“Yeah, no way I’m gonna tell the guys back at the station I checked out a breaking and entering and it turned out to be a mouse. I have to take you in.”
“Maybe you put me in the back of your police car but forget to lock the door?”
He sighed, and it reminded me of Pierce—long and suffering. “It’s automatic, Katy. You’ve been in enough police cars. I expected you to know the mechanics.”
I shrugged and then flinched when he reached for his belt and a pair of shiny cuffs that dangled on the side. “Really? You’re going to cuff me?” Now the situation was getting out of hand.
12
Pierce
“Where the fuck was your man?” Anger boiled at my surface, and I wanted to hit something. Instead I slammed on my brakes, coming to a squealing stop at the stop sign at the corner of Bayside Street in Maine.
The rotating beam on the light house cast the small red ice cream shop into light with every pass, but otherwise the evening was pitch dark.
Ridge’s words were short and gritted as if he hated telling me as much as I hated hearing it. “Katy parked about a mile away and cut through a cornfield. He lost her in the field. By the time he made it out and discovered where she’d gone, the local PD already had a car on scene. They arrested her without incident.”
I made a sharp left and gunned it onto Main Street, knowing everyone else with half a brain was tucked safely inside their beds, exactly where I should’ve been. Where Katy should have been. Preferably with me. Not catching a nap on a jailhouse cot.
“I thought you warned him about Katy?” It’s not like Ridge’s job was demanding. Find the biggest and fiercest dude you can, select the right amount of military training, and you’re done. Then he let them loose on the town. I gave him explicit instructions to warn anyone who worked with Katy about her tendencies. Explicit instructions.
Next time I’d write them down for him. Fuck, I’d have Roxanne write them in memo form. She could make a whole fucking Katy handbook.
Breaking and entering was definitely one of Katy’s top tendencies.
Most women wanted jewelry or new clothing for holiday gifts. Katy asked for things like lock picks and bolt cutters. Somewhere in her brain, the wires had gotten crossed. She had the body of a gorgeous woman and the brain of a former felon.
The drive down Main Street went quickly considering the town was smaller than a postage stamp and I stopped the Tesla in the police station parking lot right out front. The short building held desks for the one detective and a few other police officers who were stationed in town and then three jail cells. They were intended to hold drunks if they needed a place to sober up, but they most often were empty if they weren’t housing members of the motorcycle club or Katy. She probably had a favorite cell.
Connected directly with the police station was a slightly taller building, which housed the city’s firehouse. Two tall bay doors allowed firetrucks to come in and out while providing the men a place to gather to watch TV and eat meals. I didn’t have a problem with the firehouse, but the police in this town left a lot to be desired. The chief was as crooked as any political official you’d ever met. Until he left the entire police force would be incompetent and unable to do their jobs.
“I warned him, but people don’t believe it until they experience her themselves.” Ridge didn’t like being reprimanded, but I didn’t enjoy having to get out of bed at one o’clock in the morning and bail my tenant out of jail.
And that is if she’d even let me. Knowing Katy she’d throw a hissy fit and choose to stay in jail longer so she wouldn’t be indebted to me. From Ridge’s earlier comment she hadn’t used her free phone call, which meant she didn’t want her mother to know where she was and she wasn’t willing to wake up any of the bakery girls at this late hour. There was a big possibility I’d be Katy’s only shot at seeing freedom until sunrise.
“I want somebody new on her.” Whoever Ridge assigned to her case obviously couldn’t handle the commitment. The need to be inside and see for myself that Katy was safe clawed at me. I stepped out of the car but left the door open to finish our phone call.
“Lee is a battle-hardened SEAL. He didn’t expect the five-foot five woman to lose him.”
Of course he didn’t. Nobody ever expects the shit Katy does. That’s why she gets away with it.
“Well hire better men!” I yelled, losing my cool, and then hung up on Ridge and threw the phone in my car. It hit the passenger side window and bounced back before landing in the seat.
I’d barely gotten an hour of sleep after having to entertain the city’s top councilman and mayor after dinner for drinks. The entire meal counted as a blatant attempt to get Jerome’s building site running again. The city shot him down after the incident with the scaffolding and he expected me to fix the issue because, as he said, “I had connections.”
I maintained connections because I stuck around this town. I grew up here and then stayed rather than run to New York. Jerome needed to get his ass out of the city and handle his own issues from now on. It was high time he made connections here if he wanted to be a leading business member in the city.
He could handle the protesters and the crap that happened because of his building at City Hall, like the sneers people gave when I walked the street or they looked at it. He’s the one who built a ten-story tall—what people in this little city called a skyscraper—building that didn’t match the rest the town’s aesthetic. I’d worked hard to keep the city looking nice so it would be a tourist spot. Somewhere people visited on the coast when they wanted to experience what they considered traditional New England.
Jerome said he wanted to leave the city life and pick up a quieter existence, yet he never left New York for more than a day. He needed to move his roots from the city and handle his own problems from here on out. I had enough of my own. His included a ten-story building with construction problems, but mine centered around a five-foot five woman with a temper. I had it worse.
If I wasn’t careful, the stress would cause hair loss or a heart attack. I couldn’t manage everything while constantly bailing Katy out of trouble. People needed to take care of their own problems and let me worry about mine.
I slammed the car door and hoped Katy heard it from whatever cell she sat in waiting. It would be her warning I was coming and not in the mood to deal with her bullshit.
Not that I expected her not to give me any.
The lights were on at the police station, costing the city thousands of tax dollars, but no one here cared about conserving money. They’d just jack up property taxes when they needed more.
