Born To Be Wild

FORTY-FIVE

Chico held a kick pad in front of him as he yelled at Mary Lisa that she wasn’t kicking hard enough. When she yelled and went at him, Chico turned, feinted, and leaped backward, all the while yelling at her-“Keep your knee straight!”-“Stay balanced!”-“More energy!”

After five straight minutes, she was panting so hard, she collapsed where she stood. He tossed the kick pad onto a mat, leaned down and patted her shoulder. “Not bad for your third lesson. Next time wear a band around your forehead, it’ll keep the sweat from dribbling into your eyes. I know that stings.”

No kidding, Chico de Sade. She kept her head down, still trying to simply draw breath into her lungs.

“Mary Lisa, you’ve got some talent, you’re tough. Come on, now, get yourself together. Here’s a Coke, loaded with sugar. Catch your breath, and then we’re going to do it again at”-he consulted the big clock on the wall-“a quarter after, okay?”

Three minutes from now? You’re giving me three lousy minutes to come back to life? She raised her head as she drank down the Coke. “I want to kill you. Promise you’ll let me take you down, and I’ll do it.”

“You can try, Mary Lisa, you can try.” He patted her sweaty shoulder again and walked away, whistling. She watched him pull out his cell, punch in numbers, then talk. Here she was dying and he was calling his girlfriend?

Three minutes later, with the help of a full can of Coke racing through her system and lots of deep breathing, she knew she was going to live. She splashed cold water on her face, slipped one of Chico’s sweatbands over her forehead, and got to her feet again. She focused all her strength, all her energy, all her fury and fear, on him. Her first kick was so hard he stumbled backward. He gave her a huge grin, waved his fingers at her. “Is that a onetime deal or do you think you can do that again?”

When she was hovering at the edge of collapse again, unable to give Chico even a hate-filled look, he called a halt and told her not to forget the aspirin and hot tub.

Mary Lisa wanted to get going so she didn’t take time to shower in Chico’s minimalist unisex locker room. As she walked barefoot across the mats, she noticed the bright red polish on three toenails of her right foot was badly chipped. She grinned at Chico, pointed to her toes. “One of the hazards of the sport, Chico?”

“As long as none of those cute little toes are broken, they’ll just serve as a reminder you’re in training,” Chico said.

She gave him a fist to his perfectly polished bicep on her way out. “I’m going to clean the floor with you next time, Chico.”

“Yeah, I’ll count on it. Don’t forget the exercises, Mary Lisa.”

Mary Lisa rolled her eyes. She had forty-eight hours to convince her muscles they wouldn’t implode. And she was actually paying for this?

She was surprised to notice this time, though, that she was actually walking out of the dojo without all her muscles screaming at her. Only her foot was sore. When she climbed into her Mustang, she pulled out her cell, noticed a message from Jack. She hit the Call Number button.

Jack answered his cell on the third ring. “Yeah?”

“Hey. It’s Mary Lisa. I gather since you called you’re in need of some of my insights into that mess you’ve got in Goddard Bay?”

“Right. But first, Mary Lisa, how are you? You’re taking care, right? Still the most popular girl in the Colony?”

“I’ll tell you, I don’t feel very popular right now. I haven’t felt this unpopular since I called Robbie James impotent in the eighth grade.”

He laughed. She smiled listening to that wonderful laugh. He’d sounded tired, but now that was all forgotten, at least for a minute.

“How did you know he was impotent?”

“I heard my father mention the word to my mother, about a friend of theirs. I asked her what it meant and I thought she’d faint. She told me to forget it-”

“So of course you used it the first chance you got.”

“Robbie was being a real jerk, talking about how a friend of mine didn’t have any boobs when he knew both of us could hear him, along with a dozen other kids, so I called him an impotent jerk, told him I’d read it in the girls’ bathroom.”

“What did Robbie do?”

“His face turned as red as the trim on our neighbor’s house and his friends started hooting, poking him, you know the teenage boy drill.”

“You think maybe he’s the one down there trying to do you in?”

“Nah. Last I heard, Robbie was living in Moscow, Idaho, teaching history at the local high school.” She laughed. “That’s enough about me, big boy. Tell me what you’ve found out about Milo Hildebrand’s murder.”

Jack was in his office. He took a sip of his cold, dead coffee, put his feet up, and tilted his head back. “The M.E. has confirmed Milo died of poisoning with coumarin-you remember I told you it’s a kind of rodent poison. It’s only loosely regulated, fairly easy to get. We found traces of it in what was left of the mashed potatoes on Milo’s dinner tray. So it looks like someone did slip into the kitchen at the Goddard Bay Inn, or got to the tray after it left there. We’ve shown photos of everyone close to the case-the Hildebrand family and Mick Maynard, Jason’s brother-to everyone at the inn and to our own staff. No one recalls seeing any of them around the time Milo’s dinner was prepared in the kitchen.” He sighed. “It turns out Marci Hildebrand worked in the inn five years ago, long before she married Jason Maynard, but so have lots of people in Goddard Bay over the years.”

“No one from the kitchen staff remembered anything unusual?”

“Yeah, an old bum who came by for a handout, real unusual for Goddard Bay. He caused a bit of a ruckus, tried to pee in the drinking fountain in the kitchen. That disrupted everything for a while.”

“There you go. Your poisoner could have slipped in while he was causing mayhem. Do you think the killer maybe bribed the old guy?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. However, the old guy disappeared. But where would he go? Everyone agreed he looked homeless, ill-kempt, bad teeth, layered dirty clothes.”

“A disguise, you think?”

“Yeah, that’s possible too.”

“A woman?”

“Could be. I don’t know. I’ve got all my deputies out near the inn looking for him, or for his clothes.”

“What has John been up to?”

“Among other things, he’s been dealing with Patricia Bigelow. She been all over city hall, threatening to wipe out the town’s coffers with a lawsuit on Olivia and Marci’s behalf. She says Milo was innocent and in our custody, and we’re liable for his death. She seems really excited about the possibility of a large contingency fee.”

“So she’s rubbing your noses in it. You don’t think it’s possible, do you, that Milo was innocent?”

“Truth is, you always feel better if the perp confesses. Milo didn’t. But the evidence, Mary Lisa. There was simply too much evidence against him. And he tried to run.”

“But say he didn’t do it, say he made himself look guilty because he was protecting someone. There are only two people he’d protect, right? Olivia, his wife, and Marci, his daughter. Maybe something happened to make him turn on the guilty one.”

“When I arrested Milo, he was trying to blame his wife, so go figure. There’s Marci, of course, the apple of her daddy’s eyes. I can’t think of another person in the world Milo might protect.”

Mary Lisa said, “I never did like Marci in school. She was always gossiping, bad stuff that hurt people.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

She heard the fatigue in his voice again. “Hey, Jack, if I think of anything else you can do, I’ll be sure to call you.”

He was silent for a moment. She was hanging in there, trying to keep his spirits up, her own as well, he supposed. He admired her in that moment. He was proud of her. The fact was he missed her-missed her smile, her ready laugh, her smart mouth, all of her, not to mention that orgasm she’d had lying on top of him. That made him hard just remembering the movement of her against him, remembering those screams of hers in his mouth. He wanted to do that again, like right now. He wanted her powerful bad. He hoped she couldn’t hear his shudder through the phone. “You do that,” he said. “Oh yes, listen to what Daniel tells you. Ah, Mary Lisa? Keep that blanket of friends wrapped around you. Take care of yourself, no rides with strange men.” He paused. “I miss you, kiddo. I really do.”

She closed her eyes, felt her heart beat slow heavy beats. “I miss you too.”

He wanted to keep talking to her, but his office phone buzzed. “I’ve got to go. Please, sweetheart, you take care of yourself. We’ll get through this, I promise.”

“Okay.”

As soon as he’d punched off, he barked into the phone, “Yeah?”

His secretary, Mulhouse, just Mulhouse, thank you, said in her scratchy smoker’s voice, “The D.A.’s on the line, Chief. He wants to meet you at Marci Maynard’s house.”

“Got it.”

When Jack pulled into the Maynard driveway ten minutes later, John Goddard waved him over to the living room window.