He crouched as I did it, so as not to give anyone a target to fire on. By now, I was reasonably sure that no one would fire even if they had a clear shot, but I guess he did what he had to do. I scrambled across the gear shift and into the passenger seat, and half a second later he was inside the car with me, with the door locked behind him, holding his hand out for the keys. I dropped them in his palm and watched him insert the car key in the ignition and turn it. The car roared to life under us. Rafe’s hand didn’t even shake when he moved the gear shift. When he reversed out of the parking space at fifty miles an hour, narrowly avoiding taking out a police cruiser and Tamara Grimaldi, I couldn’t hold back a terrified squeak.
He glanced at me. “Relax, darlin’. I know how to drive.”
He stepped on the gas and we barreled toward the road leaving rubber on the pavement behind us, dodging cars and agents.
“I know,” I managed. He drives like Mario Andretti on speed. But he hadn’t killed me yet. Although this might be the time he did. I clung to both sides of my seat when he squeezed the Volvo through a narrow space between a cruiser and an SUV with the FBI logo on the door, and took the turn onto Nolensville Road on two wheels. “God!”
Rafe grinned. I smiled weakly, all the while waiting for the sound of shots or sirens from behind us. They didn’t come, although in the rearview mirror I could see a dark shadow emerge from the parking lot we’d just left, and turn into a pair of headlights on the road behind us.
“They’re following,” I said.
“Let’em,” Rafe answered. “Strap in, darlin’. It’s gonna be fast.”
He turned the Volvo onto Harding Road in the direction of the interstate, and lowered his foot on the gas pedal. The car jumped forward.
Chapter 12
Four minutes later we were on I-24. It had taken me that long to catch my breath.
“That was interesting,” I said eventually, neutrally, when I thought I could speak without squeaking again.
Rafe glanced at me and grinned. “You did great. For a second there, when I saw you, I thought everything was gonna blow sky high. But then I realized Tammy musta sent you in.”
“No,” I said.
He shot me another look. “Tammy didn’t send you in?”
I shook my head. “I told you what happened. I looked into the ownership of the warehouse, and—”
“Hold on. If Tammy didn’t send you, what happened back there?”
“I didn’t want them to shoot you,” I said.
“They wouldna shot me. It was a set-up.”
“I figured that out. Eventually.”
He was quiet for a second. “So when I grabbed you, you thought I was taking you hostage?”
“That’s why I asked you if the safety was on,” I said.
“And you took my word for it?”
“I told you. I know you won’t hurt me.”
“Right. Not that way.” He slid another look my way, out of the corner of his eye, while most of his attention was on maneuvering the Volvo through the late night traffic. He kept the car moving at a pretty good clip. Somewhere behind us, I figured the FBI vehicle followed, and he might be trying to lose it. Or not. “You wanna explain that to me now?”
Not really. I was used to blurting out truths when I spoke to him, usually without thinking, but right now I was in control of myself, and I had a question. “You first. Who’s Carmen?”
That earned me another flash of dark eyes, incredulous this time. “You’re worried about Carmen? Christ, Savannah; what’s wrong with you?”
I’m in love with you, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Not quite ready for that confession yet. Not out loud and no holds barred like that. “I’m not worried about her. I just want to know who she is.”
“Her name’s Carmen Arroyo. She’s Hector Gonzales’s right hand man—or woman—in Nashville.”
“Hector Gonzales owns the warehouses, right?”
“Hector Gonzales,” Rafe said, “owns a lot more than that. He runs the biggest SATG in the southeast.”
I loosened my death grip on the seat and folded my hands in my lap. “What’s a SATG?”
“South American theft gang. Organized crime. South American variety.”
“Drugs?” That’s what the South Americans do, isn’t it?
“Not so much,” Rafe said. “Smash and grabs of jewelry stores, hold-ups of armored cars, hijacking of tractor trailers and cargo boxes.” He glanced in the rearview mirror before changing lanes. “The TBI’s been working to shut them down for years. But I never got past the periphery. They’re suspicious of anyone who isn’t Hispanic. We got a couple of their minor players once in a while, but I never made it far enough into the organization to take down anyone worthwhile. Till August.”
“What happened in August?”
“I talked Julio Melendez into hiring me for those open house robberies.” He veered left, to pass an eighteen wheeler that wasn’t moving fast enough, and zipped back into the lane in front of the tractor trailer again as soon as we were clear. He checked the rearview mirror, and I did the same. There was no sign of the SUV. “And I woulda been able to do a better job back then if goddamn Perry Fortunato hadn’t gotten in my way.”
I had no fond feelings for Perry either.
“Instead,” Rafe continued, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as if around something soft, like Perry’s throat, “I ended up blowing my cover and killing the son of a bitch. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but I woulda had Carmen and Hector and everyone else back in September if it hadn’t been for Perry. Instead, somebody sent a goddamn hitman after me, and more people ended up dying. People who shouldn’t have died. And then I had to kill him too!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, since there wasn’t much else I could say. He hadn’t had any other choice, really: it had been between Jorge and him, and between Perry and me, and I for one thought he’d done the right thing. I’d much rather be alive than not, and I wanted him to stay that way too.
He glanced at me, chagrined and maybe even a little embarrassed.
“So Carmen works for Hector,” I added, bringing the conversation back to where it had derailed.
He nodded. “Hector’s based outta Atlanta. That’s where I’ve been the past couple months. Hector never met Jorge Pena, so he bought that I was him. When he hired Jorge to kill me, because Julio told him to, it was all done by phone and wire transfer. After Jorge was shot, we used his own phone to take a picture of him—after we shaved him—and then we sent it to Hector as proof that the job was done. When I showed up in Atlanta, Hector had no reason to think I wasn’t Jorge. I had the man’s phone and all the information. So he put me to work cleaning house.”
“Cleaning house?”
“Getting rid of anyone Hector don’t like,” Rafe said. “There’s a house in Cobb county where half a dozen of my targets are in house arrest, waiting for Hector to get taken off the streets so they can rejoin the world of the living.”
“And will he be taken off the streets? He wasn’t there tonight, was he?”
He shook his head. “He’s still in Atlanta. But the police there moved on Hector at the same time as the MNPD and TBI moved on us. I don’t think anybody had the chance to call and warn him.”
“So they got him.”
“I hope they did,” Rafe said. He entered the ramp to take us from I-24 over to I-40, and looked in the rearview mirror again. I did the same. Still no sign of the SUV.
“Where are we going?”
He glanced over. “I’m taking you home.”
“And?”
“Someone’ll come get me.”
“I see.” The last time he’d driven me home, we’d barely made it upstairs without scandalizing the neighbors.
His voice pulled me out of my reverie, just as things were heating up in my mind. “You ever gonna tell me what ‘not like that’ means?”
“Oh.” Well, that brought me back to earth with a thud.
But we had to d
iscuss it, and now was as good a time as any. Might as well get it out in the open. We’d had tricky conversations in the car before; maybe it would be easier to talk when I wouldn’t be looking him straight in the face.
I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders, figuratively, before plunging in. “Remember last month when you were here? When David went missing?”
“Hard to forget,” Rafe said.
“After we found him, we went home and... um...”
His lips curved. “Hard to forget that, too.”
True. Even if my memories of the event were tainted by what happened afterwards, what happened before had certainly been memorable.
“You found that pill on my kitchen counter.” The morning-after pill. Mifepristone. Also used for first trimester at-home abortions.
The smile disappeared. “Yeah.”
“And then you left and came back and I’d started bleeding and you had to take me to the emergency room.”
He nodded, tight-lipped.
“You left me there.” My voice shook, and I had to make an effort to firm it. “I was in the hospital having a miscarriage, and you left.”
“I waited for your family to get there,” Rafe said.
“I didn’t want my family.”
“What about Satterfield?”
“I didn’t want him either.” When I’d discovered that mother had brought Todd with her, I’d been mortified. “I wanted you. And you didn’t stick around.”
“It wasn’t my place—” Rafe began.
“How can you say that? You had more right to be there than anyone!”
He shot me a glance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I blinked. Something was wrong here. He sounded sincere, like he really didn’t understand what he’d done. In deference to his obvious cluelessness I kept my words simple. “I lost your baby, Rafe. How is that not your place?”
He turned to look at me, for long enough that I had to remind him to keep his attention on the road so we wouldn’t crash.
“What?” he said, facing forward again.
“I lost your baby. And you left me there. Alone.”
He shook his head. “That can’t be right.”
“What do you mean, it can’t be right? I was there; you did it. Or are you questioning my knowledge of whose baby I was carrying?”
“Satterfield—” Rafe said, and that’s when I lost it.
“Don’t you dare try to blame Todd for this! What did you think, that I was sleeping with both of you at the same time?”
He opened his mouth, and I cut him off before he could say it. “I’d gone through weeks of agony over that baby. You were gone, and I didn’t know whether you’d ever come back. You told me you’d only be gone a few weeks, and it had been two months. You didn’t call and you didn’t write. You never promised me anything, and you sure as hell hadn’t signed on for fatherhood.”
By now I had tears spilling down my cheeks, and I was too upset to care. “I had no idea whether I could count on you and I wasn’t sure I could handle the responsibility on my own. So I went to see the doctor. She gave me that pill you saw, so I could get rid of the baby if I wanted. I’d had it for almost a week and I never took it. Because I wanted that baby. I may have been anxious and worried and scared out of my mind, but there wasn’t a single second when I didn’t want it. And after all that, when I lost it anyway, and you just walked out, like nothing had happened...!”
“I didn’t know,” Rafe said.
“Yes, you did!” I dashed the tears off my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “I sent Catherine after you. My sister. I told her to ask you to come back. And you didn’t!”
He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me it was my baby.”
That took the wind right out of my sails. I dropped my hands to my lap. “She must have.”
His voice took on an edge, too. “Why else would I leave, Savannah? You think I didn’t wanna be there?”
“You could have asked me,” I said.
“Sure I could. But why?”
“You knew it could be your baby. I’d slept with you. Without protection.”
“If it was my baby,” Rafe said, his hands so rigid on the steering wheel his knuckles showed white, “I figured you’d have told me. You didn’t.”
OK, so that hit home. And stung. I’d had plenty of time to tell him, but I had chosen not to. What was he supposed to think?
“I was in the middle of telling you in the hospital,” I said, “but then my mother showed up...”
“And you acted like you couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.”
“I’m sorry about that. I just...”
I trailed off. There was no excuse I could make, really. Mother had walked into the room and I’d snatched my hand away from his without thinking. I had regretted it immediately, but by then it was too late.
“When I got out in the hallway Satterfield was there,” Rafe said, his voice tight, “and he told me it was all my fault.”
“What was your fault?”
“I didn’t ask. But since we’d done what we’d done that afternoon, I guess I figured he was blaming me for the whole thing.”
“What we did had nothing to do with it,” I said. “I told you so. I would have lost the baby anyway.”
“Yeah,” Rafe answered, “but I’d just figured out you were pregnant, and you hadn’t told me it was mine, so I figured it had to be his, and he was blaming me for causing the miscarriage because I didn’t keep my pants zipped, and it all just added up...”
“So you hit him.” I nodded. Understandable, under the circumstances. “He didn’t mean that, though. Todd knew it wasn’t his baby.”
“You sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “Todd knows I’ve never slept with him.”
“Never?” He sounded surprised, the bastard.
“No. Never.” I glanced over at him, debating. In the end I figured I might as well just tell him the truth. “I’ve only ever slept with two people. You and Bradley.”
He looked at me, shocked.
“What?” I said. “Did something about me give you the idea that I have a habit of sleeping around?”
“You slept with me.”
“And it took you two months to get me into bed. Does that say promiscuous to you?”
“I never thought you were promiscuous,” Rafe said. “Just that you’d been sleeping with Satterfield. He asked you to marry him.”
“Without sampling the goods. Mother always told me a man won’t pay for the cow if he can get the milk for free.”
He smiled. “You gave me free milk.”
“Yes, I did.”
I waited for him to ask why. He didn’t. We were close to home, and he focused on maneuvering the Volvo through the quiet East Nashville streets toward 5th and East Main while I focused on wiping my face. Once we got there, he pulled up to the curb outside the condo complex and cut the engine. I thought about telling him to pull into the garage, but I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. The car would be OK on the street for one night.
He turned to me, and I waited for him to speak. When he did, it wasn’t what I expected to hear. “D’you know someone who drives a white compact?”
I blinked, switching mental gears as quickly as I could. “I’m sure I know a lot of people who drive white compacts. It’s the most common car on the road, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer, and I added, “Why do you ask?”
“The one across the street’s been following us since we got off the interstate. Prob’ly before that, too. I think I saw it outside Fidelio’s earlier.”
“You’re kidding.” I stretched my neck to look past him and across the street. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Rafe said. “But I can find out.” He opened the door. I opened my mouth, to ask him what he was planning to do, but before I got the words out, he was jogging across the street toward the white car, gun in hand.
Whoever was i
n the compact must have taken a single look at him and decided that retreat was the safest option, because the next second, the car had peeled away from the curb with a squeal of tires. Rafe had to throw himself out of the way to avoid being hit. The compact took off up the street, and I took off too, out of the Volvo and over to where Rafe was just picking himself up.
“Are you OK?” I started patting him, to make sure he wasn’t hurt.
“Are you crazy?” He pushed me behind him with one hand and scanned the street in both directions.
“Nobody’s going to hurt me,” I said. “You scared him away, whoever he was. Or she. Let’s just get inside.”
He let me tug him along, through the gate and across the courtyard, but he didn’t put the gun down until we were upstairs, inside my apartment with the door locked and bolted behind us, and he had walked into every room and made sure it was empty. He even looked behind the shower curtain and opened my closet door and moved the clothes around to make sure no one was hiding inside. Once that was done, he laid the gun on the dining room table and turned to face me.
“What’ve you been up to, darlin’?”
“Other than following Carmen around?” I said. “Not much.”
“You musta done something, to make someone take this kind of interest in you.”
I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything. Isn’t it more likely someone’s following you?”
“In my line of work, people tend to be better at surveillance. If someone was following me, we prob’ly wouldn’t see’em.”
“Maybe it was someone who trailed us from the nightclub. Trying to be a hero, you know? He’s probably on the phone with the police right now, telling them where we are.”
“Maybe.” He thought for a second. “Your ex got remarried, right? You think it could be the wife?”
“I doubt it,” I said. Shelby wouldn’t be caught dead in an economy compact, at least not if I were any judge of character.
Although she might be smart enough to realize that’s what I’d think, and so she’d rented or borrowed a simpler car to throw me off. If Rafe had first noticed the car outside Fidelio’s earlier, that led some credence to the idea that it might be Shelby. She’d probably started out by following Bradley, and when he dropped me off and went home, she decided to follow me instead. If memory served, he’d started sleeping with her around the time I got pregnant. Maybe he’d picked up another mistress now that Shelby was expecting. Or maybe he hadn’t, but Shelby just thought he had.
A Done Deal Page 14