Holiday Heat

by Janelle Denison

  “So Hiro planned the whole operation?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Rick replied. “I thought it was too much, but he was, I don’t know, excited. I didn’t care as long as I could convince Belinda not to give the baby away. She was adamant about it. She wouldn’t listen. It’s my baby, too, and…”

  At this, Marisela gave him one parting shot in the shoulder, leaving him to writhe and moan in pain while she leaned forward to talk to Frankie.

  “What did you do that for?” he asked.

  “If my sister says his opinion doesn’t count in what she does with her baby, then it doesn’t count. Stupid pendejo gets his rocks off without using protection and then whines like the baby he made if he doesn’t get to tell her what she can or cannot do with her body? Fuck that. Let him bleed.”

  Frankie swallowed deeply. “We didn’t use protection a half hour ago,” he pointed out.

  She patted his cheek. “I’m on the pill. Think I’m going to leave that shit up to you?”

  Frankie wisely let the topic drop. He and Marisela had had this conversation before—a hell of a long time ago. He clearly knew better than to touch the topic again.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked. “If this guy’s yakuza, he has powerful friends.”

  “He’s disgraced Yakuzu, kicked out for fucking up. He wasn’t even important enough to kill for whatever he did wrong. He’s an amateur.”

  “An amateur who got the best of you,” he reminded her.

  She narrowed her gaze and without encountering a moment’s resistance, disarmed him and had the gun, for a split-second, shoved under his chin.

  “That’s only because he caught me by surprise,” she said, flipping the gun to return it to him, handle first. “That won’t happen again.”

  Marisela didn’t need Frankie’s weapon to compel Rick to stop groaning long enough to give them directions to the warehouse where they’d stashed Belinda just on the edge of downtown. He confessed that the plan had been to drive her back to his family in San Francisco, but roadblocks and his gunshot wound kept them from moving her out of the city. Instead, they’d tried to find a doctor who would treat the injury on the down-low, but they couldn’t find anyone they could trust. Belinda had agreed to be cooperative if his cousins took him to the hospital.

  Interestingly, she’d insisted on St. Joseph’s, rather that Tampa General, which was closer to their hide-out.

  Marisela grinned, impressed with her sister’s ingenuity. Despite Marisela’s aversions to the place since her injury, it was the neighborhood’s go-to medical facility and the most likely place that Marisela would look for the man she’d injured. Belinda had either acted on her strong connection to familiar things or she’d been sending her one-time lover straight into her sister’s hands.

  Either way, she had to give Belinda credit. The girl might be a stone-cold ice-queen most of the time, but she was damned smart.

  She turned to Rick. “You had to know the cops were going to question you about the gunshot and the explosion.”

  “I was supposed to get treated, then wait for Hiro and his brother, Makoto, to break me out. That’s why I made sure to stash my cell somewhere the police wouldn’t find it once I got to a room. Then you called. Now, I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  Marisela pulled out her phone. “Call them. Tell them you saw an opportunity to get out and you took it. Tell them to do nothing but to wait until you get back.”

  He nodded, but after struggling with the arm Marisela had rendered useless through her coercion, he rattled the number off and she dialed and pressed the button for the speakerphone. The call rang through, but no one picked up.

  “That was Hiro’s number,” he said. “Let’s try Makoto.”

  The second attempt was no more successful. This time, they got a message that the number was no longer in service.

  Marisela grabbed him by the throat, the heat of his sweat against her palm icing at the chill racing through her. “If you’re lying—”

  “No!” he gasped. “I’m not. Just wanted. To talk. To her. This is a mistake. A mistake.”

  Luckily for Rick, they arrived at the warehouse before Marisela had a chance to work up more rage. She already had too much. Any more would make her sloppy. Dawn was breaking. The city was waking one storefront at a time, though lazily in this industrial part of town, thanks to the holiday.

  The warehouse parking lot remained deserted, though a supply house catty-corner to the building had a few trucks backing into dimly lit bays. Frankie chose a spot around the corner, then left Marisela in the car with Rick while he mined his trunk for weaponry. He handed her a heavy 9mm Glock and then a strip of black cloth, which she used to wrap around Rick’s mouth.

  “Can’t have you calling out a warning,” she explained as he moaned his protests. She took the extra precaution of binding his wrists with plastic ties, just in case. He was their only leverage in case his cousins, Hiro and Makoto, decided to put up a fight. Marisela wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake, but Frankie advised that they try to keep this operation clean since neither one of them wanted to spend Christmas Eve in jail.

  “How are you going to explain to the cops about why your gun matches the bullet in his shoulder?” Frankie asked as they moved toward a back entrance, keeping tight to the building.

  “It was self-defense,” she said. “I’m sure Mr. Suzuki here will back me up, won’t you, Ricky?”

  He nodded, the sounds of his agreement lost in the material stuffed and tied around his mouth. He led them to a door hidden behind a Dumpster. Frankie worked the padlock like the pro he was and seconds later, they were swallowed by the darkness.

  They listened, but heard nothing at first except the scamper of rats and the flutter of wings that could belong to either bats or pigeons who had roosted in the rafters. But no one spoke. No one breathed. Even Rick stopped whimpering long enough for them to maneuver through the dusty crates and mildewed boxes piled high against grimy walls and blocked-out windows.

  Then they spotted a light shining from an office in the back. She shoved Ricky between a pair of old oil drums and with hand gestures and the kind of psychic connection she shared with no other man, proceeded to the room in total coordination and silence.

  But when they burst inside, the room was empty, if you didn’t count the dead guy on the floor.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Marisela checked the man’s pulse, not at all surprised to find the skin cold and the carotid artery motionless. From the gash on the back of the head and the bloody hammer a couple of feet away, she could figure out the how he died.

  The question was, why? And where the hell was her sister?

  She turned to ask Frankie to retrieve Rick, but he was already tossing the injured man into the room. He caught his fall with his good hand, which Frankie had released from the ties.

  “Hiro,” he said, sliding across the floor, missing the blood by inches. “Is he—”

  “Dead?” Marisela supplied. “Yeah, and my sister isn’t where you promised she would be.” She pointed her weapon at Rick’s other shoulder. “Tell me again why I shouldn’t pump another hole in you?”

  “No! Wait!” he begged. “I had nothing to do with this. Makoto took me to the hospital. Hiro stayed with Belinda. They promised not to hurt her.” He army-crawled to a ratty couch in the corner. The moldy fabric was partially covered with a sheet so new from the package, it still bore the patterned indentations of the folds.

  On an upturned, rusted crate rested a box of Belinda’s favorite Oreo cookies and a carton of milk. The top was torn open into a perfect square with just enough room for dunking. She checked the leftovers. The only ones left behind were chipped or broken or otherwise marred. Marisela couldn’t fight a quick grin. Belinda would only eat the perfect ones. The rest she’d give to her little sister.

  The little sister who’d failed to protect her at the airport and now wasn’t making any progress in getting her back.
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  She leveled her gun at the sweaty spot in between Rick’s dark eyebrows, clearing the space between them in two long strides so that the barrel was pressed hard against his forehead. “You trusted a couple of thugs with my pregnant sister. Exactly how trustworthy are guys who run in gangs? Frankie? Care to lend your expertise?”

  Frankie clucked his tongue. “From my experience, not trustworthy at all.”

  The crisp atmosphere of doom cracked the minute Rick started wailing. He flung himself over his cousin’s body and wept, sobbing at one point so loudly that Marisela desperately wanted to leave the room. She didn’t. She stood, gun aimed, arm steady, waiting for the man to run out of grief or realize that any scam meant at tugging at her heartstrings wasn’t going to work.

  Not that Marisela didn’t have heartstrings. She’d long ago accepted that hers were tuned more finely than people might expect. It was her secret weapon—and her secret curse. She battled between taking Rick out of the equation and giving him a chance to prove he was worthy of fathering the child he’d put in Belinda’s womb.

  “That’s enough,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and dragging him away from the body, disgusted by the pattern of blood now stippling his hospital gown. “And take that rag off. You got clothes here?”

  He obeyed, gesturing toward an old desk where bloody strips of material, torn from the remaining pieces of the cheap sheet set, sat in a haphazard pile. Clearly, they’d shopped at a discount store on the way to this hide-out, buying a mound of first aid supplies, a package of generic t-shirts, bottled waters and a pillow, judging by the plastic wrapper.

  Marisela looked around, but the cushion was nowhere to be seen. She closed her eyes and willed away the image that popped into her brain of her sister clinging to it for comfort in the face of her fear.

  “Help him,” Marisela ordered Frankie.

  “What the fuck? No way,” he argued.

  She turned and squinted, shooting the full power of her rage at him from her slitted eyelids. “If I touch him, I’ll kill him. If I kill him, we’ll never find my sister. Help him.” She ground out the last word, “please.”

  After a string of curses in two languages, Frankie handed her his weapon and assisted Rick in cleaning up. There wasn’t much they could do with his bandage since Marisela had likely reopened his stitches with her coercion, so Frankie tore more strips from the sheet on the couch and wrapped them around his shoulder so he didn’t bleed through. He then helped Rick into the darkest colored t-shirt and fashioned a sling.

  As much as Marisela hated it, Rick alive was more useful to them than Rick dead or unconscious. She slung Frankie’s gun into her waistband, but held tight to hers as she handed her sister’s lover an opened bottle of water.

  “Drink it,” she ordered. “Get your shit together. We need to know everything you know. Every fucking detail. It’s Christmas Eve, you son of a bitch, and I want my sister back.”

  “I want her back, too,” Rick croaked.

  Marisela laughed. “You’re not going to get anywhere near her until you tell us everything—and I mean everything—from the moment you first laid eyes on Belinda until you rolled into the hospital. And be as careful about the details you leave in as the ones you leave out, got it?”

  Rick might have been in pain and grief-stricken, but he absorbed her message and recounted the details of his affair with Belinda with discretion. He told them how they’d worked side by side on a project and were attracted to each other, an emotional response that Belinda had found frightening at first, then confusing, then curious.

  “We got to be friends,” he explained. “She trusted me and things just, evolved.”

  As a reward for his carefully chosen words, Marisela shook four over-the-counter pain killers into her hand and helped him swallow them down.

  “So what happened when she found out she was pregnant?” she asked once he downed the last of the bottled water.

  “Nothing,” Rick said. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant. She and I spent some time together, but she didn’t seem anxious for a relationship and I didn’t want either of us to lose our jobs. When she started gaining weight and got a little moody—as moody as Belinda can be—I guessed what was wrong. I proposed, promised to take care of her, but she said no. No marriage. No baby. But she just kept getting bigger and wouldn’t answer anyone’s questions. Finally, our boss confronted her and she told him she was putting the baby up for adoption.”

  “And I guess that pissed you off?” Frankie asked.

  “Wouldn’t it piss you off?” Rick demanded. “That was my child and she wasn’t even giving me a say in what happened to it. I lost my temper and got sent home. The next day, Belinda started working from home. She wouldn’t answer my phone calls or emails or texts. She called the building manager when I came banging on her door. I just wanted to talk to her, tell her I’d marry her or that…”

  His voice trailed off.

  Marisela woke him from his stupor with a swift kick to the leg. “You stalked her and she blew you off, so you decided to kidnap her and what, force her to marry you or keep her in a cage until she gave birth? Did you plan to steal the kid and leave her behind?”

  “What? No! I swear. I had to go to San Francisco and I figured she’d go to Spain to spend Christmas with her cousins there like she does every year. I planned to fly there at New Year’s, try to use her family to convince her to let me do the right thing, but then someone at work told me that she’d taken a leave of absence to go back to the States. I knew she was coming here to give the baby away. I knew she’d use you for protection. She knew I had…connections. I think it scared her.”

  Marisela leaned down, her gaze level with his. “Belinda doesn’t get scared.”

  “She was scared of my background. Hell, so am I.”

  “Scared of yakuza?” Frankie asked. “So your cousin wasn’t the only one wrapped up in that shit.”

  Rick’s chin dropped as he shook his head.

  Marisela exchanged a glance with Frankie, uncertain what he was implying for a second. He remained silent, staring first at her, then back at Rick.

  She laughed. “You can’t be serious. You think this maricón is Japanese mob?”

  “Maybe not by choice,” Frankie guessed. “Yakuza is more like the mob than the gangs we ran with. Maybe he didn’t join, but he was born into it,” he explained. “Is it your uncle? Father?”

  “Father,” Rick confessed, his voice ripe with shame. “My mother was an engineer he met on a vacation. They had an affair, but she left him the minute she realized what he was. She moved to London, then realized she was pregnant. She didn’t tell him about me and by the time he figured it out, she convinced him that I was too old to follow in his footsteps.”

  Marisela holstered her weapon. Her sister’s lover posed no threat. Even his father thought so, or he might have fought harder to drag him into his underworld organization. Clearly, the man had good instincts. Rick was only criminal enough to be dangerous to the people around him—like Belinda.

  She crouched next to him. “Look, I’m sorry your papi rejected you. And it sucks that one of your cousins whacked the other one. But how does this have anything to do with Belinda? This Mako, guy—”

  “Makoto,” he supplied.

  “Whatever. Why would he kill his own brother?”

  Rick shrugged carelessly.

  Marisela slapped him. “Wrong answer.”

  “I don’t know! Makoto wanted to go to Japan. He wanted to regain his family’s honor with the yakuza, but his father, my uncle, forbade it. My father respected his wishes and refused to allow Makoto to join the organization. And he didn’t kill Hiro after he screwed up. To my father, family is everything.”

  She stood. “Something your father and I have in common.”

  Frankie tugged her away from Rick, who had dropped his head onto his one good hand and started weeping again. This time though, he made no sound.

  “No wonder his father didn’t fight h
arder for him,” Marisela snapped as they abandoned the office to talk alone. “He’s a wuss.”

  “Let’s review,” Frankie said. “First, he found out his lover was pregnant, but putting his kid up for adoption. Then he got shot. Then his one cousin killed his other cousin and is probably trying to buy his way into the Japanese mob with his child. He has permission to lose his shit for a few minutes.”

  Marisela’s heart stopped. “Do you think that’s his plan? To sell my niece or nephew for a chance to play gangster?”

  Frankie shrugged. “He won’t be playing if it works. The yakuza doesn’t operate in Tampa. Not in Florida. Probably not in the entire southeast. If he wants to pay to play, he’s going to have to either get her out or bring someone else in.”

  “But we have her passport—” Marisela began, but stopped herself before she grabbed onto any false hope. “I guess these yakuza guys would have no trouble getting a fake.”

  “If Rick’s dad is as powerful as it seems, he probably travels with a forger. Hell, he probably has a private plane. It would be the easiest way to get her out of town. Quietly. No roadblocks. No questions, even if Belinda is screaming her head off.”

  Marisela ran the possible scenarios through her head, quickly coming up with the likeliest way a rich gang of mobsters could get her sister out of town. “How do we check?”

  A voice echoed against the still silence of the cavernous warehouse. “I can call in a favor from the FAA.”

  Marisela and Frankie had spun, weapons drawn, before the gruff, but somewhat familiar voice finished the sentence. The intruder stepped into a beam of light that had broken through a crack in a window high above them, hands held high above his shoulders.

  Frankie lowered his gun, but Marisela had no idea why.

  “Frankie,” she chastised.

  But her ex-boyfriend and sometimes partner only grinned. “Geez, Marisela, don’t you recognize the magician when you see him?”