“No! Wait!” he begged. “I had nothing to do with this. Makoto took me to the hospital. Hiro stayed with Belinda. They promised not to hurt her.” He army-crawled to a ratty couch in the corner. The moldy fabric was partially covered with a sheet so new from the package, it still bore the patterned indentations of the folds.
On an upturned, rusted crate rested a box of Belinda’s favorite Oreo cookies and a carton of milk. The top was torn open into a perfect square with just enough room for dunking. She checked the leftovers. The only ones left behind were chipped or broken or otherwise marred. Marisela couldn’t fight a quick grin. Belinda would only eat the perfect ones. The rest she’d give to her little sister.
The little sister who’d failed to protect her at the airport and now wasn’t making any progress in getting her back.
She leveled her gun at the sweaty spot in between Rick’s dark eyebrows, clearing the space between them in two long strides so that the barrel was pressed hard against his forehead. “You trusted a couple of thugs with my pregnant sister. Exactly how trustworthy are guys who run in gangs? Frankie? Care to lend your expertise?”
Frankie clucked his tongue. “From my experience, not trustworthy at all.”
The crisp atmosphere of doom cracked the minute Rick started wailing. He flung himself over his cousin’s body and wept, sobbing at one point so loudly that Marisela desperately wanted to leave the room. She didn’t. She stood, gun aimed, arm steady, waiting for the man to run out of grief or realize that any scam meant at tugging at her heartstrings wasn’t going to work.
Not that Marisela didn’t have heartstrings. She’d long ago accepted that hers were tuned more finely than people might expect. It was her secret weapon—and her secret curse. She battled between taking Rick out of the equation and giving him a chance to prove he was worthy of fathering the child he’d put in Belinda’s womb.
“That’s enough,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and dragging him away from the body, disgusted by the pattern of blood now stippling his hospital gown. “And take that rag off. You got clothes here?”
He obeyed, gesturing toward an old desk where bloody strips of material, torn from the remaining pieces of the cheap sheet set, sat in a haphazard pile. Clearly, they’d shopped at a discount store on the way to this hide-out, buying a mound of first aid supplies, a package of generic t-shirts, bottled waters and a pillow, judging by the plastic wrapper.
Marisela looked around, but the cushion was nowhere to be seen. She closed her eyes and willed away the image that popped into her brain of her sister clinging to it for comfort in the face of her fear.
“Help him,” Marisela ordered Frankie.
“What the fuck? No way,” he argued.
She turned and squinted, shooting the full power of her rage at him from her slitted eyelids. “If I touch him, I’ll kill him. If I kill him, we’ll never find my sister. Help him.” She ground out the last word, “please.”
After a string of curses in two languages, Frankie handed her his weapon and assisted Rick in cleaning up. There wasn’t much they could do with his bandage since Marisela had likely reopened his stitches with her coercion, so Frankie tore more strips from the sheet on the couch and wrapped them around his shoulder so he didn’t bleed through. He then helped Rick into the darkest colored t-shirt and fashioned a sling.
As much as Marisela hated it, Rick alive was more useful to them than Rick dead or unconscious. She slung Frankie’s gun into her waistband, but held tight to hers as she handed her sister’s lover an opened bottle of water.
“Drink it,” she ordered. “Get your shit together. We need to know everything you know. Every fucking detail. It’s Christmas Eve, you son of a bitch, and I want my sister back.”
“I want her back, too,” Rick croaked.
Marisela laughed. “You’re not going to get anywhere near her until you tell us everything—and I mean everything—from the moment you first laid eyes on Belinda until you rolled into the hospital. And be as careful about the details you leave in as the ones you leave out, got it?”
Rick might have been in pain and grief-stricken, but he absorbed her message and recounted the details of his affair with Belinda with discretion. He told them how they’d worked side by side on a project and were attracted to each other, an emotional response that Belinda had found frightening at first, then confusing, then curious.
“We got to be friends,” he explained. “She trusted me and things just, evolved.”
As a reward for his carefully chosen words, Marisela shook four over-the-counter pain killers into her hand and helped him swallow them down.
“So what happened when she found out she was pregnant?” she asked once he downed the last of the bottled water.
“Nothing,” Rick said. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant. She and I spent some time together, but she didn’t seem anxious for a relationship and I didn’t want either of us to lose our jobs. When she started gaining weight and got a little moody—as moody as Belinda can be—I guessed what was wrong. I proposed, promised to take care of her, but she said no. No marriage. No baby. But she just kept getting bigger and wouldn’t answer anyone’s questions. Finally, our boss confronted her and she told him she was putting the baby up for adoption.”
“And I guess that pissed you off?” Frankie asked.
“Wouldn’t it piss you off?” Rick demanded. “That was my child and she wasn’t even giving me a say in what happened to it. I lost my temper and got sent home. The next day, Belinda started working from home. She wouldn’t answer my phone calls or emails or texts. She called the building manager when I came banging on her door. I just wanted to talk to her, tell her I’d marry her or that…”
His voice trailed off.
Marisela woke him from his stupor with a swift kick to the leg. “You stalked her and she blew you off, so you decided to kidnap her and what, force her to marry you or keep her in a cage until she gave birth? Did you plan to steal the kid and leave her behind?”
“What? No! I swear. I had to go to San Francisco and I figured she’d go to Spain to spend Christmas with her cousins there like she does every year. I planned to fly there at New Year’s, try to use her family to convince her to let me do the right thing, but then someone at work told me that she’d taken a leave of absence to go back to the States. I knew she was coming here to give the baby away. I knew she’d use you for protection. She knew I had…connections. I think it scared her.”
Marisela leaned down, her gaze level with his. “Belinda doesn’t get scared.”
“She was scared of my background. Hell, so am I.”
“Scared of yakuza?” Frankie asked. “So your cousin wasn’t the only one wrapped up in that shit.”
Rick’s chin dropped as he shook his head.
Marisela exchanged a glance with Frankie, uncertain what he was implying for a second. He remained silent, staring first at her, then back at Rick.
She laughed. “You can’t be serious. You think this maricón is Japanese mob?”
“Maybe not by choice,” Frankie guessed. “Yakuza is more like the mob than the gangs we ran with. Maybe he didn’t join, but he was born into it,” he explained. “Is it your uncle? Father?”
“Father,” Rick confessed, his voice ripe with shame. “My mother was an engineer he met on a vacation. They had an affair, but she left him the minute she realized what he was. She moved to London, then realized she was pregnant. She didn’t tell him about me and by the time he figured it out, she convinced him that I was too old to follow in his footsteps.”
Marisela holstered her weapon. Her sister’s lover posed no threat. Even his father thought so, or he might have fought harder to drag him into his underworld organization. Clearly, the man had good instincts. Rick was only criminal enough to be dangerous to the people around him—like Belinda.
She crouched next to him. “Look, I’m sorry your papi rejected you. And it sucks that one of your cousins whacked the other one. But how does thi
s have anything to do with Belinda? This Mako, guy—”
“Makoto,” he supplied.
“Whatever. Why would he kill his own brother?”
Rick shrugged carelessly.
Marisela slapped him. “Wrong answer.”
“I don’t know! Makoto wanted to go to Japan. He wanted to regain his family’s honor with the yakuza, but his father, my uncle, forbade it. My father respected his wishes and refused to allow Makoto to join the organization. And he didn’t kill Hiro after he screwed up. To my father, family is everything.”
She stood. “Something your father and I have in common.”
Frankie tugged her away from Rick, who had dropped his head onto his one good hand and started weeping again. This time though, he made no sound.
“No wonder his father didn’t fight harder for him,” Marisela snapped as they abandoned the office to talk alone. “He’s a wuss.”
“Let’s review,” Frankie said. “First, he found out his lover was pregnant, but putting his kid up for adoption. Then he got shot. Then his one cousin killed his other cousin and is probably trying to buy his way into the Japanese mob with his child. He has permission to lose his shit for a few minutes.”
Marisela’s heart stopped. “Do you think that’s his plan? To sell my niece or nephew for a chance to play gangster?”
Frankie shrugged. “He won’t be playing if it works. The yakuza doesn’t operate in Tampa. Not in Florida. Probably not in the entire southeast. If he wants to pay to play, he’s going to have to either get her out or bring someone else in.”
“But we have her passport—” Marisela began, but stopped herself before she grabbed onto any false hope. “I guess these yakuza guys would have no trouble getting a fake.”
“If Rick’s dad is as powerful as it seems, he probably travels with a forger. Hell, he probably has a private plane. It would be the easiest way to get her out of town. Quietly. No roadblocks. No questions, even if Belinda is screaming her head off.”
Marisela ran the possible scenarios through her head, quickly coming up with the likeliest way a rich gang of mobsters could get her sister out of town. “How do we check?”
A voice echoed against the still silence of the cavernous warehouse. “I can call in a favor from the FAA.”
Marisela and Frankie had spun, weapons drawn, before the gruff, but somewhat familiar voice finished the sentence. The intruder stepped into a beam of light that had broken through a crack in a window high above them, hands held high above his shoulders.
Frankie lowered his gun, but Marisela had no idea why.
“Frankie,” she chastised.
But her ex-boyfriend and sometimes partner only grinned. “Geez, Marisela, don’t you recognize the magician when you see him?”
She narrowed her gaze, peering into the long, matted hair, ratty clothes and hippy sandals to find something that would tell her how she was supposed to know this hobo.
Then she reached his eyes—gray eyes that weren’t so much a pigment as they were an absence of color altogether.
She launched herself into his arms.
“Max!”
Sixteen
He smelled like ass. And yet, Marisela held on a little longer than was hygienically wise. It was Max, after all. To Frankie, he was Ian’s loyal manservant. But to Marisela, he was the one operative within the Titan organization who appreciated her for who she was—and for who she was not.
“That’s enough,” Frankie said, tugging her off. “Let the man breathe. Fuck, let him back up so we can breathe.”
“Really, Max,” Marisela said, waving her hand in front of her nose to diffuse the stench of unwashed hair and skin. “What are you, pretending to be forty-days-in-the-desert Jesus for Christmas?”
His expression was unrepentant, though it was hard to read under a tangle of overgrown facial hair. “Would you have preferred I delay my response to your calls in lieu of a spa day?”
“No,” Marisela answered. “Find a crate to sit on, downwind, and let me fill you in.”
While Frankie went back to check on Rick, Marisela told Max everything she knew. She’d never been officially briefed on the nature of Max’s position at Titan, but he was part manager, part Ian’s valet and part secret weapon. She didn’t even know his last name. But after a half-dozen operations with him in command, she knew the one thing that mattered: she could trust him.
As she recounted the events of the past sixteen hours, Max neither nodded nor commented. As he did with light and shadow—Marisela was convinced he possessed a preternatural ability to appear and disappear at will—he absorbed.
“So the younger brother, Makoto, hungry for a spot within the yakuza, killed his disgraced sibling and took your sister and the unborn grandchild as an offering to the kumicho,” Max summed up.
Marisela replayed his assessment in her head. “If kumicho means head asshole of the Japanese mob, then yea, that’s the theory.”
Max nodded. “It’s reasonable. And it means your boy in there could be a valuable bargaining chip in retrieving your sister before she’s spirited out of the country. Just because his daddy didn’t want him when he was a scrawny kid at Eton doesn’t mean he can’t find a use for the educated, upstanding British citizen he’s become. You and Frankie did a good job by enticing him out of police custody.”
“Don’t we always?” Frankie’s voice croaked as he reappeared, the nearly-unconscious Rick slumped over his shoulder.
Max lifted Rick’s head by the hair and gave him a long once-over. “I assume he looked better when your sister slept with him?”
“You’re one to talk, mountain man,” Marisela replied. “I guess escaping from the police takes a lot out of a guy.”
“Not to mention the after-effects of your interrogation technique,” Frankie said, grunting under Rick’s increasingly deadening weight.
“Let’s get him somewhere he can recover,” Max suggested, a tiny and terrifying grin peeking from his bearded face, “and we’ll give my interrogation techniques a try.”
Frankie’s eyes widened. “You do realize he’s more valuable to us alive, right?”
Max didn’t answer.
Marisela decided she didn’t care what Max did, as long as they got answers. If Rick Suzuki had respected her sister’s wishes about her pregnancy, none of this would have happened. She had no idea what Belinda had been thinking in deciding to put her baby up for adoption, but thanks to Rick, she hadn’t had a chance to find out.
In the twenty-nine years she’d managed to stay alive, Marisela had fucked up a million times. But she’d never gotten herself knocked-up. She’d had a scare once or twice. What sexually active woman hadn’t? But in the end, God or biology or whatever must have agreed that despite her interminable love for all things baby-related, she’d make a terrible mother.
But an aunt? She’d kick-ass.
Now, she might not ever have the chance.
Moving Rick, a fugitive, proved easier now that they had another pair of hands. She and Frankie loaded him into the backseat of Max’s car while the spymaster worked his magic on the area around Hiro’s body, removing all evidence of their presence. By the time they eased out of the parking lot into the moderate morning holiday traffic, Frankie following behind them in his car, which he’d stash at his brother’s garage on their way to a safe house, the sound of sirens, though audible, were far in the distance.
“We could have burned the place,” Marisela mumbled, not happy with Max’s decision to keep the crime scene intact. She wanted nothing left behind that would tie Rick’s dead cousin to her or worse, her sister.
Max eased into a parking spot at the mechanic’s shop. “I saw no reason to add arson to the list of crimes you and Mr. Vega have perpetrated in pursuit of your sister.”
Marisela opened her mouth to object, but couldn’t find the words. She supposed they had fractured more than one local, state or federal statute, including but not limited to, hampering an on-going police investigation. B
ut it had been for a good cause.
Frankie bypassed his brother’s security system and parked his car in an empty bay. He then climbed into the passenger seat of Max’s car, leaving Marisela to push Rick into a corner in the back and hope he slept off his growing lethargy. He deserved the pain she’d inflicted for getting her sister pregnant and for involving mobsters and thugs in her already complicated life, but she didn’t want him to die.
Not really.
“Think anyone’s looking for us?” Frankie asked.
“Other than the charming Detective Flores?” he said, throwing a sly look in Frankie’s direction.
“You know her?” he asked.
Max kept his eyes on the road. “I made a few discreet inquiries about the local law enforcement situation prior to giving my recommendation for the Tampa satellite office.”
“Any of those inquiries tell you what’s going on with this case?” Marisela questioned.
“Ballistics testing on your gun isn’t complete, though we both know they’re going to make the connection between you and the round dug out of Mr. Suzuki’s shoulder.”
“It was self-defense,” she argued.
Max nodded. “And I expect a good attorney will be able to argue that point successfully. Also, Homeland Security is nosing around for an interview in regards to the destruction of your car, but as it’s the holidays, I’m convinced they can be put off.”
“I’m not going anywhere near the cops until I have my sister back,” she said.
“I believe that would be prudent and to that end, we won’t be returning either to the office or Frankie’s apartment, which I understand is now under surveillance.”
“What about my parents?” she asked.
“Their house is being watched,” Max said.
“No, I mean, has anyone told them about Belinda?”
“On that, I have no idea.”
She dug out her phone. There were no messages, either text or voice, from anyone. If the police had alerted her parents, she’d have gotten a hundred calls by now. By this afternoon, Aida and Ernesto would be expecting a call from Belinda. That was the tradition. In years past, Belinda did as Rick had said, spending the holidays in Madrid with the distant cousins who had taken her in when she’d gone to Spain for the special school.
Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto Page 10