Page 81 of No Kind of Hero
“Maybe Beth’s not sure,” Michelle said, “but I am. Babies aren’t chess pieces. That precious girl belongs with the person who loves her best, and that’s not the person who ran away and stayed gone, and then snatched her when she was sick. Anybody’s going to see that. I know both our magistrates. They might not always be popular, but they’re not stupid. It’s going to happen, Evan. You’re going to get her back.”
Evan didn’t sleep much that night. He tried, because there was nothing else to do. He got that he was where he needed to be. If April came back, because surely she wouldn’t want to deal with a sick baby. She hadn’t been able to handle crying before. Why would she even have taken Gracie in the first place? It made no sense. It was crazy.
Around and around his thoughts went, getting nowhere. He lay rigid on his back and stared into the dark. And Beth didn’t take her hand off him all night long.
He didn’t want her to touch him. And he did.
Beth waited until Monday morning. And then she called.
Eight o’clock, and she was in Evan’s back yard dialing the number. And after a few minutes, she was dialing another one. Felicia Diaz, who’d already be at her desk, because she’d only just made partner.
Felicia didn’t say hello. She said, “Thank God. This old lady Simon stuck me with is crazy, and I don’t think she likes brown people. No men, no non-Anglos, and nobody who hates dogs. I’m 1 for 3, and that’s OK, because I hate her too. I want to kick her wrinkly old ass right on out of here, but you know I can’t. I’ve got her scheduled for Friday, and we’re going to do it in your office. One of her yappy little asshole dogs peed on my carpet. I hate my job.”
Beth said, “Stop. Wait. Listen.”
“Uh-oh,” Felicia said. “Don’t tell me.”
“It’s not that. It’s a friend here. His ex took his little girl . . .” She explained as briefly as she could, knowing that it sounded like every other custody dispute. “And I need your help,” she said at the end. “We need to find out where this guy is.”
“I’m not who you need to talk to,” Felicia said. “Call Hogan and get him to do it. Investigation’s his job.”
“I tried,” Beth admitted. “Just now.” She rubbed two fingers over her forehead, wishing she’d had more sleep. “It’s not firm business, I’m not a partner, and it’s way too sketchy. I need somebody else to request it. Somebody who can make Hogan close his eyes.”
“I want to help you,” Felicia said. “But that’s not going to be me. I’d get myself up a creek, and I can’t do it. You know your friend can get a hearing. If she really left the kid for that long, then grabbed her like that? He’ll probably get sole legal. All he has to do is wait.”
“I know,” Beth said, “but he doesn’t feel like he can wait. He needs to knownow.”
“And then what?”
“That’s the tricky part, sure. But I have a plan for that.”
“What? There’s no good plan. Or there is. The one—oh, yeah—that we tend to advocate here. Wait for the judge. You’re too close to it. This is why you don’t represent your friends and relatives. Well, it’s whyyoudon’t.Idon’t because my relatives are crazy.”
“All right,” Beth said. “Thanks anyway.” She hung up, walked around the back yard in her bare feet, noticed absently that the lavender near the back fence had started to bloom, and thought about things. And then she made another call.
They didn’t go in the helicopter after all.
“It’d take longer to arrange for the car on the other end than it would to drive,” Blake said. He sounded reluctant to Evan, like he’d been looking forward to the ride, to some action, and Evan knew why. He could think of a few movie scenes he wouldn’t mind reenacting himself. Where you hovered a few yards over the house, maybe, and drove the bad guys out. Or where you put the helicopter down right smack in front of that pickup. After that? He had more ideas. It was Monday afternoon, Gracie had been gone for twenty-eight hours, and he wanted to hit somebody. He wanted tokillsomebody. He wanted his daughter.
Instead, he and Beth were going to be driving, she’d informed him. In her mom's car, because, she’d said, “I have a plan. And we need my mom's car, not yours, for it, because April won’t know it. And my mom's car’s so respectable, too. Soappropriate.Put the car seat in the back. And Mom’s coming with us, by the way.”
“That’s right,” Michelle said. She’d come over first thing this morning and had made coffee, and she and Beth had walked around the yard and talked. Evan had assumed there was some kind of consoling going on, some mother/daughter thing. Apparently, though, he’d been wrong.
“How come she gets to go and I don’t?” Dakota complained. She’d been pacing all morning, the way Evan had wanted to do, until she’d grabbed his clippers and finished trimming his bushes, which had made Blake sigh and go help her. Big-time millionaires probably didn’t do a lot of their own trimming. When Beth had called them to the house again a little after two-thirty, though, they’d both hustled right back in.
“You don’t get to come because you’d probably hit April,” Beth told Dakota. “And that’s not going to work.”
“It would work for me,” Dakota said. “It would workgreat.I wouldn’t just hit her, either. I’d kick her while she was down.”
“Beth’s got a plan, baby,” Blake said. “I know you’d like to jump right in, but every so often, the careful people get a turn. And when it comes to the legal stuff, the careful people are usually right.”
“Yes, we are,” Beth said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.” She looked at Evan. “If you trust me to try it my way.”
He didn’t want to. He wanted the helicopter option. Preferably with guns mounted. “I get it,” he said instead. “I have to take the longer view, because I need Gracie to be given to me, so we’ve got to do it right. Let’s go.”
The drive would take less than an hour, but it was probably good that Beth was driving, because he’d have been getting a ticket for sure. The closer they got to Liberty Lake, the town in eastern Washington where one Chris Wilson had registered a blue Dodge Dakota, the more Evan’s body stiffened. By now, he was rigid, and he was trying not to look at the empty car seat beside him with the bunny rabbit rattle sitting in it, one ear floppy and chewed.
“How did you get the guy’s address, anyway?” he asked, then realized he’d talked right over something Beth had said to her mom, beside her in the front seat. “You never said.”
