Heat Wave (11 page)

Frank slid his quarter into the machine,
patted the buttons as if for good luck—pressing them did nothing to
determine which songs would play—and started back to the table he’d
been sharing with his Kreske’s colleagues. Almost at once, the room
filled with a familiar riff, the slide and thunk of the guitar
notes at the beginning of “Dirty Water.”

The room erupted in cheers. Gus’s customers
loved “Dirty Water,” loved its propulsive beat, loved the abrasive
nasal voice of the singer, loved that the song was about Boston.
Within seconds, the dance floor was swarming. Down the bar from
her, Manny began jiving. He might be built like a linebacker, but
he moved like a ballet dancer, his burly shoulders and solid hips
rocking and swaying to the beat.

“Ohhhh, Boston, you’re my home!” the
tavern’s entire population sang along.

Through the throng of writhing dancers, Gus
spotted some newcomers entering the tavern—Caleb Solomon and a
young blond woman. Solomon was the lawyer who had indirectly helped
Ed catch a sleazeball who’d been importing drugs into town on his
private ocean-worthy sailboat.

The woman with Solomon had been in the Faulk
Street Tavern earlier that week, too, talking to him. From their
body language tonight, Gus couldn’t tell what they were to each
other. They didn’t touch, didn’t even look at each other. The woman
appeared tense, her lips pressed into a ruler-straight line and her
gaze darting around the room. Solomon searched the room, too, but
his gaze was steady. He had a purpose in mind.

They weren’t lovers; Gus could ascertain
that much. But they weren’t quite an attorney and his client,
either. Something beyond business connected them. Gus wasn’t sure
what it was.

She realized pretty quickly that Solomon was
searching for an unoccupied table. Not an easy thing to find on a
Friday evening, when the place was packed with folks celebrating
the end of the work week. All the booths were taken, but eventually
he spotted a small table near the hall to the bathrooms. They sat,
and the woman eyed the dancers. The song had rounded a verse,
returning to the refrain, and the room filled again with a
boisterous, off-key chorus of, “Ohhhh, Boston, you’re my home!”

Boston wasn’t that woman’s home, Gus guessed
as she punched the blender button and watched the icy pink froth of
two margaritas spin inside it. But she was pretty, all that
golden-blond hair and that cute little nose. If Solomon couldn’t
see that for himself, he was blind.

He and the woman both leaned in, their
foreheads practically touching above the table. Gus supposed a
couple would have to move their heads close together if they wanted
to talk. The already high noise level in the tavern always rose
another fifty or so decibels when “Dirty Water” played.

She pulled her attention from Solomon and
his companion to dip two margarita glasses in salt. She filled them
with the concoction from the blender just as Tricia loped over to
the bar, her tray empty. Gus balanced the margaritas on the tray,
as well as three icy bottles of Pete’s Wicked Ale she’d uncapped,
and three chilled glasses. “Make sure you stop by table
twenty-four,” Gus advised her. “A couple just grabbed it.”

“Worst table in the room,” Tricia muttered
with a sigh. “People who sit too close to the restroom always wind
up leaving lousy tips.”

“Deal with it,” Gus said, smiling to soften
the words. Everyone on the wait staff got burned by tips sometimes,
and it had nothing to do with which tables they were serving, and
everything to do with the people seated at those tables.

“Dirty Water” ended, but most of the dancers
remained standing on the scuffed plank floor at the center of the
room, waiting to hear what the next song would be before they
returned to their seats. Elvis. “Blue Suede Shoes.” No one would
sing along with that song, but most of the people on the dance
floor resumed dancing. It was a happy, boisterous crowd. Tricia
would do fine in the tips department tonight.

Gus and Manny had their own choreography
behind the bar. They filled clean glasses, hooked dirty glasses
onto the dishwasher trays, filled orders, printed out tabs. Manny
apparently didn’t think “Blue Suede Shoes” was worth dancing to,
but he moved fluidly, shooting Gus a grin whenever they sidled past
each other in the aisle between the bar and the back wall, which
was stacked with bottles of whisky, rum, vodka, bourbon, assorted
liqueurs, and all the red wines that didn’t require chilling.

She tuned out the din of voices and the
rumble of Elvis’s voice as she worked. She’d learned how to mix
drinks at her husband’s side. She’d been a kid with a freshly
minted college degree and no job prospects, and she’d moved back
home to Brogan’s Point and wandered from joint to joint, hoping to
land a waitressing job until she figured out what she wanted to be
when she grew up. Tom Naukonen, the owner of the Faulk Street
Tavern, had hired her. She already knew how to wait tables—she’d
worked at a local pizza place while attending college—and he’d
taught her how to mix drinks, how to manage a bar, how to run a
business. Then he’d married her and produced a couple of sons with
her. Then he’d died. But sometimes she felt his hands on hers,
urging her to go a little heavier on the vodka, a little lighter on
the vermouth. He was still here, his spirit hovering above the bar,
floating around the tables, hanging out near the jukebox. He
would’ve been singing along with everyone else when “Dirty Water”
played. He probably would have been singing along with Elvis,
too.

Tricia jogged back to the bar just as “Blue
Suede Shoes” ended. “A Sam and a Pinot Grigio,” she said, angling
her head toward Solomon and his lady friend. “Not exactly big
drinkers. They’re gonna stiff me.”

Gus only chuckled. Tricia would pocket a
huge tip from them. Eleven dollars’ worth of drinks, and they’d
probably hand over fifteen bucks and tell Tricia to keep the
change. Gus filled the order, placed the drinks on the tray and
glanced at table twenty four, where the lawyer and the woman were
still talking intently, seemingly oblivious to all the dancing and
carousing.

Frank Olveida’s third song burst through the
woven speakers of the jukebox. “Heat Wave.” Another song that had
at least a third of the tavern’s patrons cheering and launching
into a dance.

Gus’s gaze cut straight across the room to
the tiny table near the bathroom hall. Solomon and his companion
both seemed stunned. The woman’s eyes grew round. Solomon’s sharp
jaw jutted at an angle as he tilted his head and frowned. Gus
continued to watch them as Tricia circled the dance floor to
deliver their drinks.

And then Gus laughed again. This was their
song, she remembered. The last time they’d been here together,
“Heat Wave” had played. Gus hadn’t realized it then, but she
realized it now: that song had cast a spell on them.

If Ed were here, he’d roll his eyes if she
mentioned her suspicion that Solomon and the woman had been
bewitched by the song. When it came to the jukebox’s alleged magic,
Gus’s boyfriend was a total skeptic.

But Tom, long gone but
never
really
gone,
would have laughed right along with her. “That thing’s been
enchanting people since before I bought this place,” he’d say.
“Probably since before I was born. Two more souls caught up in it,
for better or worse.”

Judging from their
bewildered expressions, Gus wasn’t sure if the spell “Heat Wave”
had laid on Solomon and the woman qualified as
for better
or
for worse.
But they were definitely
caught up in it, the song like a heat wave crashing over them and
carrying them away.

“I can’t believe that song is playing
again,” Meredith groaned.

She’d been stressed out when she’d arrived
at Caleb’s office—and now, instead of decompressing with a glass of
wine, she appeared even more stressed out, thanks to the song
blasting from the jukebox. He tried to calm her down with a joke.
“I remember hearing as a kid that earwigs would enter your head
through your ear and eat their way through your brain. I’m
wondering if ear-worms work the same way.”

She was too busy biting her lip to
smile.

His own smile was forced. What was that crap
Annie had told him, about the jukebox being magic? He didn’t
believe her. He didn’t believe the jukebox had any power over him.
He’d just heard an old Elvis Presley song emerge from the machine
without feeling anything other than bemusement that screaming
teenagers used to go apeshit over a guy with sneering lips and
puffy hair who sang about a pair of shoes.

It was only “Heat Wave” that had an effect
on him. Probably because the weather had been so freaking hot the
past few days.

Screw magic. Screw the song. “Come on,” he
said, tapping the neck of his beer bottle gently against Meredith’s
wine goblet. “Have a drink and let’s brainstorm.”

She obediently took a sip of wine. Caleb got
the impression that she wasn’t always so compliant. But she seemed
dazed, as troubled now as when she’d come to his office. Lowering
her glass, she sighed. “You brainstorm. My brain’s gone missing in
action.”

He tried to come up with
another joke. If he could make her laugh, maybe she’d find her
brain again. But he couldn’t think of anything witty or clever to
say. His brain had gone AWOL, too.
My
head's in a haze,
he thought as the singers
belted out those very lyrics.

He lifted his beer bottle, tipped it back
against his lips, and took a long drink. The bubbles stung his
throat; the flavors—a mix of sour and bitter—soothed the sting.
This room wasn’t hot. His drink wasn’t hot. Yet he felt inundated
by a heat wave.

Burning with desire.

Damn. He wanted Meredith. He wanted her in
his arms, naked. He wanted her breasts not flashing in a cell-phone
video but filling his hands, swelling against his lips. He wanted
her bottomless as well as topless, her long legs wrapped around
him, his dick buried inside her. He wanted her more than he could
ever recall wanting a woman before.

It made no sense. Sure, she was beautiful.
But not overly sexy. Not flirtatious. There was nothing come-hither
about her. Her brief semi-naked streak across the beach
notwithstanding, she seemed kind of prim. She was the sort of woman
who would untie her bikini top for no other reason than to avoid a
tan line when she wore a bridesmaid’s dress.

But he wanted her. The table separating them
was small enough that he could reach across it and hug her if he
dared, which he didn’t. Small enough that he could lift her out of
her chair and pull her into his lap, and then he could nuzzle her
graceful throat and plunge his fingers into the depths of her lush
blond hair. He could kiss her, stroke her, tongue her, take her…and
acknowledge, when it was over, that she’d been the one who’d taken
him. Did she have any idea of the power she had over him?

Which was crazy. She was
a
client
. A client
who’d never even batted her eyes at him, unless you counted her
little crying jag in his office.

He took another swig of beer to clear his
mind and cool him off. “The way I see it,” he said, relieved that
his voice emerged steady and serious, all business, “you’ve got
three options. Option one is to ignore the video and assume it’ll
be forgotten in a day or two, when everyone will be going nuts over
some new video of a cat playing Beethoven on the piano.”

She rolled her eyes and made
a delicate snorting sound through her nostrils. He realized he
could hear this because the “Heat Wave” song had finally
ended—
thank you, God!
—and the dancers had returned to their tables.

“Option two is, you go to your superiors at
the high school and address the issue. Tell them you’re a fine,
upstanding citizen and a top-notch teacher, and you don’t want this
stupid video to leave a blemish on your record.”

This suggestion didn’t prompt an eye roll or
a snort. He thought option one made more sense, but Meredith was
apparently the kind of woman who liked to confront potential
disasters head-on.

She rotated the stem of her wine glass
between her thumb and index finger. Once again, he noticed her
nails, polished a pale, glossy hue that reminded him of opals. How
would those nails feel digging into his back when she came?

Bad thought. He took another deep, cooling
slug of beer.

“What’s option three?” she asked after a
minute.

He lowered the bottle. “Let
me say up front that I’m not crazy about this option. But you could
view the video and see if you recognize anyone in it—besides
yourself, of course.. If there were other students on the beach
that day, they might have recognized the asshole—forgive me, the
perpetrator
—
who
dumped the ice on you.”

She sat up straighter, her blue eyes
widening. As he’d feared, she clearly liked this option best. “What
could I do if I figured out who the student was?”

“Have him charged with assault? Or
harassment? Or report him to the school’s disciplinary board, or
however they handle kids who misbehave. But I wouldn’t recommend
option three,” he added, wincing inwardly at her eager glow.

“Why not? This
perpetrator
—” she adopted
his word, even though they both knew
asshole
was closer to the truth
“—victimized me.”

“You were sunning yourself topless.”

“On my stomach,” she reminded him.

“Yes, but if you accuse him of assaulting
you, he’s going to hire a lawyer and that lawyer is going to turn
the accusation back onto you. Trust me on this. If I were his
lawyer, that’s exactly what I’d do.”