Wild Thing (The Magic Jukebox Book 3) Read online

  Why did Monica’s apartment feel like home to him? Why did he want to stay there?

  Why did the thought of clearing his name, turning in his rented motorcycle, and flying back to Miami depress him?

  He turned and reentered the cottage. The plaster already felt dry. He planted a can of paint on the drop cloth, used a screwdriver to pry off the lid, and reached for a stirrer. When his cell phone rang, he pressed the lid back onto the can, straightened and answered. “Nolan wants to meet with us at the marina,” Solomon said.

  ***

  Ed had told Caleb Solomon to have his client down at the North Cove Marina at four o’clock. The boat had been sitting there since the day Cronin had sailed it into the slip, impounded but not exactly under lock and key. The Brogan’s Point police force didn’t have the manpower to keep a guard stationed beside the boat twenty-four-seven.

  If Cronin knew where the drugs were on it, he could have slipped past the police tape under cover of darkness, sneaked on board, removed the stash and tossed it into the sea. Losing a few hundred thousand dollars of smack would hurt, but not as much as a conviction.

  If Cronin was just the courier, of course, he wouldn’t be losing a few hundred grand. He’d already gotten his payoff from MacArthur. So dumping the smack would have been the smart move—if he wanted to avoid prosecution.

  But he’d sworn he was innocent. And volunteering to help the police wasn’t the sort of thing a guilty guy would do. At least not unless he was truly Machiavellian. Cronin seemed smart, but he didn’t strike Ed as a shrewd schemer.

  In any case, it was only three-thirty, which gave Ed a half-hour to kill before he met Cronin and his lawyer. Well, twenty minutes. It would take him some time to get from the Faulk Street Tavern to the marina.

  The tavern was nearly empty, as it usually was at this time of day. At night, you had to elbow your way through a mob to reach the bar. But mid-afternoon, the only patron in the room was Carl Stanton, slumped on a stool at the far end of the bar, staring blankly into a glass of something alcoholic. Carl started his drinking early and ended it early—because Gus made sure to end it for him.

  Ed once asked Gus why she even bothered to open as early as she did. She said she usually made a few bucks around noon—some folks were determined to drink their lunches—and she liked the quiet afternoons. They gave her and Manny a chance to check inventory, set up, prep the snacks she served in the evenings, and wait the occasional table. When Gus had begun her career at the Faulk Street Tavern, she’d been a waitress. Within a few weeks, the owner of the place had become smitten with her; within a few months, they’d been married. She’d learned the business when she wasn’t raising her sons, and when her husband died, she’d slid smoothly into the role of proprietor and boss. But she still knew how to take an order and wield a tray. Waiting tables brought her back, she told Ed, made her feel young again.

  She was plenty young enough, as far as he was concerned. But then, he was the guy smitten with her now. One of these days, he’d get her to marry him. He’d proposed a few times, but she always shrugged and said she saw no need for the piece of paper. It wasn’t as if they were going to be having any kids together, and merging their finances would only complicate matters for their families after they died.

  He spotted her behind the bar as soon as he entered the tavern. She was as tall as a high-fashion model, and just as appealing to him, although she always laughed and shook her head when he complimented her appearance. “I’m going gray,” she’d remind him, but he liked the threads of silver glittering in her short, tawny hair. He liked the angles of her face, the faint lines crinkling the corners of her eyes. He liked what she had under her clothes, too, but she got embarrassed whenever he mentioned that. Not embarrassed enough to deprive him of the pleasures of her body, but embarrassed enough to blush and shove him away and tell him he was embarrassing her.

  She was reading something on a computer tablet as he strode across the room, but glanced up as he neared the bar and shot him a smile. “Coffee?”

  “You know me too well,” he said, grinning and settling onto a stool.

  She filled a mug with steaming coffee and slid it across the bar’s polished surface. Hot, black, and unsweetened, the way he liked it. Then she glanced at her tablet, tapped a button, and gave her full attention to him. “My wine distributor’s offering some serious discounts,” she said, gesturing toward the device. “I’m stocking up.”

  Ed nodded.

  Gus filled a second mug with coffee, blew lightly on the surface and took a delicate sip. The information about her wine distributor’s sale was more than she usually volunteered. She was a listener, not a talker, and a patient listener than that. If someone wanted to chat with her, she’d wait until he launched into a conversation. Silence didn’t bother her. She had the perfect temperament to be a bartender.

  “I’m heading down to North Cove Marina in a few,” he told her. “I’m supposed to meet with that kid and his lawyer. The kid thinks he knows where the drugs might be stashed on the boat.”

  Gus took another sip. “If he smuggled the drugs, it makes sense he’d know where they were.”

  “Exactly.”

  She gave him a canny smile. “But he didn’t smuggle the drugs, so he only thinks he knows where they are.”

  “That’s his story.” Ed took a slug of coffee. “If he shows me the drugs, what do I do? Arrest him or thank him? Or both?”

  “He didn’t smuggle the drugs,” she said with surprising certainty.

  “Don’t be swayed by that mellow beachcomber attitude. The boy is trouble.”

  “You’re sure of that, are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure of that. He’s roaring around town on a motorcycle and hitting on Monica Reinhart. A nice, sweet girl like her—he can’t give her what she wants. He’s only passing through town, unless he winds up passing through the criminal justice system. What’s he messing with her for?”

  Gus said nothing for a moment, then: “Maybe she’s messing with him.”

  Ed’s eyebrows shot up so fast his forehead ached. “What?”

  “Maybe she’s the wild one.”

  “Oh, come on. Monica Reinhart? Probably the only member of her generation who’s never gotten a speeding ticket or a warning for underage drinking. Hometown girl. The sweetheart of Brogan’s Point High. The daughter of the Reinharts of Ocean Bluff Inn.”

  “All of the above,” Gus agreed. “But…she’s got a wild streak.”

  Ed snorted. Gus was pretty talented when it came to reading people, but so was he. He had to be. That skill was a necessary part of his job, just as it was part of hers. “I just hope the Cronin kid doesn’t break her heart,” he said.

  “If you arrest him, maybe you’ll be the one breaking her heart.”

  “Or saving her from a really big mistake.” He checked his watch, drained his cup and stood. He shot a glance down the bar to Stanton, then leaned across the bar and murmured, “Take his keys.”

  Gus patted the pocket of her apron. Ed heard the jingle of keys and smiled. “I’ve got his wife’s number on speed-dial.”

  “He ought to get into treatment.”

  “I’ve recommended it a few times.” She eyed Stanton and sighed. “His next refill is coffee, straight up.”

  “Then he’s a lucky man. You make the best coffee in town.” Ed brushed a kiss against Gus’s cheek, turned, and sauntered toward the bar, wondering if Cronin was going to convince him of his innocence, the way he’d apparently convinced Gus.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Caleb Solomon was already at the marina when Ty motored into the parking lot and shut off the bike’s engine. A few vehicles were parked in the lot above the docks, one of them the glossy black Beemer he’d seen his lawyer climb into the evening he’d rescued Ty from Detective Nolan’s interrogation at the police station. He saw no police cars in the marina lot, though.

  He took comfort in the fact that Solomon was prompt. Clearly, Solomon thought foll
owing up on Ty’s hunch about where the drugs were hidden on the Freedom was a good idea. Or else he’d wanted to get to the marina early to keep an eye on Ty, to make sure he didn’t say or do the wrong thing.

  Ty was paying the guy by the hour—by the minute, probably. If he showed up at the marina early, those extra minutes would appear on the bill he presented to Ty once this shit was over. But if he cleared Ty’s name, every penny would be worth it.

  Solomon emerged from his car as Ty walked toward it. Once again, the lawyer had on a suit—and a tie, this time, although the knot was loosened and his shirt’s collar button unfastened. Even so, Ty felt grungy in his old jeans and a gray T-shirt. He’d managed to slap the first coat of paint on the parlor wall he’d repaired, but as it dried, he’d acknowledged that he’d need to add a second coat to cover the patch adequately. The other three walls of the cottage parlor would require a coat of paint, too, to match the repaired wall. He could get the rest of the painting done in the evening, if this meeting didn’t take too long, and it if didn’t end with him in handcuffs.

  He’d rather spend the evening with Monica than painting a room in the resort cottage. But getting the cottage back into shape before the first guests arrived was more important than his own pleasure. The second-floor bathroom needed some touching-up, too. The plumbers had reinstalled the vanity under the sink, but the walls had a few dings.

  If Ty did wind up arrested by the end of the afternoon, Monica’s regular maintenance staffers could finish fixing the cottage walls. But Ty wanted to do it. He believed in completing what he’d begun. More important, restoring the cottage meant a lot to Monica. He wanted to be her hero.

  He shook the lawyer’s hand. “You know the drill,” Solomon said. “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you it’s okay. Don’t say anything without my permission.”

  Ty nodded.

  “I’m not sure how this is going to play,” Solomon said, “and when you’re a lawyer, that’s a problem. We like to know our destination before we take the first step.”

  Ty nodded again. “I’m not a lawyer,” he said. “I just—if I’m right about this, I want the drugs gone. I like this boat. I lived on it for a week. I got to know it inside and out. And I don’t want drugs on it. It was my home, you know?” At least it had felt like a home to him back when he defined home as wherever he happened to be sleeping that night.

  “What if you’re wrong?” Solomon asked him. “What if we don’t find the drugs?”

  “Then there are no drugs on the boat,” Ty said. He meant it, too. As he’d said, he knew the boat. There was no other place drugs could have been stashed on it without his having stumbled upon them.

  “All right. Let’s see how it goes. At the very least, you’re winning points with the cops for being helpful. There’ s Detective Nolan now.” He motioned toward the police cruiser turning off the road and into the parking lot.

  Within a minute, the three of them were down on the dock, approaching the slip where the Freedom was tethered. Before Solomon could request it—before Ty could even think of it—Nolan handed Ty a pair of latex gloves and snapped a second pair onto his own hands. “You’re not going to be touching anything, are you?” Nolan asked Solomon.

  The lawyer smiled and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. “I’ll try not to.”

  Ty considered pointing out that every surface of the boat was likely already covered with his fingerprints—except, of course, for the space behind the toilet in the head, where he believed MacArthur would have hidden the drugs if there were, in fact, drugs on board. Ty knew that the absence of his fingerprints in that space wouldn’t exonerate him. MacArthur could have stashed the drugs there and Ty could still be convicted of transporting them. But he appreciated that Nolan didn’t want him adding his fingerprints to anything incriminating they might find behind the crapper.

  Once he’d maneuvered his hands into the tight elastic gloves, he followed Nolan onto the boat, ducking under the yellow police tape. “I’ve got to get some tools,” he said, climbing down into the cabin and lifting one of the benches. Beneath it was the storage bin where he’d stashed a small tool chest, in case he’d had to perform repairs on the boat while he’d been sailing it north. He knew where every storage bin on the boat was, and what was inside each one. Flares over here. Spare life vests in that compartment. Oatmeal and saltines in the galley cabinet. Canvas for patching sails folded neatly in that container. None of them contained any illegal drugs.

  “What makes you think you know where the drugs are?” Nolan asked as Ty unlatched the tool chest and pulled out a couple of screwdrivers.

  Ty obediently turned to Solomon, who nodded his permission to answer. “If there are drugs on board, this is the only place I can think of where they’d be,” he told the cop. “It’s the only place Wayne could have hidden them where I wouldn’t find them. When Wayne hired me to make this run for him, I told him I could handle any sort of repair on the boat except a plumbing problem. I don’t do plumbing. It’s beyond me. So there’s no way I’d open the panel behind the toilet.”

  “What would you have done if there was a plumbing problem while you were out at sea?” Nolan asked.

  “I’d bring the boat into dock,” Ty said.

  “And then some plumber would come to repair the plumbing problem, and he’d find the drugs. Assuming they’re where you think they are.”

  “Wayne told me he’d had the plumbing serviced a week before I was scheduled to sail. He’s got a top of the line commode, the kind that treats raw sewage so it can be emptied at sea. That kind of toilet demands regular servicing, so I guess he’d taken care of that. He said if I had a plumbing problem, I should phone him from wherever I was moored and he would deal with it. But he swore to me there wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “And there wasn’t?”

  “Lousy water pressure for the shower, but I expected that. It’s a boat.” Satisfied that he had the right size screwdrivers, he crossed to the cramped head. He’d forgotten how small it was. A few nights at the Ocean Bluff Inn—either in his own guest room or in Monica’s apartment—had completely erased his memory of the inconveniences of living on a sailboat. He loved sailing, and when you were doing something you loved, you could ignore the fact that the bed you were sleeping on was really just a thick cushion on top of a hard bench, and the doorway into the cabin was low enough that if you didn’t duck, you could knock yourself unconscious on the door frame. And that the bathroom was the size of a coffin and carried a faint whiff of mildew.

  Ignoring the stale odor, he hunkered down in front of the toilet. The access panel behind the seat was stained the same color as the surrounding wall, camouflaging it so it was barely noticeable. The screws holding it in place were Philips-head, and Ty got to work with one of the screwdrivers. He could feel the cop and his lawyer behind him, even though he couldn’t see them. The cop was close enough that Ty could practically sense the inch of air between their bodies pressing on his back. Did Nolan think he was going to do something stupid, like swallow the drugs if he found them? Or unearth a gun stashed inside the wall and blow the cop away?

  Back off, he wanted to shout. I’m doing you a favor here. Your idiot crime scene guys should have pulled off this panel. But he knew he had to remain polite. He was doing Nolan this favor in the hope that Nolan would do him an even bigger favor: cross him off the suspect list.

  As each screw came loose, he slid it into the chest pocket of his T-shirt so it wouldn’t get lost. After removing the final screw, he eased the panel off the wall. Then he pulled out his cell phone, clicked on the flashlight app, just as he’d done at the cottage earlier that day, and took a peek inside.

  Below the pipes that snaked out the back of the bowl, he saw two white bricks wrapped heavily in plastic. He sighed, edged back, and handed Nolan his phone. “Have a look.”

  Nolan squatted down beside him—hard to do in the confined space—and peeked into the opening. “Shit,” he muttered.

&nb
sp; Was Nolan disappointed? Sorry that Ty had found what his own officers couldn’t? Disappointed? Ty peered up at Solomon, who shrugged, evidently as bewildered by the detective’s curse as Ty was.

  If anyone should be cursing, it was Ty. He’d just provided Nolan with the evidence the guy needed to slap those handcuffs on Ty’s wrists.

  Nolan reached his gloved hand into the opening and pulled out first one brick and then the other. He produced a plastic bag from his back pocket, slid the bricks carefully into it, folded down the edge and pressed an adhesive strip to seal it. Then he pulled out a pen and scribbled his name and the date and time across the seal. “These will have to go down to the state crime lab for testing,” he said as he stood. His knees announced his age with a few clicks; he winced as he slowly straightened his legs.

  “Yeah,” Ty said. “It could be baking soda or something.” Actually, it looked a little like the plaster powder he’d stirred into mud for the cottage wall earlier that day.

  “But let’s assume the obvious for now,” Nolan said, his craggy face etched into a pensive frown. “I’ve got to take you in, Mr. Cronin. Sorry, but I have to.”

  Solomon clicked into high gear. “He’s just handed you your case, detective. Without him, you had nothing. Now you can nail MacArthur to the wall. You should be thanking Tyler.”

  “Thank you,” Nolan said, sounding surprisingly genuine. “I’ve still got to bring you in.”

  Ty knew he’d run the risk of arrest when he removed the panel. But if MacArthur was shipping illegal drugs—and using Ty as his unwitting delivery boy—Ty wanted the son of a bitch hung out to dry. He wanted him caught, convicted, and locked up for good.

  “Look,” he said. “I was in the middle of a repair job at the Ocean Bluff Inn. The room needs a coat of paint. Can I go back and finish that, at least?” Starting work on the bathroom upstairs was probably out of the question, but maybe the cop would let him get the parlor back into pristine shape, with no water stains or visible patching. “One hour, two tops. Then you can arrest me.”