Looks are Deceiving

by Michele Hart

  Allen shifted his weight, his big arms snaked across his chest, his light-colored eyes roaming the room, taking in their surroundings and looking quietly infuriated.

  Jerry flicked more ashes to the concrete floor. A smile appeared on his face, and he pointed his cigarette at Elissa.

  “I ran into your little secret, Greg. Had plans to take the Amigos for a grand? Did you see her, Allen? Remember her from Club Reno’s? She was gonna cost you more than three hundred bucks just because Greg thinks we’re stupid. Didn’t Derek pick her out in the parking lot and follow her into the store? Greg and Derek set it up. She’s an actress, or something like that. They put us on.”

  Allen’s seething eyes took on no change. “The bet’s off, Jerry. Stick to what’s real, will you? At least cut the girls free.”

  “No. We have a friend dropping by, and your visit screws up a lot.”

  Jerry reached for the closest case of wine bottles and placed it atop the long table that stretched its length between him and the men, probably to guarantee a big space and time buffer if Greg and Allen took a step he didn’t like. Jerry placed the second crate up there beside the first.

  Apparently feeling safe, Jerry drew out the bottles one by one and held them up against the harsh fluorescent lighting of the warehouse, unsatisfied with each, what he sought still a mystery.

  But then one particular bottle pleased him, and he grinned from ear to ear. “Jackpot. One more to go.”

  They watched Jerry do the same to the remaining wine, inspecting the bottles in the light to his disappointment.

  “Just one bottle. Half is better than nothing,” he said with a pre-victorious sigh. “In this instance, several million dollars more than nothing.”

  “Great. Maybe they’ll only kill half of you,” Greg said. “What’s so great about the wine, Jerry?”

  Their old friend regarded the men to catch their accusatory glares. “It’s a fine year.”

  “Let the girls go, Jerry,” Allen suggested again, not at all cooling off. “You’ve got what you were looking for.”

  A great grin stealing their peace-of-mind, Jerry corrected him, “I got half of what I was looking for. This isn’t going to be a smooth cruise for you, Greg. You should never have set up that port robbery. It’s a damned shame Allen hitched a ride tonight.”

  Greg looked disgusted. “How’d you and your business end up in the hands of the Mob, Jerry?”

  Jerry took over his chair again, straddling it, and he shook his head, looking at a sad loss to reminisce. “It’s the business, I don’t know. Sucks you into the dark side, not to get rich, just to keep your business afloat when doing business above the law costs so much.”

  He ran his hand through his dark hair and took another deep drag from his cigarette, then he examined the smoke, rolling the butt in his thumb and finger. “You know, sometimes these coffin nails just don’t work fast enough.”

  Jerry looked back to the guys, and said wearily, “When I took the company over from my father, I wasn’t good at it. I was better at gambling. Well, at first.”

  His distaste obvious, Allen said, “So you got in debt with the Mob to save your hide and keep Fortunate Imports afloat.”

  “I agreed to solve their shipping problems.”

  Greg drew a hard breath, hoping for temperance. “How are you going to get out, Jerry?”

  The shark returned to his smile. “I’ve already screwed up once, lost a shipment a while back, and you’ve pissed off people all around the world. If I want you to remain alive, I have to find the wine, Greg. Both bottles. Two. If I don’t, I have to hand you over for crossing them, bringing the cops down on them again and causing another loss.”

  “Then we all should get the hell out of here, Jerry.”

  “No. It can’t work that way.”

  He aimed the gun toward the men again. “You see, Greg, they were going to kill you outright for siccing the state on them, whether the wine showed up quickly or not, but I negotiated, and they gave me a week to find the bottles. Tried to steal the bottles back from you twice. You probably lived a week longer for it.”

  “Thanks,” Greg deadpanned.

  “Now I have an even better idea.” Jerry held up the wine bottle he favored and waved it in the air, then set it on the nearest end of the table, his smile gleeful. “I’m going to take this wine bottle and go live like a king in a Third World country.”

  “They’ll target your family, Jerry,” Allen told him.

  At that proposition, Jerry cast his eyes about the freight-stacked warehouse, uncaring. “Yeah, that would be sad. I’ll whine and blather for a while missing them, but I’ll get past it, and wounds will heal. I’ll treat my sorrow on a nice topless European beach with a fat steak, booze, and a stash of Cuban cigars.”

  “That must be some wine,” Allen commented, his eyes on the bottle, his expression wary.

  Elissa watched everyone.

  Greg cast his sight down to the rubber-streaked floor of the warehouse, and he shook his head, his expression a mixture of disappointment, shock, and repugnance.

  “Jerry, I can’t believe the man you’ve become. You’ll trade the lives of family and friends for money. That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve heard.”

  Allen added, “I gotta agree. You’ve come a long way, Jerry, right down a path to Hell. Is there anyone you care for? Is anyone your friend?”

  “Jerry’s no one’s friend,” boomed a voice from the crates, and everyone turned to see a tall, husky man enter the room, an evil smile on his face, a semi-auto pistol in his hand, blessed with a silencer. “Ain’t that right, Jerry?”

  With the entrance of this stranger, Jerry dismissed the analysis of his character and returned his gun to the holster under his arm. From several yards’ distance, Elissa studied Jerry’s gun in its shoulder holster. He hadn’t snapped the restrainer strap.

  The new man preferred his gun in his hand and on them all.

  “Greg, Allen, this is the Agent.” Then Jerry turned to the pock-marked and balding stranger. “Greg brought only twenty bottles, and most of them were empty.”

  “The rest were enjoyed,” Greg contributed to the conversation. “None of them must’ve been the bottles you’re looking for. No one complained about their contents. By the way, what’s in the special bottles, Jerry?”

  Elissa watched Greg’s steeled eyes shifting between the Agent and Jerry. She worried over what Greg might do, standing before the men who’d murdered his father.

  The Agent scrutinized their faces. Then he turned to Jerry and approached the table that held the bottles. Jerry started at the other end of the table, passed the Agent one bottle at a time, and the stranger held each bottle up to the bright lighting, then he gave a little grunt for every bottle that displeased him. Elissa noticed Jerry switching the bottle he favored for one already determined to be a dud. The Agent was too engrossed in his inspection to have noticed. Elissa thought to say something, to bust Jerry for his plan to double-cross the Mob, but doing so might not prevent their murders.

  Elissa looked to Greg who stared at her. He opened his jacket just a little to show her he’d brought his gun while Jerry and the Agent inspected wine, and her heart sank, undecided about whether that was a good thing or not.

  Someone about to die. Goose bumps raced over Elissa’s flesh, fear taking on a fresh and sharper level of intensity now.

  Done with his inspection, the Agent turned to Greg. “Moretti, you’ve cost us a world of hurt, myself personally. We can’t have you screwing with the cops like you did. It’s got you nowhere but dead. So what led you to step into the muck?”

  “I have a feeling Jerry knows who killed my father,” Greg replied, his eyes now glaring at his old friend as though he wished Jerry to spontaneously combust.

  The Agent threw his head back and belted out a guffaw that shook the tin-plated warehouse.

  “Didn’t he tell you? Jerry’s a gutless screw-up of major proportions. He’d accidentally sent the wro
ng box for delivery to your restaurant, and your old man invited him into the restaurant that night as though he were trustworthy. His trust got him a bullet in the heart.”

  Elissa's eyes shot to Greg, whose sight exploded into a wordless fury. He looked like he wanted to rip Jerry’s head off, and Elissa feared what would soon come.

  “You killed my father, Jerry,” Greg ground out, clearly in shock, and Elissa worried, thinking of the gun beneath his coat. “How could you do that to a man who’d treated you like a son?”

  Elissa wiggled her fingers to ensure good circulation. She was about to need it.

  Jerry’s scowl turned to desperation and anger, appearing almost as livid as Greg. “Your old man shouldn’t have been there, Greg! I didn’t want to shoot him, but popping Daddy Moretti was better than prison or facing the Agent for having screwed up a shipment. I had no choice! I was already in too deep!”

  Sissy broke into tears and fists, and she spouted, “You bastard!”

  “Enough of the past, gentlemen.” The Agent sat atop the tabletop Elissa wasn’t sure could hold his great weight, and he set his gun across his lap, the barrel lazily pointing Greg’s and Allen’s way. “You’re making the women weepy, and drippy sentiment makes me murderous.”

  No one said a word.

  Elissa’s sight fixed again on Jerry’s gun.

  “We’re all going for a little walk into the back lot's last warehouse. The place hasn't been opened for years,” the Agent told them. “Some fresh air for your last breaths.”

  “So what’s in the wine, Jerry?” Greg growled, sounding as though he grew angrier and quite prompted to jump on his former friend and beat him into a loss of a few organs. Elissa feared what might erupt. “What was more valuable than my father’s life?”

  The Agent smiled over heavy jowls that bespoke an easy life. “I’ll bet you’re dying to know, in the most literal sense possible. Jerry, untie the women.”

  Opening a drawer of the shipping desk standing against the far wall, Jerry retrieved a pair of heavy-duty metal cutters, approached Sissy first, and he cut the binding that suspended her wrists in the air in front of her. Sissy rubbed her wrists in relief, but her eyes gave away her fear and revulsion for a man who’d been a part of her childhood.

  Allen took a few steps forward to Sissy, and the Agent posted the barrel more solidly on Greg and Allen, stopping him in his tracks. “Don’t move. I’m not scrubbing blood off concrete tonight.”

  Jerry must’ve had his head full of whooping it up on some anonymous island, because he forgot Elissa had given his cousin a painful surprise.

  Closer, Jerry. Closer, Jerry.

  He approached her with the cutters. Just when Jerry reached up high to cut the plastic strap restraining her, Elissa brought her arms down, reached for and grabbed the gun from his holster. At the same second, she lifted her foot and slammed it into Jerry’s knee, causing a loud yelp. She felt the snap of his bone through her sandal, and Jerry went down, wailing and cussing.

  Everything happened in slow motion. Greg drew his gun on Jerry, unknowing her intentions, too distracted by his father’s killer to spot the Agent sighting him for execution.

  Elissa brought the revolver up with all the speed a decade of martial arts classes had given her, and she shot the Agent right in the head.

  Elissa shot a man. Blood went flying in a shower, and the body hit the concrete with a sickening thud.

  She heard Sissy let out a shriek of horrid surprise over Jerry’s wails of agony, and Elissa had to turn her head from the gore of it, feeling ill and attempting to keep her empty stomach from heaving.

  It was more horrible to shoot a person than she’d thought it would be. Much more horrible.

  Not even Greg’s arms made it feel better. Elissa was barely aware of anything around her, of his presence and comfort. She heard sirens and yells, watched the police flood the place. She felt numb.

  Disconnected, Elissa watched the police review what had happened on three cell phones Greg had planted all through the warehouse to audio-record every word that had been said, plus Greg’s video cell phone had recorded everything, pictures and all. The sight of the horror replayed a loop in her head. Elissa didn’t need a video file.

  After a tarp had been placed over the dead body and the flash of cameras documented the aftermath of a gory scene, Greg’s warm hand took hers, and they stepped over to the table where the bottles of wine lined up in rows like soldiers at reveille. Allen joined them with a tear-stained Sissy tucked under his arm and still shaking.

  Greg took the bottle Jerry had favored and held it up to the light. Elissa didn’t bother looking. She was foggy.

  “Holy mackerel,” Greg muttered incredulously, as Sissy and Allen met his side. “That can’t be what it looks like. They’re nearly invisible.”

  Warning everyone to turn away, Greg smashed the bottle against the table’s edge to see a flood of wine gush out and something else that looked to Elissa on first sight like crushed ice. Allen knelt down to the mess and picked through some rough pieces, then set a few chunks in his palm to show them to Elissa, Sissy, and Greg.

  “Blood diamonds,” was Elissa’s only words at first, examining the rough crystals. Then her stomach sank again into a nauseated cramp. “I shot a man over diamonds.”

  Greg stretched his arm across her shoulder, brought her against him, and he shook his head. “You shot a monster aiding genocide in Africa.”

  But that didn’t make the blood-spattered horror of it all go away.

  Chapter 15

  After hours of interviews and the examination of the audio and video files that revealed all, the police released Greg, Elissa, Sissy, and Allen to go home and sleep off the night’s poisoned memory. Elissa just felt hypnotized, nothing but the recycling red of killing a man replaying in her mind. It disturbed her to her core.

  Elissa had long ago accepted, as a federal agent she would shoot someone, probably several someones over the length of her career, and she’d always thought she’d handle it mentally and emotionally, something she would get through and put it behind her with a little counseling, like all the other agents.

  It was part of the job to shoot the bad guys. She hadn’t suspected the vision would never leave her, not even for a moment. She hadn’t considered the scars might last forever.

  Greg took her home to his house, but she barely spoke, couldn’t eat a thing, not even Julian’s award-winning mushroom veal marsala or the cheesecake named after her. Greg tried to get her to talk, but she couldn’t hold another thought in her head other than every second of the shooting pounding through her reason.

  Elissa knew even the hardest investigator buckled at his first shooting. She’d have to condition herself to accept the very real probability that she’d be forced to shoot someone again. She’d thought wrongly if, before this night, she’d considered it a small speed bump to overcome.

  The next morning, Allen and Sissy came by, and Elissa wasn’t much more willing to talk. Allen praised her for her sharp work, had joked that she’d shown him what a can of whoop-ass looked like, and that she could count on respect from him from now on.

  Feeling incapable of being social, Elissa passed through the glass doors to spot the bottle she’d opened for Sissy and her to share, still sitting there as they’d left it before the kidnapping. She stared at it, realizing that it was the last bottle to be accounted for after the bottle in Japan. Elissa picked up the wine glass and held it to the morning sun to see clear rocks, diamonds traded for weapons to kill defenseless people in an unending evil war. She might've choked on a few carats if she'd finished off her wine yesterday.

  “Greg,” Elissa called out, and he came right away, saw her holding the glass up to the sun, and she could tell from his expression he knew what she’d discovered.

  After the police arrived and seized the evidence, Elissa sat at the pool’s edge, her feet dangling in the water, her thoughts not quite attached to the world around her.

 
; How many minutes had passed, she didn’t know, but Sissy joined her, stuck her feet into the pool, and took her hand. “Elissa?”

  Elissa looked up from the ripples in the water, not a master of words at the moment.

  Sissy patted her hand. “Greg says you haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  Elissa didn’t say anything, didn’t know what answer Sissy, Greg, or anyone else wanted to hear. She wasn’t hungry, wasn’t happy about the thought of ever eating again when last night danced macabre in her head.

  Sissy tried again, her big brown eyes posted on her, sympathy there. “Elissa, Greg told us about your college major and your black belt in karate. That explains how you did it. You’re damned brave. You saved everyone’s lives. Thank you.”

  Elissa tried to smile. It was a nice accomplishment that just might put her on the fast track to acceptance into the FBI training program. The video would most likely add great weight to her application for the academy.

  But it didn’t erase the Technicolor memory of shooting a man.

  “Shake it off, Elissa. Let it go. I know it’s not easy, but you have to let go of the past if you want a future.”

  Sissy put on a sudden big smile. “Hey, come back here and be in the present. That dumb idiot asked me to marry him again, but I think he’s serious this time. Greg wanted to tell you, but I swore him to silence. I thought you could use a night of rest first. And I wanted to tell you myself.”

  Sissy laughed genuinely, a sparkle in her eye. “I might be able to put up with the pompous ass. I think the crisis made him think he might lose me. I’ve never seen such an attitude adjustment. You’ll be around for it, won’t you?”

  Elissa recalled the moment Greg had released her from his arms after the shooting. He’d hugged Sissy to the point of tears in his eyes. Sissy had broken into a hard weeping over the entire event, and Greg set her head on his shoulder and let her get it all out, then he’d held her hand every moment his own hands weren’t occupied with something else. His affection for Sissy was a billboard.