“Working with her?” Maddie was starting to feel like a parrot. “With Fiona? No! That’s not true!” She took her phone from the pocket of her cargo pants and unlocked the screen. “Look, check my history! No calls from Fiona, no texts either! Just a lot of me calling and her not picking up! She didn’t reach me on Friday, either, and she certainly didn’t stop by while my father was home!” Fiona knew better than that.
But Nelson wheezed with laughter again. “You expect me to believe you don’t have a separate burner phone for business? Fee told me about your arrangement, weeks ago. She said you were one of her best sales associates, but she also said you were devious. And, yes, deceitful. That she had to watch you closely.”
Maddie looked at him, and in that moment, she knew. This wasn’t a mistake or a mixup or a misunderstanding. Fiona had taken his ten thousand dollars, left town, and framed Maddie. Not only that, but she’d planned to do it, weeks ago. She’d intentionally brought Maddie to Nelson’s garage so he’d know both her name and her face.
“You have forty-eight hours to ‘find’ the money she gave you, and return it to me,” Nelson informed her. “And that’s me being generous, and giving you a little extra time. After that, the interest rate kicks in, and it’s another thousand dollars for each additional day you withhold.”
“So, you, like, want me to go to the police?” The words were out of Maddie’s mouth before she’d thought them through.
Nelson moved fast—faster than she’d dreamed an old, out-of-shape creeper could move—grabbing her by the throat with hot-dog fingers that were shockingly strong.
“You even think of doing that,” he said as she tried to breathe but couldn’t, so she started to flail, “and you’re dead.”
Dead-Eyes was still driving, but he moved his arm over to hold her in place, his elbow across her chest as he planted his hand directly between her legs, right on her crotch, and now she was struggling against that, too. But she couldn’t move and she couldn’t breathe.
“And I know what you’re thinking,” Nelson continued, his breath hot against her ear as she started to see stars, as his fingers dug even harder into her throat. “You’ll be safe, the police will protect you. But they won’t. In fact, they won’t believe you, especially when drugs are found in your locker, when ‘friends’ come forward and say you’ve been selling on campus. No one will believe you. And you’ll go to jail and while you’re there, I’ll have you killed. That’s if I don’t have you killed before that.”
With that, he let her go. As she sucked in air, she attempted to push Dead-Eyes’s still-groping hand away from her.
Forty-eight hours had passed extremely fast.
Maddie had gone home on Monday, after getting jettisoned from Nelson’s truck. She didn’t really know what else to do, except to keep trying to reach Fiona. And to start calling Dingo, too. But he wouldn’t answer, not at first. She hadn’t connected with him until halfway through the day on Tuesday. She’d cut school to look for him, and had finally found him at the 7-Eleven where he sometimes hung out to sell weed. That hadn’t gone all that well either, but she’d finally guilted him into helping her.
Now, hidden in the trunk of Dingo’s car, Maddie rubbed the bruises on her throat as she sent him a second text: Check again.
Please, she added, because there weren’t a lot of people in Dingo’s life who treated him with respect, including Nelson. Especially Nelson. And she knew, absolutely, that Dingo was risking more than she could imagine to help her like this, behind Nelson’s fugly back.
But instead of texting his reply, Dingo unlocked and opened the door of his car and said, “I walked down a level and up a level to check. He’s gone. You can come out.”
As Maddie pushed out the backseat cushion and wiggled through the opening into the body of the car, Dingo added, “You didn’t mention that your father was a Navy SEAL. You know, love, he might actually be able to help you.”
She climbed over into the front passenger seat as he started the behemoth of a car. “Where’s Daryl?”
“I’ll take that as a no comment,” he muttered. “I s’pose you’ve got as much to say for the shocker that you’re only fifteen.”
“Why should that bother you?” Maddie asked. “We’re friends. It’s not like we’re having sex or anything.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been sleeping in the same car,” Dingo said, maneuvering his giant vehicle out of the parking space. “And FYI, Daryl thinks we’re friends with, you know, those kind of benefits? He told me he preferred to walk home than risk death via angry Navy SEAL.”
“Daryl’s an idiot,” she pointed out. “And I’m not asking my father for anything. He’s an idiot, too. Plus he doesn’t give a flying shit.”
“I’m not sure I picked up doesn’t give a flying shit when he was all Where’s Maddie in my face,” Dingo countered. “In fact, it felt an awful lot like majorly gives a major flying shit.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a good little soldier,” Maddie said, “and he thinks he’s supposed to take care of me.”
Dingo glanced at her. “You sure, Mads? He looked pretty cool. I mean, the way you talked about him, I wasn’t expecting—”
“The whole California-surfer-dude affect is an intentional mind-fuck,” Maddie told him. “He’s a BUD/S instructor.” At Dingo’s blank look, she explained. “He’s like a drill sergeant in the world’s hardest boot camp. He teaches the idiots who want to be SEALs by trying to make them quit. And yeah, with his cool nickname—Grunge, if you can believe that, even though he doesn’t own a single CD and I’ve never heard him listen to music, not even once—he looks like the kind of dad who’d share his doobie with you after Sunday brunch, but trust me. Not even close.”
“Dad” was a Nazi when it came to schedules and curfews and keeping their new house “shipshape.” God. He’d even made lists of household chores, like she was a five-year-old, eager to earn a sticky star on her chart.
To be kept on such a short leash after her free-range childhood was maddening. And yeah, to be fair, his punctuality had been a good thing back when Maddie had used what she’d thought of as his monthly blackmail payments to pay Lisa’s bills.
Still, she understood—completely—why her free-spirited mother had kept her distance from him for all those years. In fact, her parents were such stark opposites, the very concept that they’d been together long enough to have sex and create Maddie was almost completely unbelievable. They must not have talked. That was Maddie’s best guess. It had been pure physical attraction and lust, after which Lisa had immediately fled.
God, she missed her mother far more than she missed her freedom. Lisa may have been a crappy caregiver—in addition to paying the bills, Maddie was also the one who cooked and cleaned and made sure her mom got to work on time. But her mother had loved her. Of that she had no doubt.
Not so the strict and scary Navy SEAL sperm donor.
“You okay, love?” Dingo asked softly. “Missing your mum again, I bet.” Despite his many flaws, he always knew what she was thinking, and he was always kind. “It’ll get easier, I promise. And this thing with Nelson? We’ll figure it out.”