Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto

by Contemporary Romance

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Crime scene,” he replied.

  “This doesn’t mean they couldn’t take her out of the city,” Marisela allowed herself a split-second of triumph before reality slammed her in the gut. “They can get a fake in about an hour.”

  “Four hours,” Frankie corrected, “And only if they have the right contacts and a hell of a lot of cash. Fake passports aren’t as easy to come by around here as they are to Titan operatives. And if the kidnappers didn’t have an exit strategy that accounted for one of their guys getting shot, that buys us even more time.”

  “You’re going to help?”

  He tugged her close and she relaxed, for a second, against his chest. She just needed a heartbeat of a moment to process everything that had happened—and everything she had to do to get Belinda back.

  “I’m not abandoning you. Did you really think I would?”

  She twisted her mouth into a grimace. “Maybe.”

  “Let’s get out here. Work out a plan.”

  “But what about staking out the ER? It’s the closest one to the airport. I got in a good shot. If he loses enough blood, they’ll have to bring him here.”

  “Or dump his body by the side of a road,” Frankie said. “We don’t know if that guy was hired muscle or the one in charge. And we can’t wait around to find out. Too many cops.”

  “Let me go back inside,” she suggested. “Talk to the doctor.”

  But true to form, Frankie took her by the arm and forced her out of the shadows far away from the ER entrance.

  “I got it covered.”

  She’d bet a half-dozen nurses now had his number, but she didn’t complain. For one, her relationship with Frankie was far from exclusive. And two, if one of them gave up a clue that would lead them to her sister, she’d consider sleeping with them herself.

  Well, maybe not. But she’d make sure Frankie made risking their jobs worthwhile. That, she could guarantee.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as he boosted her over a fence that separated the hospital’s parking lot from the medical center where he’d parked.

  He cleared the chain-link barrier with the ease of a cat, grinning like one who’d just finished lapping up a bowlful of cream.

  “Isn’t that always the question with us, vidita? Your place…or mine?”

  Six

  He’d tempted her. Marisela had been riding his ass for over a month for a chance to see the inside of his condo, but instead, she directed him to her place, which was only a few blocks away. There, she’d have access to her work phone, computer and equipment, even if she didn’t have the mighty Titan machine to back her up. This time around, she had only him.

  Just like the old days—the days before he broke her heart.

  Not that he felt guilty about it—his decision to choose his gang over her had probably been stupid, but he couldn’t change the past. And he wasn’t so sure things would have turned out differently even if he had gone straight. He wouldn’t have gotten to know her sister any better. Her parents had sent her to a special school shortly after he and Marisela had met and all he knew was that she had some kind of mental condition that made her super-smart when it came to numbers and patterns and shit, but really dumb in people skills. But no matter how much her situation caused Marisela pain, she’d risk her life to get Belinda back unhurt.

  Although he wasn’t as keen to get between Marisela and her death wishes as he used to be, he wouldn’t leave her on her own. Quitting his position as her partner at Titan had been rough enough. Quitting her entirely? Impossible.

  “Who called?” he asked after she reset the alarm in her office while listening to the messages on her cell, both of which had come in while they’d been casing the neighborhood to make sure they weren’t being watched.

  “My mother. The cop. She said I should call her at my ‘earliest convenience.’”

  “Which means you won’t be calling at all,” he concluded, flicking on the lights.

  He didn’t blame her. He might have connections to the police department that he had exploited to get onto the crime scene, but even he knew better than to involve the cops in to this mess so early in the game. If the kidnappers made some outrageous demands, Marisela needed to consider all possibilities—not just the ones sanctioned by the law.

  “So the passport is all we have,” Marisela said.

  We. Marisela and Frankie, together again. He figured there could be worse ways to spend his time before the holidays.

  “It was just dumb luck I got that. Found it lodged under the wheel of a car parked not too far from yours.”

  She twisted in her seat and eyed him suspiciously. “How did you get so close?”

  He fiddled with a photo on Lia’s desk, which seemed to be the center of Titan’s satellite operation. From what he could tell, Marisela didn’t have a desk, though he suspected the curve in the plush couch near a laptop and a moldy cup of café con leche would perfectly fit her ass.

  “I have a contact who used to work the gang task force,” he explained, careful to leave out names or ranks. “That got me into the staging area on the parking garage’s bottom level. I swiped a crime scene tech jacket and blended into the chaos.”

  He’d gotten a hold of the passport because no one had found it, but he’d watched them recover what he believed to be Belinda’s cell phone. Unfortunately, once it was bagged and tagged, the chances of him getting near it had disappeared.

  “You took a chance getting this for me,” Marisela acknowledged, shaking the passport. “I owe you.”

  He scoffed. “Vidita, if I made you pay me back for all the things you owe me for, you’d be on your back for the rest of your life.”

  “I thought you liked it better when I was on top?”

  “Any way you want it, baby, I’m game.”

  He hoped she’d pick up the sexy banter and run with it, but she immediately put her attention back on the office phone. She called in to her office voicemail while she checked emails on Lia’s computer.

  After a long silence, she clicked off the phone and slammed the keyboard drawer shut. “El silencio está matándome.”

  He could only imagine how not hearing anything was tearing her apart. Marisela and patience had never been friends and inactivity was her mortal enemy. In situations like this, she could act without thinking, which would result in getting both of them—and her sister—into a shitload of trouble.

  The instinct to grab her, hold her tight, distract her with sex, fought with the knowledge that if he did any of the above, she’d gift him with a painful black eye.

  “You should call Max,” Frank suggested instead.

  Max, not Ian. Ian Blake, the Boston-Brit who ran Titan, was a first-class prick who put his Christmas holiday ahead of the safety of his people. But Max, Ian’s right-hand man, wouldn’t leave Marisela out in the cold if he knew she was in trouble. At least, Frank didn’t think he would.

  “His phone isn’t on and his texts aren’t going through. He said he was going off the grid and Max never lies.”

  “Unless the boss man orders him to,” Frank muttered, suddenly thankful for the business he got tracking down bastards who didn’t give a shit about their wedding vows. Tailing bastards who gave their mistresses diamonds for Christmas while the mother of their children got a vacuum cleaner had sucked the holiday spirit right out of him, but even that was better than working for Ian Blake. “Where is your fearless leader anyway? Why didn’t you call him instead of me, since he’s the one you stayed with?”

  Marisela threw him a look that said, “Fuck you.” That was oversimplifying things, but Frank was a simple guy. He’d paid his dues working for Ian. He’d learned everything he could about investigation and protection, socked his salary away and at the first opportunity, went out on his own. He’d wanted Marisela to come with him, but she’d declined the offer. Said she wasn’t ready. Said she had more to learn. She was probably right, but the choice still got und
er his skin.

  “Bryn and Ian are out of the country, touring the damned North Pole or something.”

  “Don’t you mean South Pole? Unless they’re into mushing dogs and sub-zero weather.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what they’re into,” Marisela snapped. “I need them and they’re too far away to help, bonding with each other over the holidays or some shit. Coño! Why would anyone take Belinda? She’s useless. They must have wanted to get back at me.”

  “Self-centered much?” Frank challenged. Marisela’s brain fired faster when she was pissed. Right now, she was pacing like a jungle cat with a thorn in her paw, changing directions without warning, anxious and unpredictable. But she hadn’t done anything to alter the situation in her favor—and that worried the hell out of him.

  “I know my sister,” Marisela insisted.

  “How? You haven’t seen her in years. You have no idea what she was into in London.”

  “I know someone was into her,” Marisela said. “She’s pregnant.”

  He tried not to react, but this was news he hadn’t anticipated—ever. He’d only met Marisela’s older sister once and she gave off a vibe that even the most clueless hombre couldn’t miss: Don’t Touch.

  “She told you?” he questioned.

  “Didn’t have to. She looks like she’s going to pop at any minute.”

  No wonder Marisela was off her game. She was in shock.

  “When is she due?”

  “I didn’t have time to ask!”

  “You must have seen that she was pregnant before you went up to the top of the parking garage.”

  Marisela stomped her foot and shoved a load of file folders off Lia’s desk, sending them onto the floor like manila snowflakes. He arched a brow, watching her kick the mess around until there was no way they’d ever reconcile the paperwork.

  So, he’d hit a nerve. Luckily, slipping into her psyche was as natural to him as sliding into her body. She’d probably seen Belinda’s fat belly and had a fit, one that was more about Marisela yelling and less about Belinda telling her how she’d ended up with a bun in her oven.

  He inhaled deeply and forced his voice to be gentle. “What do you know?”

  She flopped into the nearest chair. “I know I’m an idiot! I know that whoever moved my car did it to throw me off. Or to separate us. I know whoever took my sister was smart, but not a pro.”

  “Why not a pro?”

  She stared at him. “Pros would not have left witnesses.”

  “Pros might not care if you didn’t see anything useful, which you didn’t.”

  “They wouldn’t have taken that chance.”

  He slid Lia’s wheeled chair out from the desk and sat. “What if they need you to pay a ransom?”

  “Then they would have called by now. And they might have killed Lia to prove they were serious.”

  “Maybe they meant to,” he argued. “Or maybe they didn’t plan for Lia to be a factor. She came at the last minute, verdad?”

  Marisela dropped her head into her hands. The strands of her thick, dark hair fell down around her face like a curtain, but Frank could feel her rage burning in the pit of his stomach. Her sister was missing. Her best friend was in the hospital with a serious injury and Marisela was trapped here, with him, her sometimes-lover, avoiding the cops and trying to work out how to fix this when none of the resources she’d sold her soul to possess were any help.

  She was holding herself together by a thread.

  But he knew better than to coddle her. If he tried to soothe her pain or even touch her tenderly, she’d slug him. Hell, he’d do the same if he was in her shoes. Problems this big needed to be fixed, not mourned.

  He retrieved Belinda’s passport from where Marisela had tossed it, then flipped through the pages, noting the details about Belinda’s life that he didn’t know—her address in London, her profession as a computer analyst, the frequency and number of her visits to Spain, usually timed around holidays and weekends. This didn’t surprise him. The Morales family had emigrated from Cuba, but they had family in Spain—family they’d discovered through Belinda’s disorder. Belinda had been sent to them when she was a teen, so it was no surprise she’d visit whenever she could.

  But on the back page, he found something that did not belong—a pale yellow sticky note with a strange symbol hand drawn in the center, then repeated in smaller versions all around.

  “What’s this?”

  Marisela looked up. “What?”

  He handed her the passport. She slid it under the lamp light. “I don’t know…looks like a B, may be for Belinda? And…a Christmas tree?”

  Frank leaned closer, ignoring the scent of smoke clinging to Marisela’s luxuriously long hair. Bits of glass and smudges of grime clung to her everywhere, but she refused to do more than brush off. He’d pay a king’s ransom for a chance at luring her upstairs into a hot shower or a bath.

  But since he treasured his fingers, he squelched his instinct to pick the shards free.

  “Does Belinda draw?” he asked.

  She lifted the passport away from the lamp. “Sometimes. If she repeats something like this, it means it’s either important or bothering her. She must have drawn it while on the plane, though, don’t you think? Maybe she was just excited about Christmas?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know…it kind of looks Chinese to me.”

  She skewered him with a disgusted look. “What the fuck do I know of Chinese? I eat at Mrs. Tanaka’s Sushi Bar twice a week, but that doesn’t mean I order without the pictures. And that’s Japanese. Two different languages, right?”

  “I guess. Google it.”

  She started toward Lia’s computer, then stopped. “How do you Google a language that doesn’t use letters?” She cursed. “Lia does the computer shit. I don’t know a Google from a garrote.”

  He chuckled, unsure if she was using the word as a reference to a method of strangulation or as slang for a penis. With Marisela, he never knew. Still, if she had access to her sense of humor, she was getting her shit together. He risked placing his hand on her shoulder. She winced, but didn’t pull away.

  “I think we should look into this drawing,” he suggested. “It could be nothing, but your sister doesn’t seem like the type to randomly doodle.”

  “She’s not,” Marisela said, her hand drifting across the desk to a notepad, presumably Lia’s since this was her office space. The yellow paper was cluttered with random stick figures, flowers and shapes, probably sketched mindlessly while she talked on the phone. If asked, Frank would have predicted that Marisela hiring Lia as her office manager was a huge mistake. Two big personalities couldn’t survive both a personal and professional relationship.

  But they’d proved him wrong, which meant the only two personalities who couldn’t survive the constant interaction were his and hers.

  “Do you want to go check on her?” he asked as her gaze lingered over the framed picture of her and Lia looking deceptively innocent at their senior prom, when he knew for a fact that both of them had skinny dipped in a hotel pool early the next morning.

  She turned the image aside. “She’s in the hospital. Her family is with her. I can’t do anything for her there. I need to concentrate on tracking down Belinda.”

  “Then maybe we should interview the only other witness to her kidnapping.”

  She conceded his point and agreed to run upstairs to her apartment, shower and change into something less conspicuous while he monitored the police scanner for any news on the explosion. She came down ten minutes later with her wet hair tied into a ponytail, dressed in plain green scrubs and tennis shoes and carrying a black bag.

  “Think I’ll blend in?” she asked.

  Frank laughed. “To me, vidita, you can’t blend in anywhere. But we’ll work with what we have.”

  “Any news?”

  “If the police know anything about your sister’s kidnapping, they aren’t saying anything on the radio.”

  She s
queezed around Lia’s desk, bent over and flicked a hidden switch. A drawer popped open and from it, she retrieved her back-up weapon, a Taurus 9mm, which she tucked into a holster hidden beneath her shirt. “Then let’s get her back before they ever have to find out.”

  Seven

  With Frankie’s help, slipping into the hospital a second time wasn’t difficult. Getting up to Lia’s recovery room without being spotted was a little trickier. But with an ID lifted from an orderly more interested in his cigarette break than security, Marisela was in and out of the reserved elevator and standing next to Lia’s mother, pretending to check the monitors before Mrs. Santorini noticed she was there.

  “Marisela, what are you doing?”

  She released the tubes. “Nothing. Just checking on Lia. Trying not to draw attention to myself. Same as always.”

  Lia’s mother frowned, then sat forward, but didn’t drop her daughter’s hand, pressed protectively between hers. “Tell me what happened.”

  Antoinette Santorini was all of five-foot-one, but she had a stare that could inject fear into the hearts of children everywhere, including her three fully grown sons, two of whom had played football all the way through college and one who was in the military. Marisela was no less intimidated. It was one thing to stare down psychopaths and remorseless killers, but it was something else to go head-to-head with an Italian mother whose daughter had been hurt.

  Marisela shuffled over to the door and tugged it closed.

  “My sister, Belinda, called me last week and told me she was coming home to surprise my parents for Christmas. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Lia. But she figured out I was hiding something,” she said, glancing at Lia so that Toni knew precisely who she referred to. “She knows that my relationship with Belinda is…complicated…so she insisted on coming with me to the airport.”

  She gave Toni a quick rundown of what happened, sparing her the gory details—like how Marisela shot one of the kidnappers. Toni knew, in theory, what Marisela was capable of, but that didn’t mean she ever wanted to hand her best friend’s mother irrefutable proof.