Chapter 10
Jail is exactly what every movie I’ve watched shows. Complete with the drugged-up, half-dressed cellmate.
The holding cell has a bench, a metal toilet with no seat, a woman named Roxanne who has been arrested nine times, and would like to walk me through all of them.
“You’ve never been in here before,” she says, smirking at me. “I can tell.”
“Is it the dress?” I ask, sure she’s never seen anything like it in this cell.
“No, it’s the shoes,” she replies and cackles.
“That’s fair,” I mumble and pinch the bridge of my nose.
Roxanne’s about five foot one and she smells like wet cigarettes. Or maybe it’s the cell. I can’t tell and don’t plan to find out.
But the woman has taken a shine to me. Probably because I’m the only other human within shouting distance.
And honestly, at hour eleven in this place, I’ll take it. It would be twice as depressing if I were alone and that says a lot.
I have learned a lot since the parking lot.
Handcuffs suck. The back of cop cars are weird. Nothing I said mattered.
When you tell a booking officer you’re an accountant, and that you would be happy to walk him through the reconciliation and explain the discrepancy line by line, he writes down uncooperative.
Pressing my fingers into my eyes, I groan.
I also learned that when they said the words four hundred and sixty thousand dollars along with the word offshore I got really, really mad.
Because I know that number.
Like any good accountant, I know exactly where that number lives. It’s in the reconciliation and I have flagged it twice. In writing. In emails. To Wallace Prince, my boss.
Both times he said that he would handle it personally.
The police have my signature on months of transfer authorizations, because I’m the junior signatory. Completely normal because I’m the one who does the work. I am the person who shows up.
My blood curdles, my foot tapping out a furious rhythm on the floor in my practical Mary Janes. Wallace Prince, you son of a bitch.
As I stare at a cinderblock wall the color of mayonnaise-gone-bad, my whole body fills up with a heat that is a completely foreign sensation, and it is not fear.
It’s rage. Clean, icy-hot, mathematical rage.
Sadly, it is the first clear thing I have felt in forever. How sad is that?
Except the nerves the biker gave me.
I felt that too.
Damn him.
When he held onto my waist, it unlocked a keen awareness that had never been awakened. Then he handed me the stolen money.
“Now you’re getting it,” Roxanne says, approvingly as she claps her hands. “I see it in your eyes. Revenge is the best!”
“So tell me what you know about bail,” I say, still staring at that wall, picturing my boss’s face, trying not to picture the biker’s blue eyes.
The next nine hours are filled with Roxanne giving me a bad legal lesson and rounds of me pacing. I count the steps to maintain my sanity.
“Ma’am. Time to move out.”
An officer startles me out of a dark plotting place in my head. He’s pointing at me.
My stomach drops then rebounds. Movement is good. Right? Something is happening. Maybe someone saw through Wallace’s bullshit.
But when the officer walks me into a small room that looks like a miniature courtroom, I turn cold from head to toe.
A man in a suit that costs more than my car is waiting on me and so is a man behind a tall desk. A judge.
Suit man says about nine sentences and my brain is so tired and wired, I only catch half the words.
“Bail set for seventy-five thousand dollars,” the judge says.
My jaw hinges open. A gasping sound comes from someone and I realize I’m the only one in the room besides the suit man who is definitely not a gasper, and a frowning judge who probably hasn’t gasped since the day he was born.
Suit Man closes his leather padfolio and says, “The bond is posted, Your Honor.”
My head whips around to stare at the side of Suit Man’s face.
Silence stretches for a few seconds. Long seconds.
There’s a shift behind the bench and a rumbled reply, “Fine.”
I’m so relieved, I sag into a chair. But I’m also so confused that a genuine migraine sprouts like a demon-stalk inside my skull.
The judge leaves the room. The Suit Man slides his padfolio into his expensive briefcase.
“You can leave,” he says, pulling out his cell phone, tapping a fast text message.
I shoot to my feet, stride across the room, and shove open the door, dragging in a breath of clean air.
It’s over, thanks to a man I have never seen before in my life.
“Miss Healy.” He catches me in the hallway. “Dom Reingold. I represent your interests.”
His suit, his cologne, his briefcase scream money that I don’t have. “I can’t pay you,” I tell him.
“You’re not paying me.” He puts a card in my hand. It’s also expensive. Heavy stock with a velvety surface and embossed letters.
“Don’t speak to the press. Don’t speak to anyone at your firm. Don’t touch a computer that belongs to Prince and Halstead. And do not, under any circumstances, go home tonight.”
Some of that make sense, but I’m not happy about the last point. I ask, “I’m sorry, why can’t I go home?”
“Somebody burned you to a district attorney on a Friday and had you arrested holding cash in a parking lot on a Sunday.”
He’s kind in the way he says it, even if it’s a proverbial slap in the face.
“At this moment you are a threat to someone. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I nod, more confused than ever and he walks away, those loafers sharply knocking against the tile.
For a minute I spin in a circle, then an officer says, “This way, ma’am.”
She leads me away from the area where I was held with Roxanne. A man gives me a manila envelope that contains my jewelry because that’s all I had on me when I was taken.
“Where is my car?”
He looks at his computer screen, tapping a few keys impatiently. “Impounded. You won’t get that back for a while.”
Did I hear him mutter, if ever?
My rage returns, bubbling hot in the cauldron that my stomach has become. With my lip in a snarl, I push open the door of the county courthouse and walk out into the sunshine.
My feet nearly tangle. There are twenty motorcycles at the curb.
Nearly two dozen big, mean-looking bikes are lined up in a row. The way they are parked, slanted in against the parking meters, they look like a mouthful of shiny black teeth.
On the sidewalk in front of them is a wall of men in leather with their arms folded.
Oh no.
I take this in for a moment, refusing to believe they are here because of me.
Every single person coming down that street is crossing to the other side to get around them. There is a woman with a stroller who has physically gone into the road.
Then I realize a man has emerged from the group. Standing out front of all of them in the middle of the sidewalk with his hands at his sides and absolutely nothing on his face, is my blind date.
The nerve of the man.
Almost two weeks ago I bid on a spa facial thinking I was going to have a relaxing day like I’ve never had before.
I guess I got part of it right. Not the facial. I got the day I’ve never had before.
The leather creaks as he starts walking toward me, and the whole wall of men moves with him.
It’s an ocean of black and metal chains.
Holy crap. That’s a lot of muscle and scowling faces. I have to plant my feet on the courthouse steps to keep from backing up.
“Stop,” I say. “No. Don’t come any closer.”
Much to my surprise, he stops. Maybe it’s the furious flames shooting out of my eyes.
“You handed me a box full of dirty cash,” I accuse.
“Yes. I did, but it’s not dirty.”
My teeth grind, when I speak again it sounds like I’m possessed. “I spent the night in a cell, and there was a woman in there who never stopped talking, and now you brought a biker gang to a courthouse.”
“Club,” he says calmly in that stupidly deep voice.
“I beg your pardon?” I snap.
“It’s a club,” he says. “Not a gang.”
“Oh, well, that’s the correction I needed, thank you, that resolves it,” I reply, waving my hand angrily at the bikes.
But my energy falters. What I say next doesn’t sound so strong. “I want to go home and I’ve been told I can’t go there because it’s not safe.”
He takes one step closer and I’m looking at the collar of his shirt because I cannot look at his face. “So I would very much like to know what is happening to me. Please.”
His chest goes up and down with one big slow breath, the kind a horse makes.
He says, “I’m going to tell you. All of it.”
“I’ve got about four hundred questions.”
“I know,” he replies gently, which is weird for the way he looks—like a big leather-wrapped monster.
“Starting with your name,” I say, as fatigue wraps around me as heavy as a lead blanket.
He steps in close enough that I have to look up or my nose will stick into his chest. Heavens he is big. Bigger than I remember. My breath snags in my throat.
I am shocked by the way my body is reacting.
“Ace,” he says.
My nose scrunches. “That’s not a name. That’s a card.”
The corner of his mouth pulls. Hitches barely a fraction. It’s gone before I can be sure it was ever there at all.
“Get on the bike,” he rumbles.