Linea reached across me to hit her friend with a rolled-up magazine. “The man gives up his first-class seat for that military bloke and to thank him you put your mitts all over him. You should be— Oh! He is muscly!”
I chuckled. I’d been the meat in a Kathy-and-Linea sandwich for the last four hours on my flight from New Zealand to Australia. Being jammed into a center seat had been well worth the sacrifice. These two strangers were fucking hilarious. I’d been highly entertained the whole trip. Better than a complimentary bourbon and a warm washcloth.
When we began to deplane, I stood in the aisle to pull down the ladies’ carry-ons.
“Jason,” Kathy said, in front of me, waiting for her bag. “I have a daughter who’s single. She’s a nurse. She’d love those blue eyes. Ya interested?”
“If she’s half as gorgeous as you, she’s out of my league.” I extended the handle on her luggage and handed it to her with a wink.
She grinned up at me. “Cheeky bastard. Good luck with everything.” She turned and started walking. “Thanks for the autograph. I’m gettin’ on Twitter to keep tabs on you,” she said over her shoulder, following Linea out of the plane.
I smiled after her as I grabbed my backpack from the overhead and stepped back into my empty row to dig out my phone. It had been dead when I boarded. I disconnected it from its portable charger and powered it on for the first time in two weeks. It burst into a vibrating symphony of chimes and pings.
Back to the real world.
Fifteen days of backpacking. I dreaded the crap I’d have to sift through after being out of contact for so long. I’d probably have a hundred messages from my agent, Ernie, alone.
I punched in my pin and started with my voicemails as I shouldered my bag. My mailbox was full. I was four messages in and waiting for a break in the line in the aisle to get off the plane when an unfamiliar female voice came through the phone.
“Uh, hi. I’ve got Tucker here? He was running around loose in the middle of the street on Topanga Canyon Boulevard? My name’s Sloan. My number is 818-555-7629. Let me know when you want to come get him.”
Shit.
I swung my backpack in front of me to dig for a pen. I wrote the number down on my hand and dialed it, doing the math quickly in my head. It was 11:00 a.m. in Melbourne. Six p.m. in Los Angeles.
Come on, come on, come on.
“Hello?” a woman said after three rings.
“Hi, is this Sloan? My name’s Jason. I think you have my dog. Did someone come get him?”
There was silence on the other end for a moment, and I thought maybe I’d lost the call. I shuffled out of my row into the aisle and pressed for the exit in the crush of other passengers, hoping I’d get a better signal outside the plane. “Hello?” I said again.
“Yeah, I heard you.” Her voice sounded edgy. “I still have him.”
I flexed my jaw. Goddamn it. Fucking Monique.
I stopped in the stuffy Jetway and moved to the wall, holding the phone with my shoulder. I hovered the pen over my hand. “Give me your address. I’ll send someone to pick him up.”
“No.”
Huh? “What?”
“No,” she said again.
“What do you mean, no? No, you won’t let me pick him up?”
“You know, you have a lot of nerve. It’s been almost two weeks, and now you decide you want your dog?”
Two weeks? Tucker had been lost for two fucking weeks?
“I’ve been out of town. I didn’t have cell service. I had no idea he was missing. I have no problem paying for a reward. Please, just give me your address and I’ll—”
“No. He’s not your dog anymore. If he’d been at the shelter, his hold would be up and he’d either have been adopted or euthanized. I put up signs, ran his microchip, put him online, I left you a dozen voicemails. I did my due diligence. You abandoned him. So as far as I’m concerned, he’s my dog now.”
She hung up on me.
I stared at my phone in shock. I hit Send on the number again and it went straight to voicemail.
Cursing, I called Monique.
“You lost Tucker?” I growled, not bothering to lower my voice for the passengers still deplaning.
“Well, hello to you too, Jason.”
The click of her heels came through the line. I could almost see her, holding her fucking skinny latte with those huge sunglasses she always wore, shopping bags on her arms while she wasn’t looking for my dog.
“Tucker’s been lost for two weeks? Why didn’t you look for him? Or put through an emergency call to me? What the fuck, Monique? You’re supposed to be taking care of him!”
“I work, Jason. And I did look. Sort of.”
Then I heard a whoosh that sounded like a subway car. “Wait.” Disbelief coursed through my veins. “Where are you?”
A pregnant pause.
“New York,” she said quietly.
“How long have you been in New York?”
Silence again.
“Two weeks.”
I clutched the phone with white knuckles. “We are done. Fucking done,” I hissed.
“Jason, when Givenchy calls, you don’t tell them that you can’t be in their Vogue shoot because you have to look for your fuck buddy’s dog. I’m sorry, okay? Don’t—”
I hung up. I’d heard enough. She might as well have lost my child and then run off to do a damn photo shoot. It was that unforgivable.
I tried Sloan’s number again. Voicemail.
At a loss for what else to do, I stood by the gate going through the rest of my messages as rain pounded on the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the tarmac.
This Sloan woman hadn’t been kidding. She really had tried to reach me. Every day for over a week she’d left me a voicemail about Tucker. I got more and more pissed off as the messages detailed Monique’s complete and utter disregard for my dog.
He’d been in the middle of the street.
He’d had a bladder infection from not being let out.
This lady had posted all over, places Monique could have easily seen the signs had she bothered to stick around to look.
He’d dived into this woman’s sunroof. What the hell was that about?
I rubbed my temples. Tucker hated kennels. Monique had been good enough with him, at least in front of me, and I hadn’t had any reservations about it at the time. She told me she’d take him on her runs.
Stupid, stupid.
I should have flown him to Minnesota and left him with my family. I fucked up. It would have been a two-thousand-mile side trip, but at least Tucker would have been safe.
I raked my hand down my face and scratched my beard, tiredly. Fuck, now what was I going to do? This lady stole my damn dog.
When I finished my voicemails, I thumbed through my text messages and saw one from the 818 number I’d written down on my hand. I clicked it and a picture of Tucker popped up. It was great not knowing you.
The photo showed a woman with her arm wrapped around Tucker’s chest. I couldn’t see her face. The top of Tucker’s head covered her mouth. She wore black sunglasses and her hair was tucked under a hat. Her arm was covered in tattoos from shoulder to elbow. I tilted my head and studied them, zooming in on my phone. I made out the name Brandon on her arm. Then the screen shifted to an incoming call notification. The 818 number. I scrambled to answer it. “Hello?”