When he closed the door softly behind them, she turned and went into his waiting arms. “Andreas, my love, you may think I am silly for asking this now, but are you sure you want me?” When he looked down on her with those blue eyes, like the sky, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth, the little bit of doubt she had evaporated.
“There is no one on this planet more perfect for me than you,” he whispered and then claimed her lips. The kiss that ensued took her breath away and chased away her fears.
When he parted from her, he looked down at her mischievously. “What does my fiancée want to do? We have an hour,” he reminded her.
She laughed. Last night had been amazing. The lovemaking had gone on far into the night, and they had little sleep when Johnny awaken them. “Actually, I’d like to do my yoga, if you don’t mind?”
The look on her face was apologetic, but he understood. Their night had been long, and they had an eternity together.
He nodded that it was okay. “If that is what you want, I guess, I can get in a quick run. All this food!”
He patted his lean torso drawing her eyes to his perfectly chiseled form and the v that hinted at what was beneath his pajama bottoms. She knew what he was trying to do. She was sorely tempted to change her mind in that moment. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” She licked her bottom lip enticingly. She could tease too, she thought and laughed when she heard his growl. But she backed away before he could grab her. “I, on the other hand, can’t keep up with all the food you eat.”
He relented. “Okay, so no fun now, but a quick work out, and then we can shower together.” His eyebrows raised and lowered mischievously. “We haven’t done that yet.”
Cat laughed. “Hm, that sounds like it could be fun. I’m going to go change, and I’ll meet you out by the pool in a half an hour. I want to be outside today. The weather is beautiful.”
“Perfect,” he winked as she passed by him. Turning on his heel, he slapped her rear when she turned to go change. “I’ll see you later.” Grabbing his running shorts and sneakers, he quickly stripped as she went to the bathroom to change. He left before she returned knowing that if he lingered any longer, neither one of them would be getting in any real workout.
* * *
Cat did a quick version of her routine. She chose to do her stretching by the dock today. Soon this perfect view of the bay would have another boat, she mused as she perfected her breathing. That would be fun, she thought. She loved the water and missed being out on it. Her great grandfather had owned a boat. When she was a young girl, he had taken her out in his small boat in Marken and Volendam, two nearby fishing villages. But this boat would be something much grander than she had ever been on. She finished her stretching and knew Andreas would be back soon, so she sat on the edge of the dock to meditate and think about her great grandparents. How happy they would be to see her now. Her world, her life, was just beginning, and each day it was looking more beautiful than the last.
Chapter 33
The Worst of Times
He had her. He fucking had her. He couldn’t believe it. His patience this time had paid off. The boat lurched in the surf. And then hit the beach hard as he pulled her right up on to the shore. He didn’t give a shit. It was a rental. He had used up most of his savings renting the boat each day since Andreas had taken Catarina from the hotel. Yes, he had been watching the bridge, waiting for his car. Waiting to go get Catarina back. He knew the man would break and bring her back. Catarina was a woman you could not get over.
He rented the boat every day for the last seven days, taking it out each morning. Something told him to go in the morning. He would blend in well with the other tourists enjoying an early morning boat ride or the fishing. The waters along Ann Maria Island were calmer and many came out in their water craft, even over the holidays.
He glanced back at the lovely creature lying on the bottom of the boat. She was out cold; the jostling of the waves, and his quick escape had not even made her stir. His car was just twenty feet away. He parked it on this stretch of beach because it was allowed here, and there were not a lot of people in the early mornings. Today was no exception. Especially considering it was Christmas Day.
He noticed just one couple walking and one other couple with a child further up on the beach. They noticed him, and turned his way when the saw the boat come aground. “My girlfriend got sea sick,” he waved them off. The man nodded and turning to his wife, they kept walking in the opposite direction. It was a quiet inlet used by only locals and their guests, but it had been the perfect spot to make his getaway. The second couple, a bit closer, called over. “Do you need any help?”
“Nah, I’m good. I’m just going to get her to our bungalow we rented.” He pointed in the direction of the small buildings across from his car. “Then I’ll go return the rental.”
The couple resumed playing with the toddler, and he swept Catarina into his arms. His cock stirred just holding her. “Sleep, my beauty,” he whispered as her head rolled onto his chest. “Soon, the world will never interfere with us again.”
He climbed out of the back of the boat, one leg at a time, and sat on the edge. Sliding down he carried his love gently to his car. When he reached to open the passenger side door, he heard the man from the beach once more. “Are you sure she is okay?” he asked.
Spiro risked a look back, and the man had gotten up out of the sand. He hastily pushed Catarina into the car. “She took Dramamine, but it made her drowsy.” He closed the car door just as the man reached the car. “We are fine. Really.”
The man tried to peer around Spiro, but Spiro stepped into his view. The man gave him a startled look, and then his eyes widened slightly before he took a step back. “Um, okay, yes, I’ll be off then.”
Spiro felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The man recognized him despite his disguise; he was hustling off to his wife and child very quickly.
He would have killed them, but he just didn’t have the time. Plus the noise would bring out other people. If he didn’t leave this instant his plans would be ruined. That man was a lucky bastard, he thought, as he hustled around to his side of the car. He got in and the rental started right up. And then he left. His prize, his beauty, asleep by his side. It was where she was meant to be.
* * *
Andreas ran.
He cut his 10K by a third and picked up his pace, getting his run done in record time. He was happy, truly happy even though Salvatore was still out there. He knew he would get him, or someone would with all the media attention the case was getting lately. He couldn’t hide forever. Not anymore. He’d make sure every Police Department in the country was looking for him, but today he would put him out of his mind. He would focus on Cat and his family.
She was his family now too. Heart swelling, he jogged the last few steps to the driveway and immediately rounded the house to head for the dock. She’d told him she would be there. But he didn’t see her as he approached, and for a moment it startled him. She’d said she would wait.
He slowed his steps and was about to turn and head back to the house when a flash of red caught his eye. It looked like a package. He smiled. A gift from Cat. He began to walk down the pier when he caught a glimpse of Marcus, one of his security men walking the perimeter. They had just two on duty today. Being home for the day, they had let the other men spend it with their families. He waved as he continued the trek, the gift appearing larger as he went. It was a small red box, about the size of a watch, he guessed. What had she gotten him?
“Tell Cat, I’ll be in momentarily,” he called out to Marcus over his shoulder as the man went through the sliding back doors. Marcus stopped dead in his tracks.
“Sir, Miss Stone is not inside. We saw her leave with you.”
A moment of dread permeated his heart, and his head cut to the package. In a heartbeat, he began to run and his actions startled Marcus who pulled out his radio and began to talk furiously as he, too, came running towards th
e pier.
Andreas retrieved the package and began to tear at the wrapping. It was a watch box!
“Sir, don’t open that,” Marcus warned fearing the worst.
Andreas wasn’t listening. He popped the box open and his blood turned to ice. He’d been right. It was a watch. His father’s! The one he was given when he retired from the police force. The sight of the watch undid him. It brought it all back, seeing his parents dead, his father resting in his recliner, a single shot to his brain. His mother, face down on the floor. Sal had come for him again, and took Cat right from under his nose. It was too damn fucking much.
Andreas crumbled to his knees, broken, and screamed out his anguish. Gulls flew, took to the air in droves, as his cry pierced the air. Just as Marcus reached him, others came pouring out of the house, Gio, and Blaze. Nikko and Lucas too! All were running towards the dock.
The watch tumbled out of his hand and clattered onto the dock. Etched in a childish scrawl, one Andreas would have recognized had he not been blinded by his own tears, were the words that haunted his nightmares, “Beautiful No More,” emblazoned upon the surface.
* * *
Spiro drove all day.
When Catarina began to stir the first time, he placed a dropper in her mouth that contained a powerful muscle relaxer and sleep aid. They were his own prescriptions, and he knew they helped him and would work on her. She was just waking when night began to fall. Darkness came early as he entered North Carolina. He had a few hours to go before he reached his destination, and so he gave her another smaller dose of the concoction, and kept driving. Soon, he thought. Soon, he and Catarina would be going home. Finally. His dream would be a reality.
* * *
In that first twenty minutes after Cat’s disappearance, Andreas was a raving lunatic. When his brothers finally calmed him down enough to get him inside, Gio took over the situation while Blaze interrogated the security team, and Nikko reviewed the surveillance tapes.
Gio placed a call to the police, who promised to be there as soon as they could. Blaze’s interrogation of the team revealed that Marcus, who had been on perimeter, heard a commotion to the right of the house and had gone to investigate. A pit bull apparently wandered into the neighbor’s yard and got into their garbage cans. Lucas, who was watching the cameras, had been watching the feed on the right side of the house, and was in communication with Marcus, giving him as much Intel as he could about the commotion.
Nikko was looking back at the other tapes while Gio came up behind him. “What the fuck? That sure as hell isn’t the neighbor!” He saw a man dressed in a tourist type Hawaiian shirt drop something in the garbage can. Then he wandered out of view.
“Can we get a still of that and enlarge it,” he asked Lucas, who nodded and began to hit some buttons. “Let’s look at the feed in the back now.” Lucas cued it up. Off in the distance, they saw the pier then Cat coming out. The camera panned the rest of the yard then thirty seconds she was there again, stretching. “Fast forward that until we see something, but not so fast we miss it.” Andreas, calmer, came up behind Gio who made room for him. The look on his face was grim.
Deadly.
Three minutes later, the same tourist with the large straw hat was coming down the pier. Cat turned at his approach, and the man rushed her. He punched her in the jaw, and she slumped over before she made it to her feet. “My God! I shouldn’t have left her!” His voice was desperate. Deep, dark guilt settled on him once more. Romeo had taken what he loved right from under his nose.
“We are going to get her, Andy.” Gio promised, his heart thundering.
“Make no mistake, bro,” Blaze came up behind him putting a hand on Andreas’ shoulder. “We’ll find her, and he will pay.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Andy whispered. His voice sounded like a pained animal. He watched as Sal Mazzelli, now with bright orange hair, and a sun burn ointment covering his nose, first put a cloth over Cat’s face. He placed the package on the dock, his memento to Andreas, and then gently picked up Cat, walking her down the pier. He hurried, like he knew security would come any minute. He wandered into the bushes that lined Andreas’ property with the property on the left. Thirty seconds later, they saw a boat, a speed boat, zoom by in the left part of the screen. But it was too far to see anything clearly.
“Get a picture of that boat, and enlarge it. If you get an identifier call it in to the Coast Guard.”
Lucas nodded, while the Marinos turned to Andreas. “Andy, hold it together man, we will find the boat, and find him.”
“Nah, he’ll dump it.” Andreas was pacing once more like a caged animal. The tick in his cheek revealed his fury. “He knew we had security, fooled us all. He’s been watching us for a while. Fuck! Where would he take her? That’s what we got to figure out.” Where would he take her? Where would he take her? Think. Think. He repeated his mantra. He had no clue.
“We can’t give up on the boat angle. Lucas, call the Coast Guard either way, and Marcus, call the police and see if they can get a chopper in the air.”
“On it, sir.”
Andreas slammed his fist into the wall beside one of the book cases. His mind was racing. He was near panic. His breathing was becoming louder as he held his fist in his hand wanting to hit something else. “I don’t think he’ll kill her. Not right away. We have time,” he murmured. Please let us have time. “I’m calling Tony. Those guys got us the Intel we needed before, maybe they can pull another rabbit out of a hat.”
“Call him,” Gio encouraged. Keep him busy. Keep him focused on finding her. His heart was breaking for his brother, but he knew if he could keep him focused on finding Cat, he wouldn’t lose it. As long as they had a chance to get her back, to get Cat back alive, before this bastard did something sick and twisted to her, Andy would keep his shit together.
Please, Gio looked up, let us get him this time. If not, if they didn’t save Cat, he didn’t know if his brother would recover. Glancing at his other brothers, he knew they were thinking the same thing.
* * *
Although it was Christmas Day, and he had been spending it with his wife and son, Tony answered the phone when he saw who it was on his caller ID.
His heart ached for the man after he told him what had happened just a few hours earlier. “I’ll do what I can. I promise.”
“Please. Dig deep,” Andreas begged.
Tony heard the desperation in the man’s voice. He knew what that felt like. He had been there himself almost a year earlier. He looked across the room at his wife, Sherrie, who was nursing their son. “I will. I promise.” He knew Sherrie would understand.
Chapter 34
Intel
BJ and Lily, two of Tony’s best computer technicians had been at it for eight hours. They had nothing. They called it in to Tony who was waiting by the phone all day. Andreas had called twice already to get a status update and fill him in on the progress of the investigation from their end. By nine o’clock, Tony went to his headquarters to check on the progress himself.
He steered into the parking lot of Alvarez Security and parked. Andreas reported to him earlier that they had found the boat. It had been abandoned twenty miles away, on a private beach near Tarpon Springs, Florida. A young couple had called it in. They had seen a man carry a woman to a parked car nearby, and gave a description of the vehicle. An APB had been sent out on the color and make, the license plate too. Once they found the boat and saw it was a rental with yet another fake identity, they had been able to track a rental car to the same name. But that car had been found in Ocala, dumped two hours later. At that point they did not know what Sal was driving. No thefts reported, and nothing rented under any of Sal’s other known identities.
All they knew so far was that Spiro Makas, aka Sal Mazzelli, Darryl James, and a Kenneth Gagne was headed North. That was what his tech people were working on now. They had several aliases on the man, and they were scouring their files and databases for properties, places the man had b
een before. Somewhere he might be taking Cat. But so far, all the places they thought were probable, turned up vacant, or others were residing in them.
He was about to call Andreas and give him the news, when a fatigued Lily jerked up from her seat at her computer station. “Hang on, I think I have something.”
Tony put his phone away. “What is it?” He jumped from his seat at the conference table.
BJ, his other technical specialist, slid across to Lily and looked over her shoulder.
“Hang on.” She hit a few keys, and a document appeared on the large screen at one end of the conference room. She began to explain what they were looking at.
It was a deed. “After getting nowhere on the aliases, I decided to look at family properties. I knew the father lost all of his, but what about the mother, I thought. And Bingo. I found out Spiro inherited a cabin. It belonged to his mother. It’s in Virginia. It was not owned by his father, so it wasn’t confiscated by the FBI. But his mother who divorced the father when Spiro was ten, didn’t own the property then. It belonged to her father. She died, let’s see, four years after her ex was arrested. But Spiro had already disappeared by then. That’s why we missed it in the first look at family properties. No one ever found it because she left it to a trust company in the name of George Spiro Makas. Her son’s middle name is George. She reversed it, or he did. After New York, he probably hid out there with his mother until she died. It was probably his safe haven. But there is nothing around the area. He probably left so he could work. I’m just assuming. It’s a long shot, but it is also not far from here. Maybe an hour’s drive. We could check it out.” She turned in her seat and looked up at her boss and friend.
The Bounty Hunters: The Marino Bros.: Box Set Page 92