by Julie Leto
She sidled up to Parker Manning and in a quick move she’d perfected at age fourteen, checked his jacket pockets for his phone.
Nothing.
Plan B.
She took a deep, fortifying breath, leaned forward and blew in his ear.
Manning spun around. “What the—?”
The phone was on his belt.
“Hey, there,” she purred, pretending that her once-over of his body was sexual and not professional. “Did you come here looking for me or is this just my lucky night?”
Whatever leftover curses were lingering on his tongue dissolved in a puddle of drool.
“What a weird coincidence,” he said, his frown deep.
“Maybe its just destiny.”
God, she couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Out loud.
“What? You live around here?” he asked, not so subtly scraping his gaze down her body, lingering on her breasts long enough to make her stomach turn.
“Nah, I’m new to town,” she said. “But Jamaica Plain is my speed. What’s a gringo like you doing around here, anyway?”
Manning smirked. “I like the beer and pasteles fritos.”
His New England accent chopped the words up until they were nearly unrecognizable, but she took the opening anyway.
“Then we have something in common.”
He eyed her skeptically. “Is this a setup? ‘Cause I told you everything you need to know earlier. I’m not telling you one damned thing about my sister.”
Marisela smiled softly and shook her head. “Just like a man to have a one-track mind. I’m off the clock.” She leaned across him, snagged his beer and took a sip. “Everyone has to wind down, right?”
The man wasn’t a fool. Though he grinned at her sensual move, his shoulders remained tight and he’d kicked the bar stool slightly behind him so he could bolt if the situation warranted. She had to move fast. Pulling the sexy, hot-for-you act would only get her so far.
The crowd seemed to swell as the players on the television went in for another forward rush. Marisela felt someone press against her, but before she react, she heard Frankie whisper, “When they score.”
All the eyes in the place were drawn to the televisions, including Manning’s. The minute the forward in the green striped shirt kicked the ball into the net, the crowd erupted. Frankie pushed back, propelling Marisela into Manning. She stole his phone, slipped it behind her back, where Frankie retrieved it and tunneled through the cheering crowd until he was gone.
Marisela spun to follow, but Parker Manning stopped her, his hand tight around her upper arm. “Where do you think you’re going, sweetheart?”
Ten
MANNING’S GRIP WAS tight, painful. She figured their run-in earlier would have taught him about pissing her off, but she decided to put her disgust aside and concentrate on the case. She had what she wanted and he didn’t have a fucking clue. And nauseating as the prospect was, she might need him again. So she wouldn’t kick his ass. Yet.
“Little chicas’ room,” she replied sweetly, her eyes darting to the back where she assumed the bathrooms were. With her prettiest pout, she leaned forward until his breath, a putrid combination of nicotine and beer, assailed her nostrils. “Will you miss me?”
His expression was uncertain, but with a nod, he let her go. Smart man.
She rendezvoused with Frankie in the alley.
“Got it?” she asked anxiously, wiping at the spot where Manning had grabbed her.
Frankie frowned. “Yes, and no.”
“What do you mean, no? That was some of my best work. He didn’t even know I’d touched him,” she insisted, shaking her hand as if it were saturated with stinky-man smell.
Frankie nodded in the other direction, so they took off before Manning discovered he’d had his phone lifted and came after them. If they had any luck at all, he’d think he lost it in the crowd. Once they had what they wanted, they’d break into his car and shove it between the seats so he’d never be the wiser.
Once they were at the end of the street, Frankie stopped. He held up the phone, an older-model flip phone with no special features—no camera, no video, and apparently…
“No signal?” she asked, unable to read the LCD in the relative darkness.
“Worse. No power.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me! He didn’t charge his phone? What an asshole.”
Frankie shook his head, unruffled. “Max’s team is tracking down a universal charger. Said to check back with him in an hour. Apparently, Manning’s phone is a dinosaur.”
“So what do we do until then?”
The number of people walking down and around Centre Street had swelled as the night wore on. Even if she could muster up the enthusiasm to search for Yizenia, she didn’t have the energy.
Frankie pocketed the phone, then surveyed the street around them, inhaling deeply. Marisela couldn’t help but do the same. The minute the savory scents hit her, her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten all day.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Who wouldn’t be in this neighborhood?”
He smiled. “Bien. It’s been too long since we’ve had a taste of home.”
They grazed their way down Centre Street, chowing down on fish tacos at a local taquería, checking out the pastelitos de carne at a bustling Salvadoran cafeteria, and then trying, for the first time, Guatemalan rellenitos for dessert from a glorious-smelling stand set up on a corner where Centre Street ran into Ballard. Marisela was so enthralled by the sweet fried platanos filled with savory refried black beans, dusted with sugar and dipped in sour cream that she nearly forgot why she was in Jamaica Plain in the first place.
They managed to avoid seeing Parker Manning again, and when they checked, his car was no longer in its parking space.
“He’s gone,” Marisela grumbled. “Now how will we get the phone back?”
Frankie shrugged. “We’ll slide by his apartment later.”
Seemed easy enough, though she couldn’t remember ever breaking into a car to return something. “Okay, then, I’m full. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Marisela said.
Frankie whipped an old, grainy photograph out of his jacket. “It’s early. Let’s see if anyone’s seen our favorite assassin.”
No one they spoke with had seen or heard of anyone fitting Yizenia’s sketchy description. After a while, Marisela got tired of asking and decided to simply enjoy the sights and sounds. Hearing Spanish spoken all around her, from the shopkeepers to the children to the DJs spinning tunes at the club they strolled by, filled her with a warm comfort that made her, for a minute, long for home.
Unfortunately, Frankie wasn’t so quick to give up the search.
“You see this woman around here?” Frankie asked a guy selling tickets for the upcoming Festival after he made change for a twenty. Frankie gestured for the man to keep half the money, then whipped out the fuzzy picture of Yizenia, the only one the research team could dig up.
The man looked at him as if he’d sprouted a second head.
Marisela dazzled the man with her best smile. “She’s mi hermana,” she lied, watching her charm and cleavage do the work as the man looked again at the picture with much more serious consideration.
“We were supposed to meet her here,” Frankie added.
The man shook his head. It wasn’t a very good shot—and didn’t much look like the kind of family photograph you’d shove in a wallet. More like the result of computerized enhancement from a shot taken by a long-distance security camera.
“That was helpful,” Marisela quipped once they’d walked out of earshot.
“Never hurts to try,” Frankie replied, popping the last of his rellenitos into his mouth and sucking the remnants of sugar and sour cream off his fingertips.
Marisela forced her eyes forward as they walked back toward their truck. They’d wasted enough time here. Tomorrow’s objective was to find Tracy Manning and they couldn’t do that until they deciphered her location, whi
ch meant getting back to Max and charging the damned phone.
“Well, other than finally pushing me over the edge into a size ten,” she said, tugging at her waistband, “tonight was a big fat waste of time.”
“We’ve got the phone. Once we find Tracy Manning, we’ll know if she hired Yizenia Santiago. Seems so loca.”
“What?”
“A chick hiring a cold-blooded killer for something that happened so long ago.”
“What’s crazy? That she’s a chick or that she hired a killer?”
“All of it,” Frankie said.
“Doesn’t seem crazy to me at all,” Marisela decided. “If those rich boys did that girl, then they deserve to die.”
Frankie eyed her skeptically. “Mierda, Marisela. You’re not going to freak out again and screw the client, are you, just because you don’t think he deserves to live?”
She stopped dead. In all the time that had passed since their last mission together in Puerto Rico, she and Frankie hadn’t really discussed how the case had ended. He’d been too busy fighting for his life and recovering from his wounds.
When she’d first learned that Frankie had opted to stay with Titan after she’d gone off with Brynn to Mexico, she’d been shocked as hell. Frankie had hated Ian before their boss had nearly sacrificed Frankie’s life for a client. At least when he’d been with the Toros, his boys cared if he died—at least, they would have to the point of avenging his murder. Ian Blake, on the other hand, had used Frankie’s injury as a bargaining chip—a way to keep Marisela in line.
“I did what I thought was right,” Marisela told him. “Doesn’t mean I’ll do it again.”
He didn’t look half as unnerved by this conversation as she felt. “I don’t want to risk my culo trying to catch a killer if you’re going to turn around and let her win because you think she should.”
His words hung in the air between them, amid the highpitched trumpets of a mariachi band playing on the terrace of a restaurant above them and the thrumming bass from hip-hop riffs blasting from a nearby car. Marisela had no argument. He was right.
“We were hired to find the assassin, discover who paid her, and stop her from killing again,” she concluded. “That’s what I intend to do.”
Frankie nodded. Her promise was all he needed.
They continued down the street, watching out for somewhere to pick up a cold drink before they headed back to the hotel. About a block from where they’d parked the truck, they jaywalked across the street, leaping over the unused streetcar tracks that ran down the middle of the road.
“Do you think she’ll give up?” Marisela asked.
“She’s not done.”
“She can’t get to Craig Bennett,” Marisela reasoned.
“There’s still Bradley Hightower.”
“If she hasn’t already killed him.”
“Then she’ll stick around here to finish her job. Brynn insists she won’t quit until she has them all.”
Inside the bodega, they bought a pair of Havana Colas, the next best thing to a Cuba Libre without the rum, popped open the tops with a bottle opener the owners kept tied with a string to the cash register, and exchanged some small talk with the cashier. This time, Frankie didn’t flash the picture, but he asked if anyone had seen a woman, a stranger, who fit Yizenia’s description—including her tattoo. The owner’s wife had a field day speculating on why anyone would mar their skin that way, causing Marisela to slip her hand into the pocket of her jacket. She hadn’t traveled thirteen hundred miles from Tampa to get a lecture she’d already heard from her own mother.
They left, with no more knowledge than before.
As they closed in on their truck, Frankie suddenly grabbed her arm. What was up with everyone pawing her today? She would have complained, but she saw a man dressed in dark clothes lingering near the front end of their F150, his movements jittery. Marisela quickly downed a swig of soda, then tipped the bottle so the rest poured free. She hated losing her delicious drink, but she wasn’t going to pull her gun just because someone was acting weird. A tall glass bottle made a great weapon in a pinch.
Frankie stuck his hand beneath his jacket, and pushing her slightly behind him, shouted to the guy near the car.
The guy took off running. Marisela hurried to the truck only to see wires and cables hanging from beneath the chassis. Without hesitation, Frankie and Marisela took off after the guy in black, following him down an alley that skirted a playground. Marisela hopped the fence, running beside the jungle gym which loomed like a multicolored monster among the deserted concrete and fencing. She pumped her arms hard. Ever since she’d lost the battle with Yizenia, she’d been itching for a fight.
Now she had one.
Frankie caught the guy, no more than a kid, before he slid into a dark alley on the other side of the playground. The brick apartment buildings on either side captured the sound of Frankie’s voice and echoed back his anger. “What the hell were you doing to my truck?”
Marisela skidded to a stop a few feet away. She opened her mouth to announce her presence when she was rushed from both sides.
The attacker on her left was skinny, not much of a challenge. The guy on her right, however, easily weighed two-seventy and smelled like pepperoni. She managed to elbow the lankier attacker in the chin, but the other, easily double her size and weight, cold-cocked her across the jaw.
While she was dazed, they each took her by an arm. The skinny guy grabbed her hair and yanked her head back so that Frankie could see the carved-handle knife he held across her neck. The fat one then reached under her jacket and removed her 9 mm from its holster.
“Let him go!” Gordo demanded of Frankie, his bulbous arm jiggling as he aimed her weapon at Frankie’s skull. “Drop your gun or he’ll cut her fucking head off.”
Marisela swallowed, the action painful as the movement caused her skin to slice against the sharpened blade.
Frankie pushed the kid away so that he crashed against the wall. Seconds later, the kid ran out of the alley as if his pants were on fire, leaving two against two. Only she’d been disarmed. And while Frankie’s gun remained heavy in his hand, his eyes wide and wild, she knew his hesitation on her account would cost them.
The fat guy jabbed Marisela’s gun into her side, a cruel punctuation to his threat. The skinny one didn’t move, the blade ice against her skin. Frankie dropped his weapon.
“Kick it over here,” the fat guy ordered. “Do it!” He bounced on the balls of his feet, shifting his considerable weight. Marisela could feel his impatience vibrating off him.
Frankie kept his hands out, his fingers outstretched—the closest thing these assholes were going to see from him in terms of surrender. His eyes flashed at Marisela and she held her breath. He moved his leg to punt the gun, at the last minute kicking up with enough force to bash the cojones of the guy with the knife. Marisela slackened her body, ignoring the painful pull the fat guy still had on her hair. Once on the ground, she executed a spinning kick that dropped the fat guy to his knees.
He dragged her down with him, the gun still jabbing into her side. “You’re not going anywhere, bitch,” he prophesied.
“Wanna bet?”
She grabbed his gun wrist and twisted. His fingers, caught in the trigger, snapped. He howled and dropped the rest of the way to the ground. Marisela spun to aim at Frankie’s opponent when she realized the guy Frankie fought might not have weighed more than a flea, but he was keenly effective with a knife.
Slashed across the chest, Frankie’s white T-shirt flapped, tiny red drops of blood marring his dark skin. Marisela sucked in a breath, resolved to fire the minute the man circled around and gave her a clear shot.
A noise to her side caught her attention, so she swung right just as the fat guy rolled toward her. She fired, but he knocked the barrel sideways, deflecting the shot. He dragged her down and tackled her, his putrid flesh enveloping her in sweaty anger.
“Get the fuck off me!” she shouted, pushing
fruitlessly at his blubbery body.
He grunted and cursed, trying to grab her gun. Unable to fire again without risking shooting herself, she used the 9 mm like iron knuckles, wrapping her hand tightly around the grip and pounding into his temple with her reinforced fist. He pushed away, but the glint of his knife caught her eye just before he sliced open her brand-new leather jacket.
“Fucking son of a bitch,” she muttered, rising to her feet and roundhouse-kicking him square in the cheek with the heel of her boot. Bones crunched. He fell forward, the gash across his face oozing bright red.
Behind her, Frankie went in for the kill. Even as the skinny guy’s knife tore across Frankie’s arm, he threw a succession of heel-palmed punches that splattered the skinny guy’s nose and dropped him to his knees. Frankie grabbed the knife and pressed it against his assailant’s neck.
“Why’d you jump us?” Frankie demanded.
He sputtered, blood coating his teeth, mouth, and lips. “Fuck you.”
Marisela slid to Frankie’s other side and pressed the barrel of her gun to the skinny guy’s temple. She cocked the hammer. The guy flinched and terror sped across his eyes.
“Try again,” she ordered. “Why did you jump us?”
“Paid to,” he croaked.
“By who?”
“Don’t know. Danny did the deal.”
His gaze darted to the fat guy on the ground, only he wasn’t horizontal anymore. He held Frankie’s recovered Glock in his hands. Marisela jerked to aim and fire, but a shot popped in her ears seconds before hers rent the air.
Danny’s body jerked, vibrated, then collapsed.
On shaky legs, Marisela stepped closer and saw the bullet hole in the back of the fat guy’s neck, clearly slicing straight through his spine.
The work was unmistakable.
She slammed up against the nearest wall, her gaze scanning the buildings across from them. “Sniper!”
The skinny guy on the ground scrambled like a crab until he was out of sight. Frankie retrieved his gun. Lights in the building across the open courtyard flashed on and someone yanked up a creaky window and screamed.