Wild Thing (The Magic Jukebox Book 3) (6 page)

But
he was gone. Probably halfway back to Florida by now, or wherever he was headed
in his moving-around life.

She
was tough. She would survive. One glass of wine had fortified her, and she had
a few bottles in her apartment.

She
let herself in, flicked on the lamp, and moved directly to the refrigerator,
where a bottle of Pinot Noir sat on the door shelf. Her computer desk, holding
her lap top and a telephone, stood near the corner of her apartment that passed
for a kitchen, and she hesitated. She hadn’t stopped back at her office after
the Rose Cottage debacle earlier that evening. She’d hiked directly to the
Faulk Street Tavern, far too eager to see Ty. She really ought to check her
messages before she got hammered.

After
tossing her purse onto the sofa, she lifted the handset and punched in the
number to access her voice mail. There was a message from Claudia, who’d had
front-desk duty that day. A guest had complained about the no-skid mat in his
shower. It was too bumpy. Did they have any smoother no-skid pads?

Monica
laughed wryly. A smoother pad would defeat the purpose, she thought—too smooth,
and your feet would skid on it.

Housekeeping
left a message about one of the driers being on the fritz. Someone in the
kitchen called to let her know a water pressure problem had resolved itself.
The pool service phoned to set up a maintenance schedule for the summer. And
then a final message: “Hello, Monica? It’s Ty. I didn’t have your phone number,
so I called the hotel to reach you. I hope that’s okay. I’m not going to make
it tonight. I’m kind of…well, things are screwed up.” A pause, and he
continued: “I need a lawyer, Monica. A criminal lawyer. If you can find one for
me, I’d be grateful. I’m at the police station now. Thanks. I’m sorry.
Everything’s really fucked up.”

He
needed a criminal lawyer?
Everything’s really fucked up?

No
kidding.

Her
heart thudded against her ribs. Her skull seemed to tighten around her brain,
making her head throb. So much for going wild, she thought. So much for making
crazy love with a total stranger. He was at the police station. He needed a
criminal lawyer.

Who
the hell was he? What had she gotten herself into?

As
a courtesy, Nolan, the tall, steely-haired cop who’d brought Ty to the Brogan’s
Point police station, allowed him to remain in an interview room rather than
locking him in a cell.

Some
courtesy. Ty wanted to change into clean clothes and check his email. Then he
wanted rent a two-stroke engine on two wheels, cruise around town, and fill his
lungs with fresh New England air. After that, he wanted to meet up with Monica,
take her somewhere nice, and feed her. And then screw her silly. He didn’t want
to sit on a hard plastic chair in a bare, square room, knowing a police
detective was spying on him through the one-way mirror attached to the wall. He
didn’t want to stare at that mirror and see his disheveled, unshaven face, his
hands folded on the Formica-topped table next to the remains of the ham
sandwich and the empty water bottle Nolan had brought him a while ago, a poor
substitute for the dinner he would have shared with Monica. His shirt was
wrinkled and his vision was bleary, shadowed by anger and worry.

He
and Nolan had chatted for several hours. According to Nolan, drugs were stashed
somewhere on the Freedom. Nolan didn’t specify what drugs, or how much, or
whose they were, although he insinuated that they were dangerous and illegal,
that they were in large enough quantity to make a nice profit when sold, and
that they belonged to Ty.

“I
don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ty insisted repeatedly. “A guy in Key
Biscayne hired me to sail his boat up to Brogan’s Point for him. He didn’t hire
me to transport drugs.”

“We
got a tip that a shipment would be coming up from Florida,” Nolan said, his
voice low and even. “A reliable enough tip to convince a judge to issue a
search warrant.”

“But
you didn’t find any drugs on the boat.” Ty couldn’t believe their search would
unearth anything illicit. He’d lived on that boat for a week, and he hadn’t
encountered any drugs on it, other than the bottle of over-the-counter
ibuprofen he’d tucked into his toiletries bag.

“Not
yet,” Nolan said. “We’re still looking.”

It
was during the search that Nolan had found Ty’s laptop and duffel bag. The cops
must have used a bolt cutter on the lock Ty had used to protect his belongings
when he’d stashed them yesterday. Nolan had assured Ty that his belongings were
safe. Was that a courtesy, too?

Ty
didn’t just want his stuff safe. He wanted his stuff within reach, or at least within
his line of sight. But it remained in the possession of the police department
for now. Perhaps some CSI analyst was right that very minute pawing through his
clothes, searching for traces of weed in the depths of his pockets, or scouring
his emails for hints that he was planning to make millions of dollars selling
oxy to school children in a quiet seaside town north of Boston.

“Tell
me more about the guy who hired you to sail the boat,” Nolan said.

Ty
eyed the digital recorder Nolan had set up on one end of the table. He was glad
for it. If the cop took a swing at him, he wanted that recorded. He didn’t want
his words mangled, either. He’d done nothing wrong, and he wanted the
digital-cam to record that. “His name is Wayne MacArthur. He’s a businessman in
Key Biscayne, as far as I know. He owns the Freedom. He keeps it docked at a
marina in Biscayne where I do a lot of work on boats. He told me he’s got a
summer place somewhere around here, and this year he couldn’t sail the boat up
the coast to his summer place, so he hired me to do it.”

“What
kind of work do you do on boats?”

“Carpentry.
These are pricy vessels. Ocean-going. They often have a lot of woodwork in
their living quarters. Sometimes I’ll be hired to spruce up a houseboat
someone’s living on. I work on buildings, too. Residential, mostly.” He
shrugged. “I guess MacArthur had seen me around at the marina, or maybe he
asked the Jeff about me—that’s the guy who manages the marina down there—or…I
don’t know. MacArthur approached me and asked if I’d do this. It sounded good
to me.”

“And
he paid you?”

“Yes.”

“How
much?”

Ty
recalled the lump of money Wayne MacArthur had wired into his PayPal account
barely twenty-four hours ago. Twenty grand. A generous sum for a week’s work,
but given that the gig had been 24/7 and had entailed risk, the payment hadn’t
seemed outrageously high. If Ty had been hired to run drugs, he would have
demanded a hell of a lot more money than twenty thou.

Not
that he would have ever agreed to do something like that, for any amount of
money. Drugs sucked. Drugs had killed his parents and nearly killed him.

“Twenty
thousand dollars,” he told Nolan. No point in lying. He had nothing to hide.

Nolan
seemed to think that amount was significant. Even though he was recording the interview,
he jotted a note on his pad. “So, this gentleman—Wayne MacArthur—paid you
twenty thousand dollars to cart drugs up to Brogan’s Point?”

“No.”
Ty tried to keep his exasperation out of his voice. “He paid me twenty thousand
dollars to sail his boat up to Brogan’s Point.”

“Mr.
Cronin, things will go a lot easier here if you cooperate with us.”

“I
am
cooperating. I’m telling you the truth. What more do you want?”

“Tell
me where the drugs are.”

“I
have no idea.”

It
went that way for hours. Nolan’s circular questioning, Ty’s honest answers.
Hours, and they’d gotten nowhere. The first time Ty asked to make a phone call,
Nolan told him he wasn’t under arrest and therefore didn’t have the right to
make a phone call. It made no sense to Ty that being arrested would afford him
more rights than merely being brought in for questioning, but he’d been doing
his damnedest to cooperate.

As
the minutes ticked by, however, he realized there was a good chance he wouldn’t
be able to meet Monica at the Faulk Street Tavern as planned. He also realized
that even though he didn’t know a freaking thing about the drugs the police
seemed to believe were on the Freedom, he probably needed an attorney.

At
four-thirty, Nolan finally relented and allowed Ty to phone Monica. He didn’t
have her personal number, so he used his phone to Google the Ocean Bluff Inn
and called her through its switchboard, hoping that receiving a message from
him on her office phone wouldn’t cause her too many problems.

Two
hours later, she hadn’t called him back, let alone sent a lawyer for him.

He’d
probably scared her off. She was a good girl, after all, neat and quiet,
professionally oriented, employed in the family business. Not the sort of woman
who’d want anything to do with a guy getting worked over by the local
constabulary, thanks to a rumor some scum informant had started that the
Freedom contained a drug shipment.

Allowed
another phone call, he supposed he could call Jeff down in Key Biscayne. The
marina manager was the person who’d introduced Ty to Wayne MacArthur. But what
could Jeff do for him? He was fifteen hundred miles away. Ty could also tell
the police he wanted a lawyer, but like the phone call, he might not be legally
entitled to one since he hadn’t been charged with anything. And if they
provided him with a lawyer, it would likely be some underpaid, overworked
public defender. If Ty was under suspicion for bringing drugs into Brogan’s
Point, he’d need someone good.

He
could afford someone good. His bank account was twenty thousand dollars richer
than it was a day ago. And he could tap into the trust fund if he had to.

But
as the day trickled away like grains of sand in an hour glass, Ty didn’t make
any more phone calls. Either he’d get charged—in which case, he’d accept a
public defender long enough to get arraigned and bailed out, and then he’d find
his own good lawyer—or he wouldn’t get charged, in which case, he’d walk out of
this frickin’ room in this frickin’ police station and buy a plane ticket back
to Florida. He no longer had any urge to explore New England on a motorbike.

He
did
have an urge to see Monica again, to kiss her one more time, touch
her, watch her eyes mist over with passion, and hear her quiet moans as he made
her come. But that wasn’t going to happen. She clearly wanted nothing to do
with someone who’d somehow, inexplicably, gotten himself into the kind of
trouble Ty was in right now.

Nolan
swung open the interrogation room door. Ty didn’t read triumph in his
expression. Apparently, the cops crawling around the Freedom with their search
warrant still hadn’t found the drugs Ty had supposedly stashed on the boat.
With a sigh, Nolan said, “Your lawyer has arrived.”

His
lawyer? He hadn’t requested a public defender.

That
meant Monica must have gotten his message. She’d sent a lawyer. Maybe he
would
see her again. He had to see her, if only to thank her.

The
man following Nolan had a lawyer look about him, even if his dark gray suit
jacket was rumpled and he’d lost his necktie somewhere along the way. The lawyer’s
hair was long and floppy, his nose and chin sharp. Ty hoped his legal skills
resembled his nose and chin. He needed someone sharp fighting for him.

“Caleb
Solomon,” the lawyer said, extending his right hand for Ty to shake. His left
hand gripped a battered leather briefcase. “Monica Reinhart sent me.”

Hearing
her name eased Ty’s tension. So did the lawyer’s handshake, which was firm and
confident.

Solomon
shot a look at Nolan. “A few minutes alone with my client, please,” he said.
Nolan nodded and left the interrogation room, closing the door behind him.

Solomon
brushed aside the napkin and wrapper from Ty’s sandwich, checked to make sure
the video recorder was turned off, dropped his briefcase onto the table, and
took a seat across the table from Ty. As he unbuckled his briefcase, he said,
“Fill me in. What are we dealing with?” His brusqueness was tempered by a
smile.

Ty
decided he liked the guy. Not that he had much choice in the matter. “How did
Monica happen to know a criminal lawyer?” he asked.

Solomon
laughed. “She didn’t. She called the attorney who handles the inn’s legal
affairs. He recommended me.” He pulled a legal pad and pen from the briefcase,
clicked the pen open, and said, “Okay. Tyler Cronin, right?” Without waiting
for Ty to confirm this, he wrote Ty’s name down. “Tell me your story.”

That
he didn’t first ask for payment made Ty like Solomon even more. Methodically,
with as much calmness as he could muster, he told the lawyer about MacArthur’s
having hired him to sail the Freedom up the coast, about how he’d docked it at
the North Cove Marina as instructed, how the police had gotten a search warrant
and boarded the vessel while he was away, and informed him they believed a
shipment of drugs was hidden on the boat. Ty knew nothing about any drugs. All
he’d done was what he’d been hired to do: deliver the boat to its slip in the
marina.

Solomon
took notes, occasionally nodding, occasionally pinning Ty with a hard,
clear-eyed stare. “Have you ever been in trouble with the law?” he asked. “I
haven’t had time to do any research on you. The police have, though, so I need
to know everything they know.”

“There’s
nothing to know,” Ty told him. “I mean, yeah, the local cops once caught me and
a couple of other kids drinking 3.2 beer when we were seventeen, but they just
sent us home.”

Another
nod. “Are you acquainted with any drug dealers? Anyone who might have set you
up?”

“Not
that I know of. If Wayne MacArthur is using his boat to run drugs up the coast,
he hasn’t mentioned that to me.”

Solomon
wrote “Wayne MacArthur” on his pad. “I’ll see what I can find out about him. Is
it possible he stashed heroin on the boat without your knowing it?”

“Heroin?”

“According
to our friend, Detective Nolan, that’s what the cops are looking for.”

Ty
ruminated. “I guess it’s possible there could be something hidden on the boat.
There could be some secret compartment I don’t know about. It’s not like I
pried off the paneling to see if anything was behind it.” He closed his eyes
for a moment, recalling various stretches during the trip—the storm off the
Carolina coast, the difficulty catching wind in a stretch of calms east of
Delaware, the smooth final leg of the journey. Nothing unusual about any of it.
“I didn’t notice any imbalance or unusual weight in the boat.”

“Let’s
say there was twenty pounds of heroin on the boat. Would you notice an extra
twenty pounds?”

Ty
shook his head. “Especially not on the ocean. A few hundred pounds I might
notice. Twenty or thirty, no.”

“Okay.
As I understand it, the police haven’t found anything yet, and they haven’t
filed charges against you. So the first thing we’re going to do is have them
release you.”

“They’ve
got my clothes and laptop,” Ty said.

“We’ll
get them to release those items, too.” Solomon stood and offered Ty another
smile. Ty wasn’t naïve enough to think his troubles were over, but that smile
boosted his mood.

Solomon
ushered Ty from the interrogation room. Just like that, as if Ty had always
been free to leave the dreary cubicle. Perhaps he had, but he’d been trying to
cooperate, hoping to win Nolan over. Getting up and walking out would have only
made him look guilty, or so he’d figured.