by Grayson Cole
Sadly, the unpleasant events from the night before began to crash in on her musings. Michael confronting her father on her behalf, discovering that Michael had been telling the truth about Elphonse all along, and then the car that had missed her only by inches. She couldn’t figure it out. What was going on? Hatsheput, and especially Nya herself, were apparently the center of something major, but what? She finished showering, still trying to put everything into context.
She entered the kitchen to see her plate already fixed and Michael loading her dishwasher. She sat waiting for him to join her at the table and began, tentatively, to eat. She didn’t realize how hungry she was until she tasted the first delicious morsel and felt her stomach rumble in appreciation.
“This is delicious,” she said to him as he joined her at the table. “Who taught you how to cook?
Michael toyed with the eggs on his plate, pondering her question. “My mother was the best cook you ever laid eyes on, and when I was very small and my father was still living, I would watch her Sunday mornings when she always cooked us a big breakfast then put dinner on. It was like a ritual for her. Everything was always done with so much care, even down to when she would spread out the flour to roll out the biscuit dough. She never really said much, especially when she cooked, just hummed something like “Go Tell It On the Mountain” or “Joshua Fought the Battle” and went about her business. Even after my father passed, she kept Sundays for us. I guess it was how she showed she cared. As I said, she never really said much.” Nya watched the way he studied his plate almost shyly as he spoke. “Anyway, when I was older and Claude was off at school, I took care of that for us: me, Darryn, and my sister Kimberly. I don’t know, I guess I cook for people out of habit.” And out of love. It wasn’t necessary that the latter be said, they both sensed it in their hearts.
“Me, too,” Nya responded. Then she felt that she should make her own confession. “Michael,” she ventured, staring down at her own plate, “I believe you.” She sucked in her breath.
She felt rather than saw him look up at her, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I believe you about Elphonse. I didn’t want to see it before—he’s been through so much you don’t know about—but I know he deliberately mislead you for the article. And I believe there is more to this than I have been willing to admit.” Michael sat silently, still appearing a little taken aback. She plunged ahead. “I wish I could say that I simply came to believe you of my own volition, but that isn’t the way it happened. He and I are so close, you know. I heard you and him talking last night at the event. That’s when I left. I just didn’t think I could handle anything else. But I guess the night was still young.” She smiled ruefully.
“Nya, you know I have been waiting anxiously for the moment when you would believe me. I feel like he’s the only thing that’s come between us, you know. But this was not the way I wanted it to happen. Last night, Elphonse did tell me that he never meant to hurt you and that he cared about you. I have to admit, I believed him.”
Nya felt a shiver go through her, not knowing how to feel. “If he cared, would he have done it?”
“I can’t answer that question. Look, do you remember Detective Laymon from last night?”
“Yeah, your friend.”
“Yeah, he’s a retired FBI agent. The guy knows his stuff and he still has connections. I asked him to look into Deklerk a few weeks ago. Early this morning, he called with some information. Information I’m sure you already have. I know why you can’t believe he would work with Mandolesi.”
Nya stopped eating and rubbed a hand over her face.
“You have to tell me everything you know, everything you’ve been holding back about him.”
She turned her glistening eyes to Michael, who waited patiently. Her shoulders hung in defeat. “I thought I knew him, but I don’t. Not anymore.”
“Nya, just tell me what happened. How do you know Rinaldo Mandolesi?”
“We all know Rinaldo.” She puffed out a strained breath. Just saying the name made her shudder with fear and anger. “And he knows us. His decision to use Art Sentries as a front was completely personal.”
“Personal?” Michael asked.
Nya closed her eyes and nodded. “It’s important that I tell you, Michael. It’s just hard,” she confessed in a low, hoarse voice.
“Take your time, sweetheart. I’m here.” He reached out and took her shaking hands in his.
Nya swallowed before she made eye contact once more. “First, I should say that you can’t really judge him by the way he is now.”
“Mandolesi or Deklerk?”
“Elphonse. He’s nothing like he used to be. He’s undergone a lot of changes in the past few years. When we were kids, he was wild and fun, I mean crazy. You should have seen him. There was nothing he couldn’t do, nothing he wouldn’t do. When we were younger, it was all very exciting, you know. You wouldn’t believe the things he got me into,” she said with a rueful smile. “He was so cool and so free with his long dreads and wild clothes.”
Michael raised a skeptical brow to that.
“No, really. And we all loved him for it. But as we got older, he started getting into a lot more stuff and a whole lot more trouble. He was unpredictable and… and…”
“Angry?”
“No.” She smiled. “No, he was never angry. He was invincible, and he always believed he was the exception to any rule.”
“He was spoiled?”
“Maybe. I think my father may have had a hand in that, you know.” Nya felt a reassuring squeeze of her hand. “Anyway, we were all worried that he’d either be in jail or dead if he kept on. His mother tried to tell him. I tried to tell him. My father tried to tell him. But no matter what we did, he wasn’t hearing it. He decided not to go to college right after high school. He didn’t get a job right away, either, but he had a swank condo, fast cars, and I noticed that when he took us ladies out, he did it up. You know, grandstanding. In every club he was a VIP. In every exotic boutique, he was the guy who shut it down for us to shop.”
“I can’t imagine you being into that sort of thing.”
“I was a kid.” Nya shrugged. “Anyway, Lysette and I went off to school. Jenine was working in the Atlanta office, and El met Dina. I swear they must have fallen in love at first sight because one minute he was telling me about meeting her, the next he was saying he wanted to marry her. Unfortunately for him, she had already been branded, by Rinaldo Mandolesi.”
“She was his girlfriend?”
“Of sorts. We don’t even know how she got involved with Mandolesi. The girl was soft-spoken, sweet, mature. She was so kind, it was just hard to believe. But yes, she was Rinaldo’s number one girl, kept like his favorite pet.”
“And El was fast rising in Mandolesi’s organization.”
“Yes.”
“Not smart.”
“It gets worse. From my understanding, they were hardly ever apart. It was like El was so drawn to her calm and her quietness because it wasn’t like anything he’d ever known. When he found it within her, all he talked about was leaving the streets behind. In some ways, he didn’t feel worthy because she loved him so selflessly and he hadn’t done anything with his life. He didn’t think he had anything to offer.”
“But she was in the game, too.”
“Yeah, she was. And, I think in some ways that kept him locked to it. He wanted to get what he could get, as fast as he could get it, and as long as she was living that same lifestyle, she didn’t pressure him to get out. She wanted him to, I know she did, but Dina wasn’t a hypocrite. She was a lot of things, but a hypocrite was not one of them. He changed his appearance to look more conservative, lost his accent, and—at least on the surface—seemed to be a more mature person. He stopped running the streets. But, Michael, it didn’t take long for us to figure out he was in deeper than ever. He would swear to us all the time that he was going to get out of the game as soon as he could and settle down.”
&
nbsp; “But he didn’t need the money.”
Nya made an expression trapped between a smile and a wince. “It’s hard to explain. El’s mother and my mother came from the same neighborhood, grew up next door to each other. Neither one of them had much to start with, but their lives took very different paths. They were close, but not close in a way. When they finished school, my mother went on to college and met my father. El’s mother started working in a hotel and never left the neighborhood. When El was born, his father took off and my dad stepped in to help with him. At first El clung to him, but as he got older, there was this barrier between them. It turned into both love and resentment after El’s mother passed when we were adolescents. My father took him in, educated him, guided him and offered him a job every chance he could get. But El said he didn’t want anything from him. He rebelled against my father.”
“Like you do.”
“I don’t. I don’t. Not like El. He’s complicated.” Nya stood and paced the kitchen. “He loved my dad, but he always remembered that my dad wasn’t really his father. It’s like it hung over him all the time.” She took a deep breath and came to stand in front of Michael. He rose and looped his arms around her. “Anyway, El eventually asked her to marry him.”
“She was still with Mandolesi? El still on the sneak?”
Nya nodded against his chest.
Michael pulled back to study her face. “Did the man have a death wish?”
“He said he had it all figured out. Of course she said no, and I think she thought that was the end of it. What’s crazy is that he let Dina think that. He and I both knew if she thought he was going to do something stupid, she would break it off to protect him. I told him that I would tell her he was planning something, if he didn’t. He said he just needed a little more time. I guess I shouldn’t have listened, and I’ll regret that I didn’t until I die, but I never said anything to her. Never.” Nya swallowed and turned her head.
Michael walked her into the den and sat with her on the couch. He could see the turmoil she was going through as she told the story.
“As I said El was still up to old tricks, but the stakes were higher. At the worst, he was running merchandise, so to speak, for Rinaldo Mandolesi.” She heard Michael gasp and knew that he understood completely the magnitude of what she said. She took a deep breath, her throat closing against her as she spoke. “I didn’t know how far he had gone until it was over, or I would have done something.”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
She swallowed and continued. “So he had planned one last deal. It was a big operation, using an old sub bought from Columbia to make a big run up past the Florida coast, all the way to Carolinas.”
“I remember that story. I remember something about Mandolesi being implicated.”
“Yeah, well, El had planned to take the money he made from expediting that deal and run off with Dina. When he finally told her what he was doing, Dina asked him not to take the deal, said they didn’t need the money. El told her that he wouldn’t.”
“But he lied?”
Nya nodded. “So what we didn’t know was that there were a few things Dina wasn’t telling any of us, either. On the night the big deal was supposed to go down, the DEA raided the warehouse and the pier where the deal was supposed to happen.” Michael sucked in his breath. “It turned out that Dina had a plan of her own to get them out.”
“She informed?”
“Yeah. She did. But, Mandolesi had his own eyes and ears out there, too. He’d been alerted about the job, and he and Elphonse were nowhere near when the DEA raided the place. Instead, they were at one of Rinaldo’s compounds on a neighboring island. He was filling El in on the foiled raid when one of his henchmen dragged Dina into the room with them. She must have been surprised, too, because she hesitated.” Nya’s voice was choked with tears. “Rinaldo knew she’d been seeing El on the side and he knew she had been the one to turn him in.”
“No,” Michael whispered, seeming to anticipate what was coming next.
“Mandolesi shot her in the head right in front of El.”
“Jesus,” Michael gasped.
“El didn’t even have time to react. Immediately after that, they were subdued and taken to a federal holding cell. Nobody trusted our police to keep them.”
“But Mandolesi still got off?” It was more a statement of fact than a question.
Nya nodded her head. “He got off because the other guy who was there, the one who kidnapped Dina, took the charge for him. El said that he had even taken the gun and shot Dina once before he was subdued to protect Rinaldo.”
“Elphonse didn’t testify against him?”
“Our lawyers told him it wouldn’t matter. He was facing his own charges.”
“But he got off, too?”
“Yeah. We have excellent lawyers. They called it entrapment.”
“And now they’re working together again,” Michael sneered disgustedly.
“No, Michael, you don’t understand. He loved her. He was devastated when she died, and he blamed himself.”
“As well he should have,” Michael retorted. “Entrapment? She warned him to stay away.”
“I understand, but if he hadn’t done it, he would have gone to prison. Don’t you understand? He had no choice.”
“I understand that now he does have a choice and he’s choosing the wrong thing. Maybe he should have gone to prison, Nya, have you considered that?”
“Michael,” she protested.
“No, Nya. You think about it. Who does Deklerk really love, based on the evidence? Deklerk.”
She turned away from him to stare out of the window. Everything he said made sense, but still, she didn’t want to believe it. It hurt so much. If Elphonse really was working with Mandolesi, he didn’t have a heart anymore. And there was no other explanation she could think of; it all just fit too well. She felt Michael’s hand entwine with her own. She squeezed back.
“How did El get out? If what you say is true and he didn’t roll on Mandolesi, how did he manage to walk the straight and narrow afterward? You don’t just walk away from the kind of organization he was in.”
“I don’t know.”
She could practically see the thoughts and permutations running through Michael’s head. Before she could ask what he was planning, her phone rang. “Good morning, Lysette?”
“Good morning, chick. Where’d you go last night?”
“I ah… had to get away. It was just stifling in there and… ah…”
“Do you know who you’re talking to? You can’t lie to me. Everybody was worried, and I heard you and Michael were talking to undercovers in the parking garage.”
“How would anybody know if we were talking to ‘undercovers,’ as you say?”
“Is it true?”
“Yeah, we were talking about the case.”
“Then I’m going to need you to fill me in after I tell you this.”
“What’s that?”
“You know my last day was Friday, right?”
“Yes, and you couldn’t be happier.”
“Right! So I went in this morning to clear some things up. I didn’t want to leave a mess. Anyway, I went through those boxes for you and—”
Michael held up her empty coffee mug and pointed to it.
“Yeah, I’ll have some more,” she whispered.
“Who are you talking to? Oh, my God! Is Michael Harrison in your house this early in the morning?”
Nya cleared her throat. “Yes. We’ll talk about that later. For now, can you tell me what you found.”
“The rest of the shipment.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The rest of the shipment. There was supposed to be another Bernard French piece in that group you found. It wasn’t there because El—I have his signature right here—asked that a couple of pieces be held back.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes?”
“Where are the crates now?”
“Send everything to my phone. Everything.”
“So now will you tell me—”
“ ’Sette, I can’t talk right now. I promise I’ll call you later.”
Immediately she was dialing again to make arrangements for the jet to take her to St. Thomas as soon as possible.
“You’re not going alone. I don’t know what you intend to do, but you won’t do it alone.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you, Michael.”
He tilted her face up to his, forcing her to hear what he said. “If it has to do with you, it has everything to do with me. We’re also going to have to report everything we know as soon as we land and check those crates. I don’t want to say anything yet, because we can’t run the risk of someone beating us to them.”
“But El already knows.”
“So we have to hope we beat him to them. He’s in Birmingham right now.”
Nya crumpled. Tears again were flowing. “Please, God, don’t let El have anything to do with this.”
Chapter 16
“Damn it, you could have killed her, Rinaldo!” Elphonse yelled into his phone.
“That was the plan.”
“That was not the plan,” Elphonse ground out.
“Maybe it wasn’t yours. She’s gotten in the way too many times. In Norfolk she got in the way, and if she saw those photographs…”
“I told you she didn’t. I got them for you, didn’t I?”
“If she saw those photographs, she’s still in the way. So I’m eliminating that problem all together. Or at least I will. A pity I didn’t send a more skilled driver. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
“Me? Of, of course not. Well at least…at least…” Elphonse didn’t know how to handle this new twist; things were getting too hot. Then it came to him. “Let me do it.”
“Hmmmm?” He could hear Rinaldo’s doubt through the phone. Then he was laughing. “I like your style, Deklerk, I really do. However, I’m not so sure you mean it.”