Wild Thing (The Magic Jukebox Book 3) (15 page)

Where
was he?

Monica
entered the Rose Cottage parlor and gazed around. The wall that had had a
gaping hole in it that morning was now intact, smooth, and painted. But the
room’s other three walls were a slightly darker hue, and a ladder, tools, and a
drop cloth cluttered the floor. The furniture huddled at one end of the room as
if the chairs, sofas and tables were conferring on a football play.

Ty
clearly wasn’t done with the repair. But he was gone.

He’d
said he would call her that afternoon, and like a lovesick teenager harboring a
crush on the cutest senior in the school, she’d checked her cell phone dozens
of times throughout the day. Maybe he’d left a message. Maybe he’d sent a text.
Maybe she’d turned her phone off by accident, and that was why it hadn’t rung.
But no, the phone was on and it was working—and she had no missed calls, no
messages. So, when she’d finally finished her other work, she’d abandoned her
office and strolled past the pool and across the lawn to the cottage.

Which
was empty. No plumbers. No workmen. No Ty.

Trying
to ignore the knot of anxiety in her gut, she exited the cottage and circled
around the main building to the guest lot. No motorcycle.

She
took a deep breath and willed her eyes not to fill with tears. If he’d left,
he’d left. He had never promised he would stay. He’d told her he was rootless
and restless, not the kind of man who settled down. He was a wild thing, after
all. She had never imagined that she could tame him. She’d never let herself
dream that far into the future.

Why
wouldn’t he leave? It wasn’t as if he’d been arrested. No bail money would be
sacrificed if he took off. And good-byes could be so awkward, so painful. Why
not just go while the going was good, turn in his rented motorcycle, cab down
to Boston and fly back to Florida, where he could live until he decided it was
time to move on again, to find some other town, some other woman, some other
ocean to sail.

It
would have been nice of him to finish his work on Rose Cottage, though.

Her
phone abruptly trilled inside her purse, and like the lovesick schoolgirl she’d
feared turning into, she felt the dark weight of hurt and anger lift off her
heart and the sky open up, as bright as heaven.
He’s calling! He’s calling!
Pulling the phone out, she checked the caller-ID on the screen and saw his
name.
It’s him! He called!

She
took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Aware of how devastated she’d been
when she’d thought he was gone, she cautioned herself not to be too thrilled
that he
wasn’t
gone. Sooner or later, he
would
be gone. She
couldn’t let herself want him so much.

But
for now, just for this evening, she could let herself experience a moment of
giddy joy. She pressed the connect button and lifted the phone to her ear.
“Ty?”

“This
is his attorney,” came an unfamiliar male voice. “Caleb Solomon. He asked me to
call you.”

So
much for giddy joy. The weight returned, heavy with foreboding. “What happened?
Is he all right?”

“Things
have gotten complicated,” the lawyer said. “Drugs were found on the sailboat.”

“Oh.”
What did that mean? What did it imply? Had Ty smuggled the drugs to Brogan’s
Point, after all? Was he as guilty as the police seemed to think?

What
was the opposite of giddy joy? Whatever it was, that was what she was feeling now.

“He’s
being held at the police station for the time being, while the DA decides
whether to charge him.”

One
sliver of her brain took a step back and assessed the lawyer’s words. It seemed
bizarre that Monica Reinhart, a well-behaved, by-the-book woman should be
having a conversation about drugs and criminal charges with the attorney of a
man with whom she’d recently enjoyed torrid sex, a man with whom she was this
close to falling in love.

The
rest of her brain clamored with panic, curses, a crazed blend of fear and hope.
“So…he hasn’t been arrested?”

“Not
yet.”

“I’m
coming down to the police station,” she said. “I need to see Ty.”

The
lawyer said nothing for a minute, and then, “Okay. I’ll be here, too.”

He
hadn’t told her not to come. He hadn’t told her to give up, to accept that her
hot blond lover was heading to the big house, the pen, up the river—whatever
people called prison these days. What did she know about prison, anyway? Just
what she’d viewed in old movies.
The Shawshank Redemption. The Green Mile.
The Rock. Dead Man Walking.

The
infatuated-schoolgirl swooniness rose up inside her again. No matter that Ty
was in trouble. No matter that Ty
was
trouble. He would have told his
lawyer if he didn’t want to see Monica. The lawyer would have urged her not to
come—or he wouldn’t have even called her. But he’d called, and when she’d said
she would come to the police station, he’d said okay
.
She was going to
see Ty. Even if he was a criminal. Even if he was the most dangerous man she’d
ever known. Even if he could break her heart—because he had a hold on her heart
in a way Jimmy never had.

She
headed straight for her Subaru, cranked the engine and steered down the winding
driveway to Atlantic Avenue. She didn’t notice the ocean to her left, the waves
curling onto the shore as the tide came in. She didn’t notice the ocean’s
perfume, the scent of home. She didn’t notice the puffy clouds rolling across
the late-day blue of the sky, the steady stream of cars carrying workers home
from their jobs, the pedestrians ambling down the sidewalk along the sea wall
and savoring the view. She kept her eyes on the road ahead of her and her mind
on her destination: Ty. In trouble.

Brogan
Point’s police station was a squat brick building down the street from the
community center. The local police department had no need for anything huge or
state-of-the-art. Most crime in town was petty: shoplifting, vandalism,
underage drinking, the occasional scuffle. The closest the town had ever come
to a murder in her lifetime was when Nick Fiore was convicted of attempted
murder of his father. Nick had been a couple of years ahead of Monica in high
school, and she’d never believed he was capable of such a crime. But his father
had somehow gotten critically injured—the rumor in school was that Nick had
beaten up his father because his father had been beating up Nick’s mother—and
he’d been diverted into the juvenile justice system, and everyone had been
deeply shaken.

But
Nick was still in town—according to Monica’s mother, he was considering having
his wedding at the Ocean Bluff Inn—and one of his closest friends in town was
Ed Nolan, the police detective. Mr. Nolan was a fair man. Monica hoped he’d be
fair with Ty.

More
than that, she hoped Ty was innocent. She yearned to believed he was. But…she
didn’t really know
.

She
parked and entered the building. Behind a counter in the front room, a plump
middle-aged woman in a uniform held a hand up to halt Monica, as if the officer
was on a street corner directing traffic. “Can I help you?”

“I’m
here to see…” What was Ty’s attorney’s name? Monica had hired the guy for Ty.
She sifted through her memory until she recalled it. “Caleb Solomon. He’s a
lawyer—”

“Monica,
yes,” Caleb Solomon called out as he entered the room, his stride brisk and
determined. His suit was slightly wrinkled, his tie loosened, his jaw shadowed
by a day’s growth of beard. He sent the uniformed officer behind the counter a
mildly flirtatious smile that caused her to grin girlishly, and then joined
Monica. “Let’s talk,” he said, taking her elbow and ushering her to a scratched
wooden bench that stood against a pale green cinderblock wall. Once they were
seated, he leaned toward her, speaking in a low voice. “Tyler came up with a
good guess about where the drugs might have been hidden on the boat. A very
good guess, as it turned out. He, Detective Nolan and I boarded the boat and
found the drugs.”

“Then
he did a good thing. Why is he being arrested?”

“He
hasn’t been arrested. The police have the right to hold him without charging
him for seventy-two hours. They’re expediting a test on what Tyler found to
make sure it really is heroin. Then I think they’re planning to plant a decoy
package—something that looks just like the drugs—in the same place on the boat.
The boat’s owner is flying into Boston Saturday—that’s tomorrow, I guess,” he
added, checking the date on his watch. “The police will monitor him and see if
he goes to the boat to retrieve the drugs. Then they’ll arrest him.”

“And
they’ll let Ty go?” she asked hopefully.

“Maybe.
Maybe not. That the boat owner would retrieve the drugs doesn’t necessarily
exonerate Tyler.”

“But
he showed the police where the drugs were,” she said.

“Which
could indicate that he knew all along where they were. It doesn’t clear him,
Monica.”

She
sighed. Tears stung her eyes and she batted them to keep from sobbing. “What
would clear him?”

“The
boat’s owner could. A Mr. Wayne MacArthur. He has a house here in Brogan’s
Point. Are you familiar with him?”

The
name meant nothing to her. She shook her head. “If he has a house here, he
doesn’t stay at the inn. Is there any chance he’d clear Ty?”

Caleb
Solomon shrugged. “We could hope he’d blurt out that Tyler had no knowledge of
the drugs. But that’s not likely. Drug dealers are rarely that honest and
accommodating.”

“What
if Ty could get him to say something? Could the police put a wire on him?” If
what she knew about prisons came from old movies, what she knew about police
investigations came from TV cop shows. On those programs, the police often
wired someone and then sat in a van, eavesdropping on the chatter until someone
said something incriminating.

The
lawyer smiled. “Ty suggested that himself. The police said no. They want to keep
him under lock and key for now.”

“Then
I’ll wear a wire,” Monica said.

“What?”

“I’ll
do it. They can wire me. I can…” She thought for a moment. “I can pretend I
want to buy some of his drugs. What kind of drug are we talking about?”

“We
believe its heroin. The crime lab will ascertain that. But you wearing a wire?”
He considered the idea, winced, and shook his head.

“Why
not? I could talk to the guy. I could get him to admit Ty knew nothing about
the drugs.” If she could ride on the back of a motorcycle, if she could go down
on Ty on a beach in a rain storm, she could wear a wire.

“I
don’t know. It could be dangerous,” the lawyer warned.

Monica
smiled. “I can do it,” she said.

***

Ten
minutes later, Monica, Caleb Solomon, Detective Nolan and Ty sat around a table
in a gray, windowless interrogation room. “No,” Ty said emphatically.

“I’m
telling you, I can do this,” she insisted, trying hard to ignore her ghostly
reflection in the mirror attached to the wall across from her. “I know how to
act. I starred in a play in high school.”

They
all stared at her.

“
You
Can’t Take It With You.
I played Alice.”

“I
know that play,” the lawyer said. “Isn’t Alice the sweet young daughter? The
only sane person in the family?”

Monica
conceded that her portrayal of the only character in the play who wasn’t wild
had been a bit of type-casting on the director’s part. But she’d proven in that
production that she could act. And she’d acted patient with and tolerant of
Jimmy all those years when he’d treated her like reliable old car, able to get
him where he was going and easy to forget once it was parked in the garage.

Maybe
all the years she’d been such a good girl were an act, too. Maybe she’d always
been a little wild at heart, and she’d been performing a role all along. Closing
her eyes, she heard the crashing guitar chords that opened the song she’d heard
on the Faulk Street Tavern’s juke box barely a week ago, chords and a gravelly,
growly voice.
Wild Thing.

“Let
me do this. I’ll tell the guy I want to buy some drugs from him.”

“Does
he sell directly?” Caleb Solomon asked. “It seems to me he hires other people
to handle the grunt work. Sometimes in ignorance.” He gave Ty a meaningful
look.

“He
had a local guy selling for him,” Detective Nolan said. “A kid named Danny
Watson. He worked on one of the trawlers out of port, and he sold drugs on the
side. He’s under arrest, though. He was the one who tipped us off about
MacArthur’s drugs. Only he said the guy’s name was Smith.” He, too, sent Ty a
meaningful look. “Unless
you’re
Smith.”

Ty
issued a long-suffering sigh. “I’m not Smith. I don’t know who the hell Smith
is. I don’t know who the hell Danny Watson is, either.” He turned to Monica,
addressing her as if no one else was in the room. “I don’t want you to do
this,” he said. “I’ve already told the cops I’ll wear a wire and talk to him.
There’s no reason for you to get involved.”