The Girl Who Wants Read online

  Alyssa pointed at her with the credit card. “You were here last week, weren’t you? Maybe Saturday? I work Saturdays.”

  Blue.

  Saturdays are royal blue. Sundays are light blue because they’re gentler than Saturdays.

  Orange rose like a sunrise in her mind. “Thursday.”

  Alyssa nodded. “Cool. Brunch here is awesome. Okay. I’ll go run this for you.”

  “Thanks, Ally-Sah.”

  The girl stopped and pointed at her name tag. “Alyssa.” She took another step and then spun on her heel, an open-mouthed grin on her face. “Oh I get it. Like I said your name wrong.” Laughing, she rolled her eyes and headed off again.

  Shee’s attention locked on the credit card swinging in the girl’s hand as she walked toward the bar. Alyssa’s stride bounced like the floor was made of gym mat. The young didn’t know what to do with all that energy. Shee looked at the back of her right—no, left—hand and followed the network of lines ridging around her knuckles, the flesh spotted with what she liked to think of as hefty freckles.

  Late forties didn’t bounce.

  In so many ways.

  She sniffed as the perfume of the woman sitting behind her made a visit to her booth. It hadn’t smelled floral a moment ago. It had smelled like—

  Oh right. Oysters.

  She twisted to see her neighbors.

  “Hi, I’m sorry, I think one of your—”

  Her attention dropped to the plate of oysters positioned between the couple. The oyster shells remained resting in the silver serving tray’s divots, glistening and empty.

  The couple had unwittingly played oyster Russian roulette.

  Who ate Stinky?

  The man looked at her expectantly, and Shee smiled.

  Ah well. I tried.

  She pulled the napkin from her own lap and dipped as if plucking it from the ground. The action happened too low for the man to see from his angle.

  “I think you dropped one of your napkins,” she said, handing it to them.

  Oh and by the way, you might want to shove your fingers down your throat.

  The woman’s mouth pinched into an exaggerated ‘o’ of surprise as she accepted the napkin. The lipstick smudge across the center wasn’t her color. She didn’t notice.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  Shee turned back to her table, confident the couple would check their laps to find their napkins where they’d left them, but they wouldn’t say anything. They’d confirm with each other, shrug, and then stuff the spare napkin aside somewhere. Shee guessed only one in ten would insist she take back the napkin. Most people avoided useless interaction unless they were desperate to talk, and the couple had each other for conversation. Thank goodness, because she’d overheard enough of their conversation to know all she ever needed about the pros and cons of the Keto diet.

  Shee left her table and caught the attention of the bartender to whom Alyssa had handed her credit card.

  “Hey, can I pay cash instead?” she asked, motioning to the credit card about to be plunged into a card reader.

  The bartender nodded and returned her card without confirming it belonged to her.

  Shee pulled a hundred-dollar bill from her shorts pocket and handed it to him.

  “Can you add two pineapple ginger martinis to my bill and send them to that couple over there?”

  She motioned to the couple. They were busy looking for a spot to stow a spare napkin they didn’t want to touch now that they knew it wasn’t theirs.

  The bartender appeared surprised, but amenable. “Sure.”

  “Give the change to Alyssa.”

  He nodded, the twitch of one eyebrow the only evidence of surprise at her generosity.

  Shee left the restaurant and stepped into the Florida sun. She’d done all she could for The Oyster People. Both pineapple and ginger helped digestion and the symptoms of food poisoning.

  Maybe they’d get lucky. The oyster didn’t smell that bad.

  She looked at her credit card and frowned.

  Siofra McQueen.

  Running the card would have put her on the grid for the first time in over a decade.

  She’d wimped out.

  Again.

  &&&

  Chapter Four

  Five weeks ago.

  “I appreciate the catch-up Viggo, but you didn’t call me to Minnesota to buy me a burger.”

  Mick McQueen shivered and wrapped himself like a burrito in his inadequate twill jacket. The elevator doors opened and fingers of frost pinched his cheeks. As an ex-Navy SEAL with almost seventy years of life experience, he thought he could withstand anything, but the icy blast of a Minnesota winter had him ready to reel off his name, rank, serial number and location of ally command.

  “Damn. I forgot it could get this cold. Florida’s made me soft.”

  Viggo acknowledged his distress with a tight smile, and thrust a hand into his khakis to the tune of jangling keys.

  Mick studied him as he looked away.

  Viggo seems off.

  Could be a lot of reasons why. They hadn’t seen each other in years. Now they were old men. There’d been times he couldn’t have dreamed they’d live so long. Viggo by his side used to mean they were in some foreign land doing God-knows-what.

  Now, where blond Viggo once strode into battle like avenging Odin, a paunchy, hunch-shouldered giant in khakis walked with the hint of a limp thanks to a recent hip replacement. With the addition of kinky gray hairs, his once-golden locks looked more like a sun-bleached pile of straw tangled on his thick skull.

  They were nearly to Viggo’s car when Mick’s musing ended and he realized his friend hadn’t said a word since they left the restaurant.

  Maybe his lips froze together.

  “Veeg?”

  Viggo stopped and looked down at him.

  A sour taste struck Mick’s pallet.

  I know that look.

  His friend took a subtle step backwards, the wrinkle between his eyebrows telegraphing sorry.

  Mick’s brain screamed its own word.

  Move.

  He pushed off his left toe.

  “What have you done?”

  His words were eaten by the blast of a rifle. Something struck the right side of his head. Force spun his body and Mick collapsed against a car.

  He could still see.

  He could still breathe.

  I’m here.

  The shot hadn’t killed him.

  I have to move—

  His elbow cracked against the paved floor of the garage.

  When did I fall?

  Betrayed by his limbs, he remained motionless, the wounded side of his skull pressed against the pavement.

  He watched as Viggo’s feet shuffled toward him. Heard a voice.

  Veeg, help me—

  The garage disappeared, replaced by the flickering image of a little girl playing in the sand by the water’s edge. He smiled.

  Shee.

  The sun dimmed. Darkness oozed across the beach scene as if it were a jammed filmstrip frame, burning beneath the heat of the projector’s lamp.

  The girl turned to look at him as the world around her melted.

  No, no, no—

  &&&

  Chapter Five

  Present Day

  Shee opened the box and wrestled foam away from the treasure nestled inside—a DJI Mavic video drone. Quadcopter, to be specific. She’d bought it using the other credit card, the one embossed with the name Hunter Byrne.

  Her cheesiest alias to date.

  She’d picked Hunter because she’d been in a bar plotting how to hunt her latest quarry when a chatty bartender asked her name. New town, new target—it had been time for a change.

  With the Talking Heads’ Girlfriend playing over the embedded ceiling speakers, she’d blurted Hunter Byrne, guessing the young bartender wouldn’t know David Byrne from a rack of oversized jackets.

  He definitely didn’t know she hunted men.

&nb
sp; Well, usually men. Not sexist, just a fact.

  She’d been a skip tracer-slash-bounty hunter since she was eight years old. Over the years, she’d had a thousand names. Most of them she made up on the spot—a talent more difficult than the average person would imagine.

  In a panic, names like Foghorn Quackenbush jump to mind, but she’d learned to resist the urge to blurt nonsense. She didn’t want to end up in a conversation about her silly name, or worse, inspire a mark to doubt her. Tell someone your name is Cockney Schnizzlefritz and they’ll blow you off on the spot.

  Shee’s Hunter Byrne credit card sat tucked in her phone case next to a driver’s license boasting the same name. Back at her hotel, locked in the safe, sat five others featuring various other monikers, most pretty common.

  Siofra was weird enough.

  Her Gaelic name meant fairy or changeling, hailing from a time in Ireland’s history when superstitious parents feared fairies might replace their babies with changeling twins.

  She supposed the name fit. She’d lost track of whether she were herself or a changeling twin a long time ago.

  Either way, now she had a drone to play with.

  She’d charged the drone in her hotel room and scoped the perfect place to use as a launch and landing area—an unoccupied mansion not far up the river from The Loggerhead Inn. A week earlier, she’d borrowed the owner’s paddleboard for another mission. In towns like Jupiter Beach, it wasn’t difficult to find empty vacation homes, even if the owners alleged to live there six months and a day in order to claim Florida residency and avoid state taxes.

  Sitting on the tax-dodgers’ dock, she plugged her phone into the controller and the drone sprang to life, a buzzing angry wasp, rising into the air.

  She touched the controller’s forward arrow and the drone shot away from her toward the trees lining the opposite bank.

  Too fast.

  She acclimated herself to the controls and video feed before pushing the mechanical bird toward The Loggerhead.

  Perched in the mansion’s waterside lounge chair, Shee’s knee bounced at the sight of the familiar hotel on her phone’s screen.

  There it is.

  On her command, the drone ascended until it hovered parallel to the uppermost windows of the building. She buzzed closer. The angle of the sun against the southern-facing windows sent light streaming through the impact resistant glass, illuminating the face of a man lying in bed.

  Dad?

  Shee glanced at her watch to find it nearly ten-thirty.

  Mick McQueen hadn’t slept past six a.m. a day in his life.

  What’s wrong with him?

  Through the drone’s eye she scanned the room. A chair and a pair of side tables clustered around the centerpiece of the room—a silver-edged hospital bed. Shee noted the matching Tetons of Mick’s feet beneath the covers before turning the drone to its nine until the camera focused on her father’s face.

  Mick’s eyes were shut. Zooming in, she spotted tubes of various sizes and colors leading into his forearm.

  A lemon rolled from somewhere in her chest and lodged itself in her throat, lumpy and sour.

  What have I done?

  She let the drone hover there, hands frozen on the controls.

  I waited too long—

  The camera shook, waking Shee from her building panic. Her fingers scrambled to keep the drone from dropping. Steady once more, she wiped her eyes and studied the screen.

  What was that?

  It was if something had struck the drone.

  A bird?

  A large insect?

  She left the device hovering another moment hoping her father would open his eyes or move—anything that made him look less dead.

  Squinting, she wished she’d brought her peepers from the car. Her forties had played hell with her reading eyesight.

  Did his chest rise and fall?

  Moving her focus to the end of the bed, she searched for a chart that might reveal his illness. Her angle kept that area hidden. No one had done her the favor of scrawling his diagnosis on the wall above his head.

  She panned the room, zooming in on anything she thought might be of interest.

  Nothing.

  She forced herself to guide the drone to the next window.

  The rest of her father’s apartment appeared empty, and hadn’t changed since the last time she’d been in it, over a dozen years earlier.

  Dad still isn’t a decorator.

  Snorting a little laugh, she wiped away a wet bubble ballooning from her nose.

  Get hold of yourself, Shee.

  Something moved near the bottom of the screen and she focused on it, hoping to identify what had hit the camera.

  Not a bird.

  The movement came from someone in the room, sitting with their back to the window, the back of their head visible above the sofa cushions.

  The person twisted to peer at the drone. A woman in nurse’s scrubs.

  The buzzing of the drone. She’d heard it.

  Shee watched the woman scowl.

  Time to go.

  She jerked the drone away from the window and retraced the Intracoastal Waterway back to her dockside perch. The contraption hummed into view and landed beside her.

  That’s something, anyway.

  She’d confirmed her father still resided at The Loggerhead Inn. She wasn’t positive she’d seen him breathe, but felt ninety-nine-percent sure he was alive.

  No reason to hire a nurse to watch a dead man.

  He had all his limbs. She didn’t notice any marks on his body. Flu? No. A hospital bed implied something more long-term. Cancer?

  Am I too late?

  She swallowed and popped her phone from the controller cradle. Time to get some lunch and review the video.

  Time to think.

  She dropped the drone into its packaging and paused to check its body for a sign of what had knocked it off course. A smooshed bug, a feather or—

  Hold on.

  Shee fingered a small black disk stuck to the side of the drone.

  That’s new.

  Plucking at it, she peeled it from the ’copter’s exoskeleton.

  Hm.

  Shee awakened her phone and reviewed the drone footage as it approached her father’s window.

  There it is.

  Tucked in the corner where one angle of The Loggerhead’s roof met another nestled what looked like a gun. Her imaginary clock told her the drone had dipped toward its nine as if it had been hit from its three.

  That has to be it.

  She studied the disc in her palm.

  A GPS tracker.

  Smaller than a quarter, the device wasn’t over-the-counter spy fun—this was military-grade. Cutting edge.

  Why had her father set up a drone tracking gun?

  He’d given her the all-clear nearly two years ago. She’d delayed returning for—well, she wasn’t sure why. That was something between her and the imaginary therapist that lived in her head with the colors, calendars and clocks.

  Had the situation changed?

  Shee packed up the drone and left the dock with the tracker still in her hand. She knew she needed to toss the GPS, but instead, carried it almost all the way back to her car.

  Maybe I want to be found.

  As she opened her trunk, a motion in the underbrush caught her eye. She spotted the familiar outline of a gopher tortoise, munching away at a patch of grass with its trademark grumpy mug. Every gopher tortoise looked like a ninety-year-old man who’d just been told to eat his creamed carrots.

  “Hey you, come here...”

  She jogged toward the tortoise. The creature noticed her approach and scrambled away as if it had remembered it was late for a meeting.

  “Fast little bugger.”

  She caught it easily enough and stuck the sticky tracker to its shell. It wouldn’t hurt the tortoise. It would probably scrape off the next time the critter crawled into its hole, but the idea of her father tracking a turtl
e made her laugh.

  “As you were.”

  She released the gopher and it sprinted toward its hole to disappear inside.

  Shee headed to her car, chuckling, trying hard to keep her mind on the tortoise.

  &&&

  Chapter Six

  Thirty-seven years ago

  Shee’s mind drifted to syrup as her father fussed with her dress.

  Blueberry syrup.

  “I want pancakes.”

  Mick rolled his eyes. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “I don’t care—Ow!” A bobby pin pinched in her father’s clumsy fingers scratched across her scalp. She thought she’d like wearing a wig, but it felt as if there were chimps hanging from her hair, yanking as they clambered around her skull.

  Her father grimaced and held out a photo for them both to study. “Sorry. I think I have it. What do you think?”

  Shee looked at the photo, then in the motel mirror, and back again. The girl in the photo had blonde hair, long and curly. Shee’s own hair, dark and short, sat hidden somewhere beneath her blonde wig. Admiring herself, she tilted her head to one side. She enjoyed the length of the soft curls, but decided she didn’t like being blonde. Blonde made her look like an angel.

  I’m not an angel.

  I’m a tracker.

  Her gaze tripped over a dot on the photo.

  “The freckle,” she said, pointing.

  “What?”

  “She has a freckle.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Yes, she does. There, above her eyebrow.”

  Mick plucked the photo from her hand and squinted at it.

  “Sonuva—”

  Shee pointed at him. “You owe me a cursing quarter.”

  “No, I don’t. I didn’t finish saying it.”

  “But my mind did and that’s what counts.”

  Mick laughed and lifted her in the air by her armpits. “Sounds like your mind owes me a quarter.”

  He dangled her in front of him, his massive biceps bulging. She could barely contain her joy. Nothing made her happier than making her father laugh.

  “Put me down.” She said the words but she didn’t mean them. Her father picked her up less and less as she grew. It was a treat to have her feet hovering three feet off the floor. His attention beamed like the sun on her face.