Uptown Thief

by Aya De León

  “Hispanic male, mid forties, three shots through the chest,” his partner said.

  As he spoke, Raul arrived with Robbery Detective John Mathias.

  “We’ve got some info on this case,” Mathias said, flashing his badge. “We’re out of the Central Robbery Squad.”

  Raul stood in the background.

  “Let’s have it,” one of the detectives said.

  “Miss Rivera here was a witness in one of our cases,” Mathias said.

  Raul jumped in. “Around the same time, she was publicly threatened by this guy, Jerry Rios, local pimp.” He explained the situation.

  “Pimp connected to your robbery case?” one detective asked.

  “Not that we know of,” Mathias said.

  “I say let the forensics team do their job,” Raul concluded. “But let’s assume that everything’s gonna check out with ballistics. You could just confiscate the gun and call it a night.”

  “What do you think?” one detective asked the other.

  “I think I’m ready to go to bed,” the other replied. “But I don’t want ballistics to find out that he was actually shot with some other gun that’s linked to seven different homicides and the women involved have skipped town.”

  Raul made eye contact with Marisol. “I can vouch for them.”

  “Our sergeant isn’t gonna like a man with three bullets in him, an illegal weapon, and no one in custody,” one detective said.

  “That’s Sergeant Brooks in homicide, right?” Raul asked.

  They nodded.

  “Brooks and Detective Mathias here go way back to the academy,” Raul said. “Like Detective Mathias said in the car on the way over, he’d stake his badge and his career on this woman’s innocence.”

  “Detective,” Mathias said, “this situation is not worth missing any more sleep.”

  “Good enough for me,” one detective said. “If anything goes wrong, we released her on your word.”

  “Done,” his partner agreed. “You’re free to go, Ms. Rivera.”

  Marisol felt a slight loosening in her solar plexus as the two homicide cops headed down the stairs.

  “You hear that?” Raul said to Marisol after the detectives had gone. “You’re free to go.”

  “Only because you put my reputation on the line,” Mathias hissed at Raul. “And because they think you’re a cop.”

  “Should I be flattered or insulted?” Raul asked.

  Mathias put a warning finger in Raul’s face. “It’s not a joke,” he said. “If this comes back to bite me in any way, it’s your ass, Barrios.”

  “Nothing’s gonna come back to bite you, Matty, because she’s telling the truth,” he said, all the humor gone from his voice. “I don’t have a badge or a career, but I would stake my life on that.”

  “How noble,” Mathias muttered as he walked out.

  Raul pulled Marisol aside, out of range of the coroner’s staff.

  Marisol slumped down on the couch. She watched like a sentry as they put Jerry on a stretcher, and the forensics staffers bagged and tagged his gun, phone, and hat.

  “Marisol.” Raul sat next to her on the couch. “Can we talk? I—”

  “You should leave,” she said.

  “Okay, but first I just wanna apologize—”

  She tensed back up. “Not while there’s still a single cop in this building.”

  Marisol rested her head on the back of the couch. Her hair fell back, revealing the bruise on the side of her face.

  “Are you all right?” Raul asked. “What happened?”

  “One hit,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Hold on,” he said, and fetched an ice pack from the mini-fridge in her office. He raised a hand to put it on her face.

  She pulled away. “I’ll do it.”

  He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “You guys just about done?” he asked the forensics team.

  “We’ll seal the place in a few minutes.”

  Marisol held the ice on her face, eyes closed against the cold.

  * * *

  When the front door clicked behind the last of the forensics team, Marisol slumped down onto the couch and let out the breath she’d been holding. She looked across the downstairs lobby at Raul, who was standing with his hands in his pockets.

  “Okay,” she said. “Say whatever you need to say.”

  “Marisol, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I was drunk when I called you, but that’s no excuse. I was totally outta line. I get why you don’t want to talk to me. I’m just glad you called me. Glad I was able to help and you’re free.”

  But Marisol didn’t feel free. She felt like a seventeen-year-old girl standing at the top of the stairs with a dead man’s keys in her hand.

  She had been so alone then, some part of her had been braced for the next nightmare ever since. But this time it was different. She had called Raul and he’d come. He’d backed her up with the cops, even putting Mathias in the line of fire. No man had ever done anything like that for her before.

  So what? This didn’t change anything. She tried to cling to the memory of his drunken voice slurring hate through the phone. She tried to do it the way she always did it. Bite back the feeling. Keep moving. Nothing to see here, folks. She wanted to tell Raul to leave. She wanted to go up to her apartment and sleep.

  She tried to stand but her legs wouldn’t hold her. When she opened her mouth, she couldn’t form any words. Her jaw trembled. Then her shoulders. Then her whole body. She tightened her core, trying to hold the trembling at bay, but the tremor increased.

  “Marisol,” Raul said and reached for her.

  She tried to pull away, but she was all fault lines. She collapsed against him, shaking and weeping.

  He held her, stroked her hair, wiped the tears with the hem of his blue cotton T-shirt.

  When Marisol was no longer overcome, when she was herself and could have a coherent thought, she wanted to throw him out and retreat back up the stairs. But it felt so good. He felt so good. The firmness of his chest, the strength of his embrace, his hands in her hair, and the softness of the cotton against her face.

  Marisol didn’t know how long she cried. It felt like forever. But at some point she stopped being a seventeen-year-old girl and became a woman. Became aware of the heat where her body pressed against his.

  Slowly, she sat up, swung around to straddle him. She moved her mouth toward his.

  For a moment, he leaned in to kiss her, but then he pulled back.

  “Wait,” he said. “What are we about to do?”

  Marisol blinked. “I don’t know what we’re about to do.” She shook her head. “Maybe I planned to fuck you and ask for some money.” She began to untangle herself from him.

  “Marisol,” he said, holding her wrist. “I told you. I’m so sorry. I was drunk and angry and—”

  “En vino hay verdad,” Marisol said. “Maybe that’s what you really think.”

  “It’s not like that,” Raul said. “I was calling myself novio de la gran puta, because I still wanna be with you. But you hung up—fair enough. I thought we were just having a fight. I took a few days to cool off. But when I called back, you were gone. Cell number disconnected.”

  Marisol pulled her arm away and reached for some tissues on a side table. She wiped her eyes. He still wanted to be with her? He had always wanted to be with her?

  “A fight?” Marisol said. “A fight is when you’re mad but you call the next day. You left me hanging.”

  “I fucked up,” he said. “I needed time to get my head together. I was just a little flipped out. It took me a while to make a clear decision.”

  “A decision?” Marisol said. “Every fucking minute you didn’t call me was a decision.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t understand how it is for guys,” he said. “It’s hard to think about your girl fucking anybody else. We wanna invent time machines to go back twenty years and kill motherfuckers before they even touched our girl, you know? But to think that a
ny asshole with a hundred bucks could have—it’s just—shit, Marisol. And I didn’t even hear it from you.”

  “I would have told you eventually,” she said. “I just wanted to get to know you a little better before I sprang my fucking sex work history on you. You said you wouldn’t hold my sexual past against me. Like I didn’t hold it against you that you fucked Nalissa.”

  “As I recall from that same conversation,” Raul said. “It’s not like you just didn’t mention your past. You intentionally lied to me. ‘I dated a bunch’?”

  “I didn’t lie,” Marisol said. “I minimized it because I knew you couldn’t fucking handle it. Who the fuck are you, really? The barrio boy who understands that we do what we have to? Or the Boy Scout who wants to marry a virgin?”

  “Wait a minute,” Raul said. “There’s a lot of territory between virgin and sex worker.”

  “That’s still the Boy Scout talking. Was it him or barrio boy who fucking called me la gran puta? You and your little fucking feelings trying to decide if you could fucking handle the fact that I was a sex worker ages ago,” she said. “It’s not like it was my first choice of a job.”

  “Okay, already,” Raul said, his voice rising. “You. Are. Right. I should have called you up the next day to apologize. I fucked up. Are you gonna give me a second chance?”

  “At what?”

  “A second chance to be with you, Marisol,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Look, you apologized. I accept your apology. Can we just leave it at that?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “Marisol, my only regret in life is becoming a cop. But now that I found you again, if I didn’t do everything in my power to be your man, I’d have an even bigger regret.”

  “Well, that’s all fine and good, but I can’t be with someone who puts me on some Robin Hood pedestal,” she said. “And then knocks me off when he finds out I’m not Maid Marian.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But, baby, I’m ready for the real. I just want to know what I’m signing up for.”

  “I don’t know what you’d be signing up for,” she said. “I don’t understand this ‘be with me’ or ‘be your man’ shit. I’ve fucked plenty of guys. Sometimes for money. Or because I had no choice. Or sometimes because I needed a good fuck. You want a guarantee? You want a road map? I can’t give you shit.”

  “What can you give me?”

  “I don’t know, Raul,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “All I know how to do with men is to fuck them.”

  “Those nights we were together?” he asked. “That was just fucking to you?”

  “I don’t know what that was,” she said. “I never had anything like that before . . . or since.”

  “It’s called making love, Marisol,” he said. “It’s what two people do when they care about each other.”

  “What are you gonna do, Raul? If we have some kind of relationship, and we run across some guy who I fucked for money?” she asked. “Or some guy I picked up in a bar?”

  “I don’t know what I would do,” he said.

  “Or your cop buddies start to talk smack about you dating an ex-whore who fucked VanDyke?” She poked him in the chest. “What are you gonna do when they start asking you how you compare to billionaire dick? Huh?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, banging his fist against the wall. “I don’t fucking know.”

  “Then don’t come to me with this fairy-tale shit until you have an answer,” she said. “Because I was falling for you until I saw your face when your friend read my rap sheet. And I’m not gonna let myself fall again unless I know you can handle it.”

  “Marisol, I’ve been in love with you since junior high school,” he said.

  “Then show me you’re not still in junior high,” she said. “All the guys want to fuck the school slut, but then they find out they like her, and they can’t face the peer pressure at school the next day.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” Raul asked. “Is that why you’re so goddamn scared?”

  “No,” she said. “I got all my high school fucking from my family, thank you very much.”

  He sat stunned for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Let’s drop it,” she said.

  “Your uncle,” he said. “I met him once. He was such a creep.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “You remember I said I had only killed somebody one time? Well, it was him.”

  “Shit.”

  “You happy?” she asked. “Wanna call one of your pals to arrest me?”

  “No, Marisol,” he said. “But I wanna talk about it.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” she said.

  “But it explains so much,” he said.

  “Don’t psychoanalyze me,” she said. “I have my own damn shrink.”

  “What does your shrink say?” Raul tilted his head to the side and looked right in her face. “About me. What does your shrink say you should do about me?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I’ve talked to a shrink before,” he said. “I had to after I shot a guy, and I kept seeing her because my fiancée and I broke up. The shrink said it’s good to open up your heart after you’ve been hurt. Your shrink say anything like that?”

  “I think you need to leave,” Marisol said.

  A smile spread across his face. “I think your shrink says I’m good for you,” Raul said. “And you keep saying things to piss me off so I’ll leave, but it’s not gonna happen, Marisol. I love you. I fuckin’ love you.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “This is real. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m good for you. And neither of us knows what’s gonna happen. That’s how it works.” He reached across the couch and took her hand. “You know I’m right.”

  “Fuck you, Raul,” she said, looking away, but she didn’t pull her hand out of his.

  “Oh no, mujer. No more fucking,” he said. “We’re making love.”

  He leaned in and kissed her, sliding his arms around her waist, pressing their bodies close.

  Her body responded. She kissed back, running her hands down his back, across his chest.

  They both moved more slowly than they had before, eyes locked on each other.

  She let herself really take him in—the smile lines by his eyes, the trio of gray hairs in his stubble, the hint of hazel in his brown eyes. This beautiful face belonged to a man who loved her. Who knew all about her past. Who was sorry he’d left her hanging. Who wouldn’t let anything stand between them—not even her own fears.

  As she took it all in—that she could be loved, would be loved—she opened up to him from somewhere deep inside. She swooned with the fullness of her desire for him. She wanted to have every possible inch of skin pressed against him, inhaling him through every pore.

  Her apartment, her bed, was four whole floors away—too far. She couldn’t wait. She pulled him onto the couch in the lobby.

  She kissed him as if she would devour him, and began to take off her clothes.

  “Marisol, wait,” Raul said as she slid out of her jeans. “I don’t have a—”

  “Shhh.” She pressed her finger to his lips. “This is a clinic that serves sex workers. We keep condoms just about everywhere.”

  As he removed his shirt, he didn’t take his eyes off her. He watched her as she walked in bra and underwear over to the front desk, and pulled out a condom from a safer sex display.

  By the time she got back across the lobby, he had stripped naked. She handed him the condom, and took off her underwear and bra. He rolled the condom onto his erection, as she lay back on the couch. He slid inside her, so tender she could barely stand it.

  “I love you, Marisol,” he said, kissing her gently and stroking in and out of her with a sweetness and precision that made her shudder.

  “I know you love me, too, even if you’re not ready to say it,” he said, grinning
down at her, moving his hips up and back, until she could barely breathe. “You don’t have to say anything until you’re ready. Just take your time.”

  I love you, Raul, she thought as she tumbled over the edge of the orgasm, moaning unintelligibly, the words clear in her mind.

  * * *

  After they had migrated up to the apartment, they lay on the bed, kissing in the half-darkened bedroom.

  He touched the bruise on her cheek, and she winced.

  “You know,” he said. “You get into so much trouble, I’m just gonna have to be your boyfriend. For your own protection.”

  “Oh really?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Then we’ll have to spread it all over the neighborhood that we’re going steady so nobody will mess with you.”

  “‘Going steady’?” Marisol laughed. “I hope you’re kidding.”

  “Only about what we call it,” he said. “You ready to let me be your man?”

  “Okay,” Marisol said.

  She felt shy. It seemed strange. And corny. And wonderful. They lay on their sides, facing each other on the bed. She took a finger and traced the outline of his face.

  He took her finger and kissed it. “So now that you’re my girlfriend and everything, I’m definitely gonna get some shit from guys on the force.”

  “Especially if you spread it all around the neighborhood,” Marisol said.

  “I don’t care what shit they say,” he said. “You’re totally worth it. I just need to ask, is there anything else I should know?”

  “Well, you know I was a sex worker,” she said. “And why I killed my uncle. After that, anything else seems kinda anticlimactic.”

  “And yet, we may be heading for another climax,” he said, sliding close to her and running his hands down her back, over her ass.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said, laughing. “Again? What is that, like the fourth time?”

  “I’m taking the fifth,” he said, and rolled on top, landing with an openmouthed kiss.

  Chapter 33

  The next day, Marisol and her crew were celebrating in the conference room. Her office was still sealed as a crime scene by order of the NYPD.

  They were all dressed up from the graduation, and Marisol wore concealer over the bruise on her face.