White Space Season 2

nightmares.
    “I don’t know, but I wanted to call you first, so those Paladin fucks don’t hear it on the radio and try calling dibs.”
    “Where are you at?” Brady asked, wondering if those Paladin fucks could hear their conversation anyway.
    “Down at slip 17, the usual spot. I have Jerry watching to make sure no one comes snooping.”
    “OK,” Brady said, “I’m on my way.”
    He was five minutes from the marina, but the ride felt like an hour, with every passing moment another nail in little Christina’s coffin.
    It had been nearly six months since his daughter went missing. She vanished one night while Brady was working late and his wife was sleeping. He’d come home and thought the front door was locked, but couldn’t be certain since he was so dead-ass tired. He pressed the button on his cell to open the door, barely paying attention. He had no idea whether the light was already green before he pushed his way through the doorway.
    Brady had gone upstairs to kiss his children goodnight, and Christina was gone. He went into his son’s room, to see if maybe they’d had a “sleepover” in his room, like they sometimes did when he worked late. She wasn’t there. When he went to his bedroom and saw Molly sleeping alone, he knew Christina was gone.
    The search was exhaustive, as were all the searches for missing people on the island. This one more so. They’d gone to every house, brought in suspects for questioning, and even sent dive teams into the caves on the island’s north end, where bodies would sometimes wind up after the currents swept them in like floating garbage.
    The girl was gone, vanished like so many others over the years. Most of the missing were always chalked up to runaways or suicides washed to sea, but not a 5 year old. Someone had taken her. It was the only explanation, and not a day went by that Brady didn’t feel as if the girl’s captor might still be on the island, watching him, enjoying the torment he managed to inflict on the chief.
    Despite the odds, Brady believed he would find her, or at least refused to believe that he wouldn’t. Not a day passed when Brady didn’t spend it harboring hope that Christina would be returned to his family alive.
    You heard of cases on the news, some whack job kidnapping a kid and keeping them prisoner for years. Sometimes it was a pervert, but other times, it was some misguided soul desperate for a child they couldn’t have. If someone had taken Christina, Brady hoped it was the latter scenario — unlikely as it might be — and that she might someday return, physically unharmed, back into the loving arms of her family.
    Brady was a cop, who had seen enough shit to erode his ability to hope, but he loved Christina enough to stitch some make-piece version of hope together. If anything, though, hope had done more damage than good, decaying his marriage and ripping into his wife’s sanity.
    Hope was a cruel fucker.
    And now, as Brady pulled into the marina, the part of him which had slowly resigned itself to his little girl being dead wanted to know for sure.
    A tiny part of him — a part Brady hated — almost wanted the body to be hers, just to finally silence the cruel hope still shredding his family to pieces. If the body was Christina’s, maybe they could find a way to finally shove the horror behind them and move on.
    Or maybe it would be the final blow to push Molly over the edge.
    Brady climbed from his cruiser and headed over to Jackson’s tugboat, where the large man waited with a solemn look on his oversized face.
    Brady cleared his throat and said, “Is it her?”
    “I don’t know, come look.”
    Planks squeaked beneath Brady’s feet as he followed Jackson onto the boat. Jackson said, “I was pulling some asshole on a schooner from near the caves, why the fuck he was trying to go in there, I don’t know, when I spotted her, floating. I didn’t say anything, waited until the asshole left, then went back, so me and Jerry are the only ones who know.”
    Jackson turned back to Brady. Brady was silent.
    He followed Jackson into the cabin where he saw the lump wrapped in a gray wool blanket. Jackson bent to pull the blanket to the side. Hollow splashes slapping the tugboat’s hull seemed to slow, sloshing the wooziness stewing the chief’s gut. Brady imagined his daughter’s dead eyes, if she still had any, staring back. He thought of Molly demanding that he take her to the morgue to identify their