She dropped her head between her arms and onto the bar and moaned. Finally, she raised her head and drew in her breath and said, “Ok.”
“Ok?”
“Ok!” she hissed, as if she couldn’t believe he were making her repeat it. “Let’s go to the hospital.”
Ezra honestly couldn’t believe it. A concession. He helped her off the stool, and she clutched his elbow, and he thought:Wow, this is kind of sweet, maybe I have her wrong, maybe she’s changed, maybe we really are in this together, and I’ve misread her this whole morning.And just as they were headed toward the broken window and the back door, the door swung open, and two security officers shouted: “You inside, don’t move! We have reports of a break-in!”
THIRTEEN
Frankie
Quite obviously, this was not Frankie’s first run-in with the authorities. There was that time in Dallas when Shawnee Patterson, lead singer of Night Vixen, trashed her suite at the Four Seasons and had to be forcibly removed by two beefy officers; there was another time in Nashville when Paxton Sunshine, a wildly talented yet emotionally unbalanced midlist country singer, made Frankie his first call after being arrested for a DUI. There had been situations at airports with intoxicated clients; there had been nightclub brawls and cocaine arrests and her own father’s dustups with the IRS every few years, for which he was always cleared although never quite exonerated. Frankie herself had managed to never yet be arrested personally, however. So this was new. Although technically, they were campus security, not cops, so she didn’t really feel the need to take them particularly seriously.
“The window was broken before we got here,” she said. “We thought maybe that meant it was open, like, the bar. It’sNew Year’s Eve, you know? We wanted to start early. We’ve only been here a few minutes.” She glanced behind her. “Go check. Everything’s there. Nothing’s missing.”
She was standing shoulder to shoulder with Ezra, just outside the doorframe, the two security guys blocking their exit down the alley. One of them clutched what she was sure was a Taser. (She’d seen some things, ok?) She dropped her hands, which were nearly numb from the frozen air. Her pulse was racing like a ticking time bomb, which sent the blood even faster to the lump in her head, which now throbbed like a metronome. But she was flying on adrenaline, and she knew herself well enough to know she could ride the wave until she couldn’t. Still, she’d delay the crash for as long as possible.
“This really feels a little unnecessary,” she added. “You know, we’re just two alumni in search of a beer at our old bar.” She felt Ezra twitch beside her.
The younger officer, baby-faced with a scuff of a beard, gave the older one a side glance, then his eyes moved back to Ezra. He tugged his wool hat over his ears.
“Sir, what happened to your face?”
“Allergic reaction,” Frankie said before Ezra could. She’d never known him to be nearly as adept on his feet or, well, frankly, as loose with the truth as she was. “Accidental brush with shellfish for breakfast. We try to be so careful, but sometimes these things happen.”
“Sir?” the officer said to Ezra, like Frankie was the one who had mauled him, like she, tiny lady that she was, had inflicted such damage on him. Frankie was honestly a little flattered that he thought she had it in her, though she knew he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
“Shellfish,” Ezra said. “We’re over at the Inn, and the chef got a little crazy with the omelet.”
The officers looked warily from Frankie to Ezra then back again, and she took it as her opportunity to move on. She didn’t see how mentioning that he had been pepper-sprayed at Homer would in any way help their cause, and she needed to keep things humming along before Ezra admitted to the truth. Because he would. Give it time. Then she remembered that he had somehow reinvented himself as an expert poker player, which always required a bluff, and wondered if maybe she were getting this wrong.
“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Frankie said, because she also knew she could talk her way out of anything. “Wouldn’t you guys rather be home with your families instead of investigating the case of a broken window?” She glanced up and down the street. “Honestly, the back door was open. We couldn’t have known. And really, do we look like people who would smash a window?” She gestured back and forth between them but stopped suddenly when she realized that neither she nor Ezra exactly looked presentable. Her wild hair and smeared makeup, his mashed-up angry red face. She wondered just how long it took for the effects of pepper spray to wear off. She should know this—she sent all her clients on the road with at least one bottle to attach to their key chains, sometimes a second one to stow in their luggage in case anything got too out of hand in a hotel room.
“Ma’am, please empty your pockets,” the older guard, who looked like he was fighting middle-age weight gain and badly needed a good night’s sleep, said. “We need to know if anything is missing.”
“I already told you—” she started, then looked to Ezra. He was the lawyer. She’d covered for the pepper spray; maybe it was time he handled the legalese.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” She nudged her chin in his direction. “Shouldn’t this now be your territory? Like, our Miranda rights or whatever?”
Frankie didn’t technically even know when Miranda rights were called for, but she’d watched enough episodes ofLaw & Orderin hotel rooms to know that it sounded official. She had to be in the shower by no later than 3:30 p.m. to make the photos at the chapel, and getting hauled into campus jail (was there such a thing as campus jail?) was not part of her timeline, not part of her plan. It was true, she considered, that she actually didn’t have much of a plan after Lemonhead, as she had somehow convinced herself that the VCR would hold all the answers. It quite obviously did not. Indeed, just the contrary: it only added to the mounting list of questions. They could go to the athletic complex, theyshouldgo to the athletic complex, but that would mean coming clean to Ezra about the slivers of the night that she remembered—the mistletoe, the kiss under the mistletoe, snippets of the scavenger hunt—and at the moment, that was obviously out of the question. She didn’t trust him to stay calm. She didn’t trust him at all.
“Miranda rights are for when police actually arrest you,” Ezra said.
“You went to NYU Law for that?” Frankie replied.
“I went to NYU Law for—” Ezra stopped himself and emitted a long, tense sigh, and Frankie saw his jaw flex, which he always used to do when he was trying not to argue with her. In fact, they were so aligned that for just about the wholeof their relationship, they honestly never did. She wanted what he wanted; he wanted what she wanted. Frankie couldn’t believe that a partnership could be so harmonious; Ezra couldn’t believe that she was always waiting for something to blow up. Maybe that was half of their problem, Frankie thought now, as she stared at Ezra and campus security stared at them both. That if you never fight, you never learn how to fight fair, how to fight well. Instead, there’s just a void, and inevitably, eventually, that becomes combustible. Just like it did for them.
“Your pockets,” the younger guard said.
“Do you think we, like, smuggled out Crystal Gayle’s headshot? Rolled it up and stuffed it down our pants or something?” Frankie asked. Crystal Gayle was the only one she could think of in the heat of the moment. She knew there were better, snappier names back there. Carly Simon maybe? James Taylor? “There is literally nothing of value inside. Absolut vodka? What is that? Like, fifteen bucks?”
“Can you ever just be quiet?” Ezra said, a little too sharply. He pulled out the linings of his pockets. Frankie already knew what he’d find because he’d done as much not an hour ago at the coffee shop. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
“Oh, sonowyou’re the lawyer,” Frankie said.
“Now you, ma’am.” The older officer nodded at her.
Frankie started to protest—she was debating mentioning something about a warrant, which she thought sounded official and she suspected was far above campus security’s station—when she felt Ezra level her with his gaze.
