wake up. He wanted to know what was next on your to-do list, so I asked him—Izzy—to pick up Hiroko. Will you please give her a call to tell her he’s coming?”
Pete nodded as he got out his phone. “Thank you, that’s…You’d make a great senior chief.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Shay said, “but I’m going to pretend it’s a good thing.”
“Trust me, it is,” he said, and dialed Hiroko.
Hiroko Nakamura lived in the home of Izzy’s dreams.
The house itself was nothing special, but location, location, location! The ocean was right there.
Eden sometimes claimed that Izzy would live in an underwater house if he could, and maybe that was true, but if he did, he’d miss the beauty of the above-water environs. The sea and the sky, and the sound of the constantly moving surf…Underwater, everything was muted and in slow motion. Most of the time. Sometimes, the Pacific could be a deadly monster, and that underwater house would have to be built pretty deep beneath the surface to avoid the churning and turmoil.
Izzy went up the front path, but he didn’t need to ring the doorbell. The door opened before he hit the front stoop.
Ms. Nakamura was diminutive in size, but the glare she gave him was gigantic.
He deflected it with a smile. “I’m Izzy Zanella,” he said.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You wasted a trip. I’m not going with you.” And she shut the door in his face.
Ho-kay. He knocked—ringing a bell just wasn’t his thing—and he kept knocking until she opened the door again.
“What?”
“Grunge—Peter—said you have some really rockin’ pictures from Manzanar,” Izzy told her. “Won’t be a wasted trip if you’ll let me take a look.”
“You just want to get inside, so you can talk me into coming with you.”
Izzy nodded. “Yup. But I’d rather do it while looking at photos of something I’m deeply interested in, instead of shouting through a closed door.”
She hmphed at him, but she didn’t shut the door.
He waited.
She did, too. She just stood there with that glare on heavy stun, trying to psych him out—make him speak or turn away.
But he had older brothers. There was no psych-out game on this planet that Izzy could not win. So he settled in for the duration, pasting his blandest smile on his face.
And sure enough, she cracked. “Why are you interested in Manzanar?”
“Well, there’s a lot of reasons, maybe the top one is Because I’m an American…?” He thought about it. “Yeah. That’s right. The forced internment of American citizens during World War Two is a stinking stain of dog crap on our history as a nation, and it’s important that we don’t erase it. I was eleven when I first found out about it, and I read everything I could get my hands on—even talked my brother and his wife into going on a roadtrip to Manzanar and Tule Lake, too. They had one of those pop-up campers.”
Hiroko did her silent stare-down thing again, and again, Izzy just waited.
She finally opened the door wider, and gestured for him to come in.
Twenty minutes later, he was carrying her bag as he walked her out to his truck. Because after he’d looked at her photos, he’d shown her his.
And that close-up of Daryl Middleton in his ICU hospital bed did the trick.
“I’m going to hate this,” Hiroko told him, as he pulled away from her house.
“Probably,” he agreed. “But maybe not. Shayla’s got it going on.”
“Hmph,” she said, but the tone was slightly different, so he decided to interpret it as Hmph, I agree.
The drive to Shay’s was going to take about twenty minutes, and he resisted the urge to suggest they sing their favorite show tunes, and instead opted to ride in what he chose to believe was a mutually respectful silence.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As Shayla stood in the middle of her kitchen with activity swirling around her, she realized that she was never going to be alone with Peter again.
Well, at least not until they found Maddie, and whatever danger the girl was in was finally over.
Hugely pregnant Lindsey Jenkins was parked on Shay’s sofa in the living room, trying to track down a cop friend who had a lawyer friend who knew Fiona’s aunt Susan. Apparently, Fiona’s parents weren’t picking up, and hadn’t returned the messages that Lindsey’d left. And Susan still wasn’t in her law office. Lindsey was hoping her friend of a friend might help.
Peter was “walking the perimeter” with Timebomb and Hans, while the young man named Seagull was at the kitchen table, attempting to create a schedule for guard duty from a long list of volunteers, taking into account the various times each person was available.
Tiffany, Frank, and Tevin were attempting to help, but probably making life significantly harder for the SEAL candidate. Particularly Tiff, who was leaning over from across the table to check the list of names every chance she got. Poor Seagull was going to have an aneurysm from all that boobage in his face.
Hiroko sat at the other end of the table, her own laptop open in front of her, arms crossed, earbuds in. Shay had no idea what the elderly woman was watching, but she didn’t want to get too close and find out for sure. This way, Shay could at least conjure up a small smile as she pretended that it was porn.
Izzy had dropped Hiroko and dashed back to Van Nuys—if one could call a two-and-a-half-hour drive a dash, especially since he was heading directly into the Los Angeles Hellmouth of terrible afternoon traffic. But he’d gone willingly and cheerfully to stake out the Dinglers’ house, in case Dingo and Maddie—or the bad men chasing them—showed up.
Izzy was, without a doubt, one of Peter’s very best friends.
Although, glancing at that long list of SEALs and former military personnel willing to volunteer their time to help keep them safe…
Peter had a lot of very good friends.
He came into the house through the kitchen door, filling up the room as only he could. It was funny how that happened. Izzy was taller and broader than Peter. Both Hans and Timebomb were, too. But when Peter walked in…
He smiled at her, and the room got even smaller.
“Hello.” Shay put almost no voice to the word, but he heard her.