Tyler O’Neill’s Redemption (8 page)

“My pleasure,” Mayor Bourdage said. “Now I’m going to go get the paperwork underway for that new squad car so you can finally stop badgering me.”

“Well, if this is how you reward bad behavior I’m going to get the wrong idea.”

They both laughed, the good will between them something she could practically taste. A sweetness that barely covered the bitter taste of his distrust over Miguel. Mayor Bourdage had brought it up again at the beginning of the meeting.

Hard to believe, but taking Miguel back to Tyler had been the right thing to do.

She turned toward the door and stopped at the sight of her father, Jasper Tremblant, standing at the night shift desk, talking to Owens.

“Dad!”

“Juliette,” her dad cried. His smile was wide, but his dark eyes gave him away. They bounced between her and the mayor, sizing things up, always watching. Measuring every relationship, every moment, convinced all the time that there was something else going on under the surface, something deceitful. Something rotten.

Thirty years as a cop does that to a man, I suppose,
Juliette thought.

The mayor made his departure, leaving her mostly alone with her father.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, leaning in and kissing his smooth dark cheek.

“A father can’t take his daughter to lunch?” he asked and Juliette glanced down at her watch—a bit early for lunch. Now she was the one wondering what was going on under the surface.

“Are you checking up on me?” she asked, trying to make it a joke, when it was anything but. Especially with Owens looking on.

“Always, my dear, always.” He, too, tried to make it a joke, but she wasn’t laughing. “Now, how about a tuna melt from Carver’s?”

“Sounds great,” she said, through her teeth. “Just give me a second.” She pointed to Owens, whose smile faded. “In my office. Now.”

“I haven’t done anything—”

She slammed her desk drawer shut, the rattle and bang silencing him. “You’ve been skirting insubordination since I was hired and you think your years on the force are going to keep you safe.” she shook her head and stood up, leaning over the desk. “But they won’t.”

“You can’t fire—”

“Out of respect for your wife who deserves better than you, no, I won’t fire you.” Her father would be screaming his head off right now, but Nell Owens was on dialysis and they counted on the force’s insurance. “But this is going to be the second letter of discipline in your file and you’re out of rotation for three weeks.”

“What?”

“You’ll be on dispatch.”

Owens bit down hard on his lip, his cheeks red, nearly purple.

“Something else you wanted to say?” she asked, blinking at him.

He shook his head and left, and when the door slammed shut behind him she sank down in her chair. Benching Owens was the right thing to do, and she felt pretty good doing it. Damn good, if she was honest. But Owens was walking out of here with a grudge, and stupid men with grudges did stupid things.

How,
she wondered,
is this going to bite me in the ass?

There was a knock on her door and her dad poked his head in. His tight salt-and-pepper curls were the only real indication of his age, but under that perfect mocha skin she’d inherited and that thin, athletic body was a weak heart. A heart that doctors had warned him couldn’t hold up to the stress of police work.

Doctors told Dad to quit. To take up golf. Yoga.

“Everything okay?” he asked, his eyes sincere for the moment.

“Owens is forgetting the basic rules regarding chain of command,” she said.

“Can’t have that.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t.” She waited with a half a breath for him to tell her how to do her job. How she should have put him out on the street.

“You know, honey, we do things differently, but you run a tight ship here. I’d hate to see that jeopardized.”

The compliment sent all of her warning flags waving.

Dad was not one for compliments.

And then, like a lightning bolt, she realized why Dad was really here—he must have heard Tyler was in town. He was checking up on her, making sure the past didn’t go repeating itself.

“Why are you here, Dad?” she asked. “Really?”

“Lunch with my baby isn’t enough?”

“Sure,” she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “If I believed that was the only thing that brought you down here today.”

Jasper turned and shut the door. “I heard Tyler O’Neill was back in town.”

“Is that so?” She wasn’t exactly sure where this anger came from, but it was here and it was growing.

“I know you know,” he said. “And I just wanted—” Dad shrugged gracefully “—to make sure everything was as it should be.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re a good chief. But that boy is bad news. I don’t trust you when he’s around.”

She chewed on her lips, wishing she could argue, but frankly it was the truth. Her truth. Her secret shameful reality. Tyler O’Neill had her number.

“What are you suggesting I do?” she asked.

“Make sure he doesn’t plan on staying too long.”

“You want me to run him out? Gather a posse and drive him out of town?”

Jasper stared at his daughter, the weight of his gaze and his expectations and love nearly crushing her. “You never did see clearly when it came to that boy.”

“I see just fine, Dad,” she said. “He’s in town checking on The Manor and will probably be gone by the end of next week.”

Again, that casual shrug that managed to say so much and so little at the same time. That shrug had thrown her off balance her entire life, had made her feel unsteady even as a kid. “Then everything is fine.”

“Just fine,” she agreed, still angry.

“Then let’s go get that tuna melt,” Jasper said, his smile wide, his eyes warm. But it was too late. The chill of her father’s love had seeped into her bones.

He heard his dad clomping up the stairs.

“The gems aren’t down there, Dad,” Tyler said before he could start complaining that Tyler was giving up.

“I think you’re right,” Richard said as he stepped up from the basement stairs into the hallway outside the kitchen. Spiderwebs dusted his hair. “But we haven’t checked the attic. Or Margot’s room—”

“You’re not going in Margot’s room,” Tyler insisted, the very idea giving him the creeps. He could only humor his father so far.

Richard rolled his eyes and pulled open the fridge. “What we need is to recruit that Miguel kid—”

“Not an option.”

“Come on, it’s been three days and he’s barely managed to tear down half the porch. He’d be better put to use inside the house.”

Tyler leaned over the door of the fridge, making eye contact with his dad. “Stay away from him, Dad.”

“Oh, I’m a bad influence? And you’re what…Mother Teresa? What would be worse, teaching the kid poker or having him look for the gems?”

Tyler laughed. “They’re about equal,” he said. “Juliette would kill me either way.”

Richard stood up in the open V of the fridge door. “This Juliette…who the hell is she?”

Right. Like he was going to tell Dad.

He reached around the old man and grabbed a beer. “She’s the police chief—I think that’s enough reason not to get her angry.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Richard said, shutting the door and leaning up against the far counter with a beer of his own. A sly grin crawled across his face. “Who is she to you? I watch every day when she comes and picks up that kid, and you don’t act like she’s no one. She gets out of that car and you look like the only woman left in the world just stepped onto the grass. So, son, who is she to you?”

Tyler twisted the cap off the beer before taking a long slug of it, trying to swallow down the strange urge to tell Richard. To confide in someone, anyone, his father, for crying out loud—the pain he felt every damn day when Juliette showed up to pick up Miguel.

How when Tyler looked at her, the weight of the mistakes he’d made nearly crushed him. And worse, infinitely painfully worse, was the way possibilities hung in the air around her like fireflies in tall grass.

“We…ah…we had a thing. A long time ago.”

“Ah,” Dad said, as if he was a daytime talk show host. “A thing?”

Tyler pursed his lips. “It was nothing.”

“She what sent you to Las Vegas?”

He felt that stab of memory, the pain no less intense ten years down the road. He’d loved her and he’d left her and it had been like tearing apart his body.

“In a way,” he said. “But nothing’s there anymore.”

“Oh!” Richard said, laughing long and hard. “Oh, son, that’s a good one. Try selling it to some other sucker.”

“Didn’t you ever want something normal, Dad?” Tyler asked, knowing it would get him nowhere. “A home?”

“Home?” Richard said. “I tried that,” he said, and shuddered dramatically.

“Aren’t you ever tired of being alone?”

“I’m not alone,” Richard said, his grin wide and white and perfect, a man with no cares in the world. “I am never, ever alone, I’ve got friends—”

“Friends who implicate you in credit-card fraud,” he said. “Are they really your friends? Can you count on them? Do they know you?”

“No,” Richard said, the answer apparently needed no thought, no contemplation. “I have you for that. Just like you have me. We know each other because we’re the same. You know, maybe we
should
go back to Vegas. I knew having that boy around was going to cause trouble.”

Tyler shook his head. “This has nothing to do with Miguel. Trust me.”

Richard narrowed his eyes as if staring at Tyler from a long ways away. “This about that cop? The woman?”

“Maybe,” he answered. Maybe definitely.

“Women are trouble, Tyler,” Richard said, his voice ominous.

“Not all of them,” he said. He thought of Margot and Savannah. Of Juliette. Some women were gifts. Gifts that you didn’t recognize until it was too late.

“If we’re not going to search for gems, I’m going to take a shower.”

Tyler heard it all from a hundred miles away, lost in some dark and desolate place. Alone. Always alone. Thoughts of Juliette stirred the ghosts in his head.

And he knew, without a doubt, he didn’t want to become his father, casual and hurtful, without a place to call home.

Without someone to love him back.

Or maybe because of it.

It was hard to say.

“You want to get off your butt and help me, Tyler?”

Tyler leisurely turned the page of the newspaper, stretched out his legs then settled a little deeper into his lawn chair. “Not particularly. You tried to steal my car. I’m holding a grudge.”

Miguel pushed the skinny edge of the crowbar under the last of the rotten floorboards and leaned into it, pushing as hard as he could until finally the wood splintered, cracked and flew off into the lawn.

Barely missing Tyler’s head.

“Hey!” Tyler yelled, wiping the sun tea he’d spilled down his shirt. “Watch it. I told you, Miguel, you’ve got to be more careful.”

“And I told you I don’t know how to do this crap!” Miguel yelled back. “Show me what to do!”

Tyler laughed, rubbing salt in poor Miguel’s wounds. Honestly, the kid was so much fun to get a rise out of. “What makes you think I know how to do this shit?”

Miguel swore at him in Spanish but Tyler only swore back.

The boy couldn’t hold a silent grudge, and within minutes he was yammering on again.

“So,” Miguel said, kicking aside some pieces of porch. “When you had those two aces you had no idea that the Japanese dude had a straight.”

Tyler turned the page, hiding his grin behind the sports section. Every day Miguel had some kind of question for him about that World Series of Poker game. The kid must go home and study the clip on YouTube.

“You ask your teachers as many questions as you do me?”

Miguel shot him a give-me-a-break look while wedging the crowbar under another board.

“I’m just saying, if you cared about your books as much as you care about gambling, you could go to college, stop busting up porches for a living.”

“This is hardly a living,” Miguel said. “You’re barely paying me minimum wage.”

Tyler swatted at a small yellow butterfly that hovered around him. Nature, so…annoying.

“Did you go to college?” Miguel asked.

“No,” Tyler lied—well, partly lied. He didn’t graduate college.

“So, you’re doing all right?”

“There’s more to life than money, Miguel,” Tyler said quietly, folding the paper carefully along its crease. Not that he expected Miguel to believe that; Tyler certainly hadn’t believed it when he was Miguel’s age. It takes a whole lot of money to make you realize what you can and can’t buy with it.

“Says the guy driving a Porsche,” Miguel scoffed.

Tyler turned his head to look at Sweet Suzy sitting under the late-afternoon sun. She was a pretty wicked car. But this car, his whole damn lifestyle, came at a price. And these days he felt that price keenly, a bitter knife in his gut.

“I bought that car with my first big win,” he said.

“Yeah?” Miguel ran his eyes across Suzy’s curves like a sixteen-year-old should, like the Porsche was a woman full grown.

“I’ve had to sell her twice,” he said. “When I lost it all. I sold her so I could have food to eat. A roof over my head.”

“But you’ve got her now,” Miguel said.

“Yep, each time I bought her back for about double what I sold her for. Suzy’s cost me a fortune.”

“Why didn’t you just buy a new car?” Miguel asked.

“She’s a reminder.”

“Of what?” Miguel said.

“That being a gambler is no way to live.”

“I don’t get it,” Miguel said. “You’re rich as hell.”

“Right now,” Tyler said. “I could go back to Vegas and lose it all tomorrow. And probably will.”

“But you’re good.”

“That’s not a guarantee of anything,” he said, the truth undeniable. “I’ve beaten the best players in the world and I’ve been beaten by grandmas playing with their pensions. Being good doesn’t mean anything against luck.”

“I still don’t understand what’s wrong with teaching me a few tricks. It’s not like I’m asking you to teach me how to cheat.”

“That’s good, because I don’t cheat.”

Miguel kept working the porch, hopefully thinking about his career options and not how he could steal Suzy again, and Tyler went back to his paper.

The sun had dipped down below the chimney and that’s when Juliette usually came around to pick up Miguel.

He braced himself for the other part of his day.

The Juliette part.

Equal measures torture and bliss.

Her voice, both soft and rough, like rubbing up against velvet the wrong way, had the ability to make Miguel jerk upright, all but saluting.

Made parts of Tyler want to salute, too.

And yesterday she’d worn a green jacket with khaki pants that made her legs look a mile long. The color of the jacket made her eyes more green than brown and they practically glowed against the gorgeous mocha of her skin.

Today he was hoping for a skirt. A short one.

No matter what, she was beautiful and real and so full of hate toward him it made his skin hurt just being close to her.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s sharp voice said from behind him and Tyler turned in his chair, shielding his eyes from the remaining daylight.

A woman stood there, a black shadow against the low blaze of the setting sun, but he could tell already that she was the kind of woman that made his balls curl up into his belly for warmth.

“Can I help you?” he asked, standing up to face the older woman, hoping, truly hoping, this had nothing to do with his father.

“My name is Nora Sullivan. I’m from the Beauregard Parish Office of Community Services.” She pulled a card from the front pocket of a charcoal pantsuit that made her look like a big gray box and handed it to Tyler. “I’m looking for Miguel Pastor.”

Tyler took the card, his neck tingling, a terrible foreboding that what was happening here was bad. Very bad.

All he could do was stall, so he took his time reading the card and then shoved it in his back pocket.

“I’m Tyler O’Neill,” he said, getting his hand crushed in the woman’s vice grip. “And Miguel is—” Tyler turned back around but the porch was empty, the crowbar lying in the grass.

Miguel was gone.

“Not here at the moment,” he said quickly, panic beating its wings against his chest.

“Our office got a call that he is usually here after school in some kind of community service capacity. And that there was some concern about the boy’s recent experience with local police.”

There were a few times in Tyler’s life when he was literally struck dumb. This was one of those times.

“You really need to talk to Police Chief Tremblant about that,” he said lamely.

“So I’m gathering,” she said. She checked her watch and pulled out another card. “I’ve left her a message at the station, but I’m on my way over to Calcasieu DOC. If you see her, can you have her call me?”

“You bet,” he said, perhaps a bit too eagerly. Nora Sullivan watched him with cagey dark eyes. Eyes that had seen every trick in the book.

Tyler felt about thirteen again.

Nora nodded and left, crossing the wide front lawn to her sedan parked at the curb. He waited until she was gone before running through the house, yelling Miguel’s name.

No sign of the kid. Not even Richard had seen him.

He grabbed his phone and dialed Juliette’s number with fingers that shook.