“Excuse me?”
“The doctor. When I was in the coma.”’
“Oh, him. Yeah, it was tragic. I heard about it the morning after it happened.”
“Why didn’t you mention it?”
“You had more important things to worry about. Besides, I found you a new doctor. Why are you here? Like this? What’s this about, Cristiano?”
“Did you know the drug he gave me would cause me to lose my memories?”
He exhales, shakes his head and sips his drink. “It was a possibility, yes. I knew that. But it was the only option. Your life was what mattered at that point. You were barely holding on. Did you want me to take a chance with your life when your brother was counting on you?”
Guilt. I drink more whiskey. “I don’t remember them,” I say.
He sighs deeply. “It’s possible you’ll remember someday.”
“I doubt it.” I walk around the desk and open the album again to look at the photo of mom on her own. She’s lying back on a pool chair, huge hat on her head, legs strewn over the arm of the chair as she reads. I get the feeling she didn’t know she was being observed or that someone had taken the photo. She was always skittish when the camera came out. Said she didn’t look like herself in pictures.
My uncle is beside me then. “She was a beautiful woman.” He brushes dust I don’t see off the image.
I shift just my gaze to study him, hearing something strange in his words, remembering what Charlie said.
Was I blind?
His eyes meet mine and for the briefest of moments, I see something foreign. Something cold.
But he blinks and it’s gone. And he’s the man he’s always been to me. He smiles and the familiar lines crease the skin around his eyes. It’s just my imagination.
“Sometimes it’s better to forget, Cristiano.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’ll tell you about her. About all of them.”
“What did the couple you had me kill do to support the massacre of my family?”
“You mean the massacre of our family.”
I wait for his answer.
“Let me show you,” he says, moving around his desk to unlock a drawer. “I didn’t want you to see these. I didn’t want to bring up old pain. Forgotten pain. But someone’s put a bug in your ear, and you’re determined, I see.”
He takes out a manila envelope, opens it to glance at whatever is on the first page before turning to me.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
I nod. My heart is racing, my gut twisted. But honestly, I don’t know what he could show me that could overwrite what Charlie has shown me.
“Here.” He hands over the envelope and sits down to rifle through the drawer again.
I sit, too, and look through the few pages. They’re bank statements, several lines highlighted. The amounts transferred from one account to the other make up a generous sum. There’s a photo before that. Several. They’re of my father and the man I killed. They’re arguing, it’s apparent from the image. I check the date. It’s a year before the murders. I compare to the date on the bank transfers. Three months prior.
“He and your father had a… falling out,” my uncle says when I look at him. “When your father blackmailed him.”
“Blackmail?”
He nods. “I told you, there was a reason I didn’t give you these.” He hands me the next folder. “I wouldn’t want you to lose respect for your father.”
Something dark tightens in my gut at his words. “My father didn’t blackmail anyone.”
“You didn’t know the business yet, Cristiano. You were too young. Michael knew. Michael was being groomed.”
I look through the next folder. Again, a transfer of funds to the same account as the previous.
“Your father wasn’t the man you thought, perhaps. But maybe you forget that he was a criminal. As are you. He chose that life. As have you.”
Something about how he says it hits me the wrong way. I’m not sure what it is, the tone or the words or maybe just the look in his eyes.
“Do you want to see more? Maybe Michael’s involvement? He would have been your father’s successor, after all.”
“No.” I close the folders and consider the evidence Charlie brought. Why hadn’t he found these? He was thorough. He’s always thorough.
“We need to take care with Dante now, Cristiano. Keep him out of that world.”
At least we’re in agreement there.
“Who turned you against me?” my uncle asks.
“It’s not like that.”
“Who?”
My phone buzzes in my pocket but I ignore it.
“Should I take a guess?”
The phone dings notifying me of a voice mail.
I finish my drink and set it down, reach into my pocket to take out my phone. “Do you think Alec tipped off Jacob to Scarlett’s location?” I ask.
“You know I do. Everyone else died. Everyone was executed. That was sloppily done on his part. An amateur move.”
“Why would he do it, though? What does he have to gain?” I ask him, phone in the palm of my hand.
“You should ask him that.”
“Or do you think he was left alive to throw me off track? Send me barking up the wrong tree?”
He snorts, shifts his gaze to the photo album, closes it.
I look down at my phone. The name of the caller I missed flashes on the screen and for a moment I’m not sure I’m seeing it correctly.
My uncle starts to say something as I push the button to play the voice mail and bring the phone to my ear. Felix’s accented voice and the pumping of blood against my ears drowns out my uncle’s words.
“I have a location. He just got there but I’d hurry. He has a nickname, I’m told. The Minute Man.” Felix chuckles. “The Rose Club. Back rooms. Where the real action is.” The message ends.
My throat is dry. My uncle is still droning on. I feel sweat already bead at my forehead. Feel my hands fist.
Without a word, I turn and walk out of the study and out of the house because tonight is the night Marcus Rinaldi dies.
22
Cristiano
The Rose Club is a high-end strip club for all intents and purposes. On the front end, at least. Four soldiers enter with me, flanking me.
Back rooms. Where the real action is.
The back rooms are where the more illicit events take place. Where drugs are sold. Where women are sold. Where those with more deviant desires are sated.
I stop just inside the deep velvet curtains that are so dark a violet they appear to be black. The lights are subdued, and three stages showcase three separate dancers. Two bars take up the whole wall at either end of the large room with glass shelf upon glass shelf of the highest quality liquor up to the vaulted ceiling. Throughout this room are situated richly upholstered deep violet chairs to match the curtains separating this room from the other spaces.
“He doesn’t get out. Not tonight,” I tell my men.
They all nod. I have two more men out front and two at every other possible exit.
“There.” In the farthest corner I spot the two men who clearly don’t belong here. They’re standing on this side of a closed door, their jeans and T-shirts out of place. The ill-fitting jackets they are wearing, obviously borrowed, and the looks on their faces that of men who’ve never seen girls like this before.
He cannot be this stupid.
“Key,” I say to the madam who is standing nearby.
“He’s in the back rooms. I told you. I don’t want trouble in here.”
“I said key.”
“Sir, I—”
I turn to her and she backs up a step when she sees my face. I lean toward her. She’s five feet tall tops. “Key.”
A moment later, the key card is in my hand. Modern, like a hotel room key.
I make my way through the center of the room to the door where the two men stand sentry. When they can drag their lecherous gazes from the women t
o finally notice us, they’re too late to reach beneath their borrowed jackets before my men have disarmed them.
They start to speak in Spanish, words hurried, any loyalty Marcus thought he had gone.
“Take them out back,” I tell my men, my eyes locked on that door. I hold the keycard up against the electronic pad and listen to the satisfying click as a green light blinks. I push the door open to find another corridor. The carpet, walls and ceiling are black. Sloppily done. No doors in this corridor. At the end, I come upon the second part of the club. The one the tourists don’t see.
A security guard meets my eyes as he slips his phone into his pocket. I’m sure that was the madam announcing my arrival.
Without a word, he gestures to a door at the far end, then slips past me and into the corridor I just walked through.
My men and I cross the large, dimly lit space to the lone door at the far end. There, I use the same key card to enter.
Soundproofing must have cost a fortune in this place because I’m instantly assaulted by the sound of heavy metal music playing loudly. In the front room, the music is lighter, something the girls can dance to. I close the door behind me.
The downstairs room is large, open. Dark like the corridor. A set of stairs leads up to the second floor. I hear a man’s laughter coming from the bedroom with the door ajar, followed by the sound of footsteps above. Whoever is descending won’t see us before we see them but it’s not Marcus. These men are speaking Spanish.
As soon as they get downstairs, my soldiers grab them from behind, guns to their temples. One is wearing a dirty tank top, the other a white T-shirt stained and stretched tight over his gigantic gut.
The two are surprised. Again, I wonder if Marcus is stupid or if this is a trap Felix set. I smile, put my finger to my lips as my men easily take hold of them and move them out the door.
I walk up the stairs, pistol at my side. I’m oddly calm. My heartbeat under control. My mind razor sharp and focused.
I hear a woman then. A woman’s scream. It’s muffled quickly and just for a moment, I have to stop because it takes me back. Takes me to my mom’s screams. He didn’t try to muffle those.
The bedroom door is open a crack and the large bed is across the room. A woman is lying on her back, arms stretched out to the sides, held by soldiers. They watch as Marcus, his hand over her mouth, has his way with her. I’m not sure if he paid for the act or if he’s taking what he wants.
She’s the first to see me. I know because her eyes go from wide to panicked.
Marcus’s ugly ass bobs in my line of vision and it takes all I have to stay focused. To stay here. Because if I go back to the night of the massacre, I’ll be powerless. I may as well be lying in a pool of my own blood again.
Without a word, I lift my weapon and point it between the eyes of the man to the woman’s right.
Bang!
The woman screams but Marcus presses his hand harder against her mouth, unaware why she’s screaming over the too loud music.
The man falls to the wall, drops into a chair there.
Marcus laughs the high-pitched insane laughter of the stoned.
The other soldier turns from his fallen colleague to me. I fire in the same instant his mouth opens. Bang! Red splatters against the wall behind him.
I see Marcus’s head shoot up. He looks at the wall, then at the second man I killed. He shifts his gaze to the first one. His ugly ass has finally stopped its in out motion.
“What the—”
“Get up,” I say.
He turns slowly to me and the woman beneath him scrambles off the bed. She falls to the floor, scurrying to collect her things, then runs out of the room and down the stairs.
“Keep her inside,” I call out to the soldiers downstairs. I don’t want her alerting anyone.
“Fuck!” Marcus scrambles too. Falling over the edge of the bed as I make my way around it. I know what he wants. The gun on top of his jeans. The idiot still has his T-shirt on but he’s bare-assed.
“Move. Opposite wall.” I point to the one farthest from the gun.
“My men are outside,” he threatens.
“No, they’re not,” I say, taking his pistol and unloading it. I toss his jeans to him. “Get dressed. I don’t need to see your dick.”
He snorts, gives me a one-sided grin. I’m not sure if he’s high or drunk or both. Maybe just plain old stupid. Which only reaffirms that he was not the brains of the operation that took down my family.
“Your mom sure liked my dick.”
I breathe.
Slow. Steady. Deep.
Calm.
Stay calm.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I can’t rush this. Can’t kill him without finding out what he said. He’s dying tonight. That’s non-negotiable.
I keep my eyes on his as I raise my pistol to aim it at his now-limp dick.
“You want me to shoot it off before we get started?”
He puts up both hands, palms to me. His pupils are dilated. The fucker is stoned and stupid.
“Get fucking dressed.”
He bends down to pick up his jeans and I watch him try to balance as he pulls them on. I see how dirty they are. How dirty the T-shirt is.
He’s barefoot but I don’t care about that. As soon as he’s got his jeans on, I empty my gun of bullets and toss it aside, pocketing the ammunition.
Marcus looks confused.
I approach him but he doesn’t move. Not at first. He’s still looking at the discarded gun.
“I’m going to kill you with my hands,” I tell him.
He lunges for the gun then even though it’s useless.
I extend my leg and trip him. He goes down hard, slamming his face into the low wooden footboard of the bed.
“Fuck!”
“Idiot.” I walk to him, get on one knee and turn him over, straddling him, but leaving his arms free. I want him to fight. I want this to last. I want his death to be a slow one.
The first punch sends his head to the side, blood spurting from his nose or mouth. I don’t know, or care, which.
“Does it turn you on to hold them down, is that it?” I ask, hitting him again. The girls here are rented by the hour. “Tell me, bastard.” I hit him again. “Can’t get it up if they’re willing?”
“Fuck you!” He stretches to his right and a moment later, I take a hit to my temple with the butt of the emptied gun.
“That was my bad,” I tell him as the room spins like the fucking cherries on a slot machine. He scrambles out from under me trying to get to the nightstand.
I reach him as he opens the drawer. I can see why he went there and not the door. Bullets. Fucker.
“Afraid to use your fists?” I ask him smashing his skull into the wall, pulling him back and doing it again before I release him.
He slides to the floor looking dazed, arms at his sides.
This isn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. It just feels sick.
“Tell me what you said,” I say, taking him by the hair and pulling him up to stand.
“How’s your girlfriend? Or is it wife by now? You like dipping your dick in my sloppy seconds?”
I smash my fist into his gut.
I have to remember why I’m here. I have to stay focused. If I get distracted, if I kill him before he tells me, I’ll never know.
“Tell me what you said to my mother before you killed her.”
“You know, you did me a favor. I never wanted that whore. Turned my stomach to look at her. At the lot of those fucking Mexicans.”
I’m tempted to smash his head in again, but I don’t want to cause further brain damage before I get what I came for. Instead, I hold him upright, put my foot on his knee and push. Just a little. Just enough to get his attention.
“You’re dying tonight, Marcus. It can be a very painful death. Or it can be slightly less painful. You know what hurts like a mother fucker?” Not that I know from experience. I’ve never fel
t it, but I have a pretty decent imagination for these things. I put a little more pressure on his knee and his eyes go wider. “You know your knees don’t bend that way, right?”
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to do it,” he starts blubbering like the fucking coward he is. “I fucking swear, man!”
I pull back a little, something cold running down my spine.
“Tell me what you said to her.”
“He told me to do it. He said I had to make her watch. He told me who to kill first. Michael. He’s the strongest.”
“Was. He was the strongest.”
“Make her husband watch. Make the bastards watch.”
My hands are fisting, one in his hair, one at my side.
“Who? Felix? Was it Felix?”
He looks confused for a minute, then one corner of his mouth curves upward. “No, man. I don’t fucking take orders from the fucking Mexicans.”
“Then who?”
He studies me, his eyes seeming to clear a little. One corner of his mouth curves upward. He shakes his head and clucks his tongue. “You were supposed to die. You weren’t supposed to live.”
I put my foot back on his knee. “What. Did. You. Say. To. Her?”
“You want to know what I said to mommy?” he asks.
It’s taking all I have not to kill him, but I push harder on his knee.
His eyes go wide. “You’ll make it quick then? You swear?”
“I swear.” Lie.
“I passed along his message. Just like he wanted.”
The cold that just found its way down my spine fills my veins. “What. Message?”
“I told her David sends his regards.”
The room goes silent. Or maybe it’s the ringing in my ears that has drowned out all the noise. Whatever it is, I’m paralyzed. And it costs me because I hear the click first. I recognize what it is an instant before I feel the tear at my side, feel the cold of the blade as it cuts through skin and muscle as I hear what he said. As I make sense of it. As I understand.
Marcus grins.
I stumble backward, hand on my side, blood warm through my fingers.
“Back pocket,” he says. “Always check the back pocket. That’s a tip for you.” He picks up his gun, loads some bullets. “Not that you’ll need it.”
I Thee Take: To Have and To Hold Duet Book Two Page 11