Commander.
Mason marveled at the title.
He must be in charge of the whole Navy.
“My friends call me Mick. You can call me Mick until you’re a sailor. Then you’ll have to call me sir. Deal?”
Mason nodded. “Yes, sir. I mean, Mick.”
Mick laughed and tussled Mason’s hair with his strong paw.
“Commander? If you could come this way.”
A police officer poked around the corner, beckoning. Commander McQueen winked and turned to leave, guiding Jelly by the shoulder to follow alongside him.
She looked over her opposite shoulder as she left, smiling. “See ya, Peanut Butter.”
Mason nodded once.
“See ya, Jelly,” he said, too quietly for her to hear.
&&&
Chapter Eleven
Present Day
Shee scooped sand into a bright yellow scallop shell and poured it on her big toe as if the shell were a little excavator. The strip of dry land on which she sat shrank another inch as the surf pounded in, driven by a strong north-easterly wind. A winter squall had the temperature hovering at a nippy sixty degrees, and Shee zipped her hoodie to protect herself against the chill.
Where did Florida go?
A man walked by holding both his skinny arms in the air as if he’d won a marathon. He wore nothing but ragged-edged jeans shorts and a Russian fur cap complete with ear flaps, his exposed nipples pointed into the wind like rocket nosecones.
Ah. There it is.
She didn’t need to worry about Florida.
Shee rested her forehead on her knees.
This is it. I’m going home.
Mick had been too still. She couldn’t remember a time she’d seen her father lie so still in the middle of the day.
Something’s wrong.
The way she saw it, she had two options. She could keep sneaking around, filling the Loggerhead Inn’s airspace with spy drones.
Or...
She could sack-up and walk through the door.
Maybe no one would recognize her. She could get a room like a tourist. Angelina was probably the only person from the Inn’s original staff still working there—the only person who could make her.
Will it be safe?
If the people after her were in Jupiter Beach, they would have killed her already. Right? She’d been a ghost for fifteen years. Certainly, they hadn’t been surveilling her father’s hotel all that time, waiting for her to appear...
Shee stood and brushed the sand from her butt. A tourist couple walked by holding hands. She could tell they were tourists because only shorts and tank tops covered their fish-belly-white skin. At sixty-five degrees, the locals were digging out their parkas. Visitors gritted through wearing their summer togs, chanting, I will be on vacation, dammit.
Shee shivered. It seemed she still had Floridian blood.
Okay. You can do this.
As the sun dipped to the west, she returned to her car and drove to The Loggerhead Inn, grateful the short trip had left little time to rethink her decision.
She pulled into the hotel’s lot and parked across from the front door. A flock of white ibis strutted nearby, poking their curved beaks into a patch of thick green grass, plucking worms and millipedes.
Eleven.
Eleven birds, ten white and one mostly white with gray speckles. The number eleven hovered over the image of the birds in her mind, like the watermark on a copyrighted photo. The tiniest glimpse at a flock of birds and she knew how many were there, but ask her twenty-two percent of sixty-four dollars and she’d spend twenty years, a redwood’s worth of paper and a thousand number two pencils working out the answer.
She hated math.
I like birds, though. Does a flock of birds become a herd of birds when walking?
Good question.
Here’s a better one.
Can I think of any other stupid ways to delay getting out of this car?
Shee cut the engine, closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Here goes nothing.
She left the vehicle and pointed herself toward the inn’s porch. The enormous man she’d seen guarding the front door during a previous drive-by had left his post.
She scanned the area, searching for the doorman. She liked to keep track of people capable of breaking her in half with their bare hands, especially after her current track record with giants, but she didn’t see him.
Good. Maybe I won’t be tempted to tackle him.
She opened the door and walked into the lobby, the air conditioning chilling her bare arms.
“Hello?”
The white granite top of the unmanned check-in desk gleamed beneath a string of modern pedant lights. Another small wooden desk, one Shee guessed belonged to a concierge, also sat empty, but for a small pile of papers, a few clear containers of local attraction brochures and a fuzzy black, bedazzled disk about the size of a dinner plate. The disc looked as if Sunset Boulevard’s aging movie queen Norma Desmond had left behind a hat.
Shee took another cleansing breath and exhaled.
You’re in. No one is watching you. This is good. You can go to Mick without having to go through anyone else.
If only all infiltrations were this easy.
She walked to the elevator, the slap of sandals against her feet deafening in the silence of the empty room.
Her attention pulled toward the ceiling, and she realized she’d been searching for speakers. The hotel needed lobby music to make guests feel welcomed. Something mellow and Jimmy Buffetty to confirm their expectations of Florida.
Heck with the music. Stationing a warm human being somewhere in the lobby would be a good start. As it was, the hotel had an after-the-apocalypse vibe. Empty. Abandoned suddenly, if the glowing iPhone on the check-in counter was any indication.
Strange.
If a zombie came shuffling down the hall toward her it wouldn’t have felt out of place.
Shut up.
