Page 42 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Half dozen,” I hollered back.

Another pause, shorter. “Then you can come in.”

I chuckled as Madden took the box from me and opened it on the counter with a focus that told me she’d decided not to stand on ceremony this early. She was already pulling one of the steaming cinnamon conchas apart when Rios stepped into the room dressed in tactical pants and button down with the SFPD logo embroidered on the breast pocket. His braced expression said he expected a problem. Which, to be fair, was kind of his default state.

He glanced at me, then at the box, then back to me. “What do you need?”

“Can’t a man just bring his friend breakfast?”

“Not before seven in the morning, no.”

“Would you believe I came to bum a cup of coffee?”

Madden poured me a cup even as my friend fixed me with an unimpressed glare.

I took the mug with murmured thanks and blew across the surface.

Rios waited.

Because I wanted to poke at him a little in the way friends do, I reached for the conchas. He intercepted my hand with a pop. “Nah. Not until you tell me why you’re bribing me with pastry.”

“Fine. I was hoping you’d had time to find out something about the guy from the ferry company from yesterday.” Mostly because I’d spent the night remembering the heartbreak and guilt in Layla’s eyes when she’d heard about Diane Crowell, and I wanted to be able to reassure her.

Rios plucked up a chocolate concha and dropped into a chair at the table. “Tyler Marsh. Twenty-three. No record.” He split the concha open. “Been with the ferry company for a couple of years. Spoke to Winslow Hobbs about him last night. Nobody who works with him has anything to say except that he’s quiet and does his job.”

Because he was no longer guarding the box like a pit bull, I snagged a concha for myself and joined him at the table. “You think he’s clean?”

Rios chewed, thinking. “I think a clean record doesn’t tell you much about whether someone’s running eyes for somebody else. It’s on my list. I can’t do more with it right now than watch.” He looked at me directly. “I need something more concrete than bad timing and a gut feeling before I can move.”

“The gut feeling is Layla’s.”

“I know whose gut feeling it is.” His expression didn’t change. “Her instincts are good. I’m not dismissing them. I’m telling you the reality of what I can do with it right now.” He picked up his coffee. “Diane Crowell is still critical. Hasn’t come around. I’ve got an officer at the hospital.”

I hadn’t known that. “Anything useful from the scene?”

“Single vehicle. No skid marks, which could mean a lot of things or nothing. State highway patrol has it, and they’re being territorial about sharing.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “I’ve called twice.”

“He was very polite both times,” Madden said, from her position at the counter where she was sneaking another pastry with the purposeful air of someone pretending not to be listening.

“I was,” Rios agreed, in a tone that suggested the third call might be less polite.

“I’m sure they’ll come around,” she said.

“Mm.”

She snagged the other cinnamon concha and said nothing more, but I caught the slight curve at the corner of her mouth. Rios caught it too, and the set of his shoulder relaxed by a few degrees.

I had genuinely not seen the two of them coming. I’d known Madden for years in the way of people whose lives intersected through other people. She’d been a year behind us in school. Gwen’s cousin. Not Rios’s outright accuser, but she’d swallowed Carson’s theory about him hook, line, and sinker. Then she’d come back to the island and upended everything, blowing the whole thing open. I’d expected the complicated history between them to stay complicated. I hadn’t expected this—the ease of it, the way she moved around him like she’d mapped his edges and had decided to work with them rather than against them.

Good for him. Long overdue.

“There’s something else.” Rios reached across to Madden’s end of the table and pulled a legal pad from beside the laptop toward him. He flipped to a page near the back and slid it across to me.

Marcus Teller. A web of entities below the name: Tidewater Marina Group LLC, one of the real estate holding companies we’d been looking into, with two local properties listed, and at the bottom of the page, the business license for the Pelican Point Bistro.

I looked up.

“Madden found it,” Rios said.