“Well, you were a priest.”
“It was more than that,” Sal said. “I performed hundreds of weddings over forty years. And there’s one thing I think I learned.” He shifted to Jeremiah, his old eyes pinched but clear. “The one who gets you is the one who makes you forget you ever had standards, who makes you forget you ever desired anything as dull and ridiculous as perfection.”
Jeremiah frowned, trying to figure out if Sal was making any sense or just pontificating.
The old man sat back. “You see? A time of day for reflection.”
“I’m going to go up and find a Band-Aid.”
“You do that.”
First he went out to Mollie’s car and found the tote bag of clothes she’d insisted she’d brought along. He felt no pang of guilt whatsoever at having had the passing thought that the clothes-in-the-car line could have been a strategic lie on her part, a way to convince him that returning to his apartment last night hadn’t simply been an impulsive act.
Which, of course, it had been, change of clothes in Leonardo’s Jaguar or not.
He managed not to run into any other elderly gentlemen with theories on romance before reaching his apartment, where he washed off his cut in the kitchen sink and bandaged it up as best he could. The throbbing had stopped. The bleeding hadn’t. Now he just felt like a damned klutz. He fixed a pot of coffee and sat at the table with his critters, all of whom had the sense to be asleep at six o’clock in the morning.
The telephone rang, jolting him out of his self-absorption. Sal with more revelations on the mysteries of romantic love? His father, perhaps, with an invitation to go fishing?
He snatched up the kitchen extension. “Tabak.”
“Tabak, it’s Frank Sunderland. You awake?”
Jeremiah ran a hand through his short hair. Frank Sunderland was his cop friend up in Palm Beach, and he wouldn’t call this early—or any time—without reason. “Yeah, I’m awake. What’s up?”
“I’m at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm. They’ve got a kid here—says his name’s Blake Wilder. He had the hell beat out of him last night.”
“Jesus, Frank, he’s a friend of mine.” Saying Croc was a friend was simpler than trying to explain the complexities of what he was to a cop or even, Jeremiah thought, to himself. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“He’ll live, but he’s not okay. Busted ribs, broken nose, broken jaw, cuts, bruises. Doctors are working on him. You’d have to talk to them to get the details. A couple of beachcombers happened to spot him. Another hour, he’d have drowned in the tide, maybe even been swept out to sea. We figure the guys who beat him up got spooked before they could finish the job.”
“Kill him, you mean?”
“Yeah, Tabak. Kill him.”
His stomach lurched. He got shakily to his feet. Mollie, he noticed, had stumbled into the kitchen. She was wearing one of his shirts, her hair tangled, the color drained out of her face. He said, “I’m on my way.”
“Listen, Tabak, this kid—he gave your name and his name and that’s it. You know anyone else I should contact?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because it gets worse.”
Jeremiah went still. “Tell me, Frank.”
“We found the diamond-and-ruby necklace that got yanked off Mollie Lavender the other night in his back pocket. Way I look at it, we’ve got three choices. One, the guys who beat him up didn’t know it was there. Two, they didn’t have time to steal it. Or, three, they planted it on him. None of which I like, I have to say.” Frank inhaled, reining in his own irritation. “If I find out you haven’t been straight with me, we’re going to have a reckoning, Tabak. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”
Jeremiah hung up and turned to Mollie, and his stomach ached and burned and his head spun. She inhaled, staying calm, at least on the surface. “What happened?”
He told her. Succinctly, accurately, his word-for-word reporter’s memory for conversations, his professionalism, clicking into gear. He left out nothing, not even the part about her necklace in Croc’s back pocket.
“We’ll take the Jaguar,” she said without preamble, digging the clothes out of her tote bag and pulling them on. Underwear, pants, shirt. She started back to his bedroom, presumably for her shoes. “It’ll be faster.”
Jeremiah shook his head and followed her back. “No. I’ll take my truck, and you can stay here.”
She snorted. “Forget it. I’d just end up passing you on the highway and beating you to the hospital, which would drive you crazy.” She sat on the edge of the tousled bed to slip on her sandals, but stopped suddenly, blue eyes on him, suspicious. “Or are you going to steal my keys?”
“I’m not a Neanderthal, Mollie.”