Covert Christmas

by Marilyn Pappano

  “It comes in handy.” After a few steps, he said, “No way for a grown man to live, huh?”

  “No,” she murmured, though the comment surprised her. He’d never held an honest job in his life. Jobs were for suckers, he’d said. He’d often tried to talk her into quitting her own job, never understanding why it was important to her to earn her way.

  When the corridor ended, they turned left and followed a shorter hall to the front, then turned again into a lobby, glassed in on three sides. A lone light above the reception desk cast shadows across industrial carpet and overstuffed chairs.

  “Joe and Liz got married in September.” Josh stopped well back from the windows and stared out at the street. Natalia did the same. There was little traffic, and the stoplight at the nearby intersection blinked a slow, steady yellow.

  “He owes you for that. If you hadn’t taken off, she wouldn’t have come looking for you and they wouldn’t have fallen in love.”

  “I don’t know. If they were meant to be together, they would have met somehow.”

  Meant to be together. She’d let herself pretend that sometimes: that Patrick Mulroney and lies and threats had brought them together, but only because that had been fate’s intent. She’d pretended that all her problems would magically disappear, that he would never know about her deceit and they would live Happily Ever After.

  But real life had always intruded on her fantasies. A relationship based on lies could never succeed; instead of going away, her problems would bury her alive; if he managed to survive, Josh would never forgive her; there would be no Happily Ever After. Hadn’t her mother told her that from the time she was five?

  “She’s pregnant,” Josh said, still staring at the street.

  A sharp ache struck Natalia. Jealousy? Odd, since she’d really never thought about having children. Not even Josh’s. “Really. I can’t imagine a better father than Joe.”

  He looked sharply at her. “You know he loves Liz more than anything.”

  “Uh-huh.” She watched a police car pass and wondered if the officer preferred quiet nights or a nice little shoot-out to liven up the long hours, then realized that Josh was still staring at her. She met his gaze. “I knew they were in love before they did.” She’d helped save their lives, only a small part of the debt she owed the entire Saldana family. “Is Liz still with the marshals service?”

  “No. She’s working with Joe at the coffee shop until the baby’s born. Then…” He shrugged.

  Those last few weeks in Chicago, after he’d made the secret deal with the U.S. Attorney’s office, Natalia had known something was up. Suddenly he’d had little time for her, making excuses about seeing a brother she hadn’t known existed. At first she’d convinced herself that he was just working a particularly complex scam, but then she’d seen him with the woman she’d later learned was Liz. It had been a scam, all right. Just not the kind she’d expected—but exactly the kind Patrick had expected.

  Sticking to the shadows, they crossed the lobby and followed the hallway to its end. In a few moments, they were back at the break room after identifying the front doors, one side door and the rear door they’d entered. Josh gestured toward the couch. “You want to sleep?”

  “I’m fine.” She stopped in front of the pop machine, shoved her hand into her jacket pocket, then grimaced. “Twenty-eight hundred dollars in cash, and I don’t have seventy-five cents for a Coke.”

  He reached into his own pocket and pulled out a handful of change. She carefully picked out three quarters, doing her best not to touch the warm, callused skin of his palm, but her best wasn’t enough. In search of an elusive coin, her nail scraped across his hand, and his skin twitched a tiny bit.

  “You want anything?” She croaked like a frog, and immediately cleared her throat.

  “Yeah, a Coke.” He picked out three more quarters, dropped them in her hand, then went to sit at one end of the couch. He waited until the machine spit out two cans and she’d brought one to him, then taken a seat at the opposite end to speak.

  “When did you know you were setting me up for your buddy Patrick to kill?”

  Josh watched her deliberate movements as she slid a rounded nail under the ring and popped it. Fizz escaped into the air, but she didn’t take a drink right away. Instead she looked at him.

  “When I heard about the shooting on the news. They didn’t give Joe’s name at first, but they had footage from the scene. I recognized your apartment building, your truck, and I couldn’t find you. I kept calling your cell, your friends, the places where you hung out and Patrick. It was the next night when he and his brother came to see me. They were furious because I hadn’t told them you had a twin brother.”

  He’d never told anyone about Joe. It was easy enough to hide; they didn’t live in the same part of the city, frequent the same restaurants or clubs or run with the same people. The only times their lives had intersected had been at their parents’ house in the ’burbs or when they got together for occasional—private—catch-up dinners.

  Mostly it had been a lack of common interests. Twins or not, he and Joe hadn’t been close since they were kids. Partly it had been for Joe’s sake. His brother had been a hotshot investment guy who made fortunes for his clients and himself. Who would have trusted him with their money if they’d known his brother was a con artist?

  And there had been one more reason for keeping Joe’s existence from Natalia: jealousy. She’d been so damn beautiful and sexy and sweet. Why in hell would she have wanted him if she could have had his law-abiding, respectable, rich brother?

  “I didn’t believe Patrick,” she went on, her voice barely audible. “I went to the hospital and I saw you leaving with Liz. Patrick filled me in on all the details then—what he did, what you’d done, what I’d done.”

  Josh fixed his gaze on a somewhat demonic-looking Santa, its glass eyes glowing in the dark. “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “I tried. But I had nowhere to go, and Sean said…well, it made sense to stay and continue working for them.”

  What had the bastard threatened her with? No doubt, her involvement in Joe’s shooting. The Mulroneys knew who’d pulled the trigger; they’d had access to the gun. They would have had no qualms about sacrificing the shooter to punish Natalia.

  He hoped the threat of being framed for attempted murder was the only lesson she’d needed.

  “Patrick decided I needed closer supervision, so he put me to work in his office, and he kept me paired with people who taught me the ins and outs of working for them.”

  “You become an enforcer,” Josh said, a laugh choking free. “Goody Two-shoes working as muscle for organized crime.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  Was she going to protest the Goody Two-shoes or the muscle comment? It didn’t matter. Both were true, just like the worthless label Joe had hung on Josh when they were kids was true.

  “My job was watching people, sometimes finding them, occasionally intimidating them.” Pink tinged her cheeks as she talked. “I wasn’t a Goody Two-shoes.”

  Josh stretched his feet out on a nearby chair. “I got into the business young—”

  “Yeah, stealing your first car when you were five.”

  Little brother had been telling stories. He frowned at her, though there was no real annoyance behind it. “I know people. That’s part of my job. And I know that you’re no more cut out for this sort of thing than—than your landlady who doesn’t want to hear anything bad on the news. You may have the mind for it, but not the heart. Inside, you’re a good person.”

  Stubbornly she shook her head. “A good person wouldn’t have gotten indebted to Patrick Mulroney. A good person would have gone to the police as soon as she figured out what was going on. A good person understands that’s there something wrong about spying on people, about pretending to be something you’re not.”

  That was one of the big differences between them: he was able to accept and blow off the things he’d done. Oh, he had a strong
sense of right and wrong; his parents and Joe had seen to that. But when it interfered with what he wanted for himself, it was easy enough to ignore. Natalia, though, beat herself up over it. She was convinced she was going to hell for her sins. He probably was, too, but he preferred to enjoy the journey.

  Abruptly he changed the subject. “Is there an all-night drugstore around here?”

  She blinked. “Yeah, two or three blocks to the west. Do you need something?”

  “If we’re going to be out and about tomorrow, I need to do something about the way I look. Cut my hair, color it, shave…”

  Immediately she slid forward. “You stay here and I’ll—”

  His smile was thin and chiding. “Right.” He drained the last of his pop, threw the can into the trash, then pulled the pistol from his pocket. “I’m guessing you know how to use this.”

  Dislike flickered through her gaze, but she nodded.

  “Well, I don’t. The only time I’ve ever even held a gun was when I took one away from a sleeping marshal who was supposed to be watching me. The way he was slumped over, I didn’t want it to fall and go off.”

  Her mouth twitched as if she wanted to laugh but didn’t dare. Yeah, he’d been a big, bad guy, guarded twenty-four/seven by four deputy marshals. He hadn’t even taken the pistol with him when he ran. He’d left it on the dining table.

  “That was when you escaped.” She pocketed the weapon, slung the duffel over her shoulder and around her neck, then led the way down the hall to the rear entrance. “Where did you go?”

  “Everywhere. Nowhere. I laid low for a long time. Never slept the same place two nights in a row.” Miserable months. Even the marshals had been better company than he’d found in himself. That was when he’d started thinking there had to be a better life out there. He wasn’t stupid, just a little lax in morals. He could hold a regular job for a regular wage. He could live in the same town and go home to the same house every day. And if he could have a job and a house and a little self-respect, maybe someday—just maybe, he’d thought—he could have a family.

  Maybe—he watched Natalia’s long, easy steps and the sway of her hips as he followed—they could have a family. Or maybe not.

  She unlocked the door, easing it open. The parking lot was silent, everything still. She eased out, then gestured to him. Lamps buzzed and a dog in a nearby backyard barked halfheartedly as they circled the building to the street out front. She turned right, and he fell into step beside her.

  He pulled his jacket tighter. He’d never lived in the South before, but he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t supposed to be this cold. Halos formed around the streetlights, probably ice crystals, because he was already losing contact with his toes.

  “They’re saying it might snow for Christmas,” Natalia commented.

  “If I’d wanted snow, I’d’ve gone to Chicago. Jeez, I hate the cold.”

  “So why aren’t you on a beach in Mexico?”

  He gave her a wry look. “Because the U.S. has an extradition treaty with them?”

  “So if you got caught, they’d bring you back and turn you over to the marshals again.” Her shrug said what she left unspoken: Big deal.

  “And either I’d have to testify against the Mulroneys or I’d face charges myself. Either way, odds are I’d end up dead. No, thanks.”

  “You can’t run forever.”

  “No, but I can do my own version of witness relocation. I can get my own documentation, and I can settle down someplace where no one would ever look for me. Besides—” he glanced both directions before stepping off the curb “—you aren’t in Mexico. Going there wouldn’t have helped me find you at all.”

  She ducked her head but didn’t respond to that.

  The neon lights of a chain drugstore brightened the night halfway down the block. The parking lot was empty except for a police car backed into an outside space. It was empty, too. Great.

  A blast of heat greeted them as they went through the double doors. The cop was standing at the cash register, hands in his pockets, a big ugly gun on his hip. The clerk greeted them, and the cop gave them a once-over and a nod before returning to his conversation.

  Natalia headed straight to the hair color halfway down the first aisle, scanning the boxes and quickly selecting a nice, plain brown. Next they got shaving stuff, a cheap bath towel and a pair of scissors, and he grabbed a couple of hoodies on the way to the checkout.

  Cops made him antsy—had for as long as he could remember. Of course, he’d had his first run-in with them when he was five. That had been enough to put him off the entire profession for the rest of his life.

  “How you doing?” the cop asked as they unloaded their purchases on the counter.

  Natalia stiffened, making Josh’s grin broader than he’d intended. “We’re freezing our asses off. How about you?”

  “Yeah, this weather is something. My kids are all excited about the chance of snow, but me, I’ll take warm weather any time.”

  “I’m with you, buddy.” He pulled out two twenties and handed them to the clerk, then pocketed the change. “Stay warm. And Merry Christmas.”

  “Yeah, you, too.”

  Picking up the bags in one hand, he steered Natalia toward the door with the other. As soon as they reached the far side of the parking lot again, tension rushed from her body, leaving her soft and warm beneath his palm.

  “I hate cops,” she murmured.

  “One of the side effects of the life you’ve chosen.”

  She stepped away from his touch, then did something so rare in all the time he’d known her that his feet stopped moving: She told him something personal. “My father was a cop.”

  It took him only a second to get his feet working again, quickly enough that he doubted she’d even noticed his hesitation. In their time together, she’d told him exactly three things about her family: the bit about her grandmother, that she had two sisters and that she hadn’t seen them in a long time. He didn’t even know where she came from.

  He couldn’t think what to say. His first impulse was to pounce on it, to ask as many questions as he could get out while her confiding mood lasted. Since he knew it wouldn’t last, all he managed was a mildly curious, “Where?”

  She shoved her hair back, making him wish it was the short, pale brown he was accustomed to. Hardly enough to run my fingers through, he’d teased while he did just that. It was soft and fine as silk and he’d liked stroking it while she had stroked—

  Oh, man.

  “Florida,” she said at last. “Orlando.”

  Wow. She was being damn near chatty. “I’ve always wondered…do families who live in Orlando go to Disney World or is that strictly a tourist thing?”

  “Not our family.” Her voice was as flat as her expression was fierce. Did she miss them that much? Or had they been that bad of a nightmare?

  “What were they like?”

  She kicked a piece of gravel and sent it skittering into the street. “The usual—Mom, Dad, his girlfriend, their two illegitimate daughters and me.”

  “Cozy. Mom and the girlfriend didn’t object to each other?”

  “Mom did. They fought about it a lot. Then he’d hit her and she’d let it drop…until the last time. She said if he wanted Traci that much, she’d get out of his way, and she took a fistful of pills with a bottle of rum. He moved Traci and their daughters in the day of the funeral.” A long pause. “I was eight.”

  She said… “You were with her?” Josh couldn’t keep the shock from his voice. No eight-year-old child should have to see her mother die. It was beyond cruel.

  “I couldn’t call 911 because he’d broken the phone when they were fighting, and I couldn’t go to the neighbor’s house because he’d locked us in.”

  Her sigh was so heavy and icy that he half expected to hear it shatter when it hit the pavement. How long had she been alone with her dead mother before the bastard had come back home? Had he given a damn about the trauma his little girl had gone through?
Had he been the least bit sorry?

  One look at Natalia, so stiff and self-contained, answered that.

  Jesus.

  As he tried to think of something worth saying, they approached the final street before their office building. A tire store sat on the corner, closed up tight. Heaps of old tires stood beside the building beneath a faded sign: Recycle tires here. That would make his environmentally-conscious brother happy.

  “Listen, Nat—”

  “Crap.” Grabbing his arm, she yanked him toward the tires so hard that he damn near sprained an ankle. He followed her into the tiniest space she could find, burrowing like rats into a hole, and waited, barely breathing, for an explanation.

  It came a moment later in the rumble of a heavy engine cruising up the street. They watched through cracks between tires as a black SUV came into sight. It was moving well below the speed limit, and despite the cold, the deeply-tinted windows were rolled down, giving them a good view of Mickey Davison in the passenger seat. His thick head was moving constantly, scanning from side to side, and his mouth was running, as it usually was.

  His lungs giving out completely, Josh watched until they drove from sight, then sat down on his butt and exhaled. “Jeez, I’m too old for this shit.”

  Chapter 4

  Natalia sat down beside him, ignoring the cold that instantly seeped into her jeans. Their space was so tight that her knees were bent practically to her chest, and all she could smell if she looked to the left was rubber.

  To the right, it was Josh. His cologne was clean, citrusy, summery, and he smelled of danger. Enticement. The promise of pure pleasure.

  Why had she told him so much about her family? He didn’t care. He couldn’t. He hadn’t even said I’m sorry, though to be fair, he hadn’t had much chance. But even back then, most people hadn’t known what to say.

  Her father hadn’t had trouble. Good riddance. I was tired of her, anyway.

  Neither had Traci. Too bad the bitch didn’t take her brat with her.