Ten years ago, after my father single-handedly unraveled the entire Fazio family in a mere weekend, the Morettis took over all of New Jersey with an iron fist, and one of their underlings happened to be my ex, Johnny Rizzo.
Johnny is the one that dragged me into that whole let’s screw the Morettis scheme while they screw the government. It involved a carwash, a donut shop, a chop shop, dirty money, and a monster profit that’s kept me in Louis Vuitton bags for the past six months, but the innerworkings of Johnny’s idiotic scheme are far too complicated to dig into at the moment, nor do I care to relive them.
But my dad… I’ve spent the last five years reliving everything about that man. How I loved the way things were before everything fell apart.
My father, Angelo Santini, or The Sunday Sinner as he’s since been dubbed, is in prison for a RICO charge. Prior to his incarceration, he became an informant for the feds. He wore a wire, the whole nine-weasel yards—and on a Sunday no less, thus his dishonorable new title.
Suffice it to say, he’s as good as dead if he ever gets out—and maybe on the inside, too.
My dad cut a deal. Not a good deal. The feds still managed to seize everything, from our small kitchen appliances to my mother’s minks. Yes, real minks had been sacrificed to create those furry horrors my mother loved to ensconce herself in no matter if the weather dictated their presence or not. Believe me, she is no friend of PETA.
But as soon as the government licked us clean, she was filing for divorce and out on the cougar prowl. Her preference for men younger than her own children is still something I can’t wrap my head around.
In less than twenty-four hours after my father’s incarceration, our first-class world turned into a third-world nightmare.
It turns out, Dad and his buddies were smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the country, via Latin America, and the Fazio family distributed it right here in New Jersey.
But since Daddy’s little tap dance with the wire, that nightmare with the Fazios imploding and the Morettis stepping up to take their place led to my own aforementioned nightmare called Johnny Rizzo. And it was his bright idea to steal from the mob, which accidentally tipped off the feds to the Morettis’ felonious misgivings—that led me here, to my very own execution party sponsored by Clairol.
“Stella,” Uncle Vinnie barks my name out as if he were trying to wake me from a very bad dream, and how I wish he were. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m doing you a favor. The Morettis have already decided they want you quiet.” In the mob, quiet is code for dead. “Johnny took off last night or they’d have gotten him first.”
“He took off?” My eyes bulge at the thought. “And he left me here to fry?” Okay. Confession: technically, Johnny isn’t my ex quite yet. As of yesterday, we were still together. I haven’t actually had the privilege of slapping him silly and telling him to take a hike just yet, only because we knew our lives were about to implode in far more dramatic ways than any mere breakup could bring on.
But on my way home from that fiasco, I had broken up with him a thousand times in my head. I came this close to texting him with the news but didn’t want to deny myself the pleasure of looking him in the eye when I did it—and I might have been looking forward to shoving my knee into his crotch as well.
Johnny Rizzo promised me a rose garden and instead wrapped me in thorns and threw me into a sewer.
“Yes, he took off.” Uncle Vinnie nods aggressively as if this should have been obvious. “You’re on your own, kid. And I’m not going to kill you.” His features soften. “I’m going to help you.” He hands me the box with a picture of a redhead on the front who could double as Ariel from The Little Mermaid. “I’ve got a car waiting around the corner. Sit in the back. You’ll find a large envelope filled with the paperwork you’re going to need. New driver’s license, social security card, passport, and car insurance. Everything you need to start a new life. My driver is taking you up to the New York border. I bought a car for you. It’s not much, but it’s yours. There’s some gas money in the glove compartment. You’ll have to be smart about how you spend it. Drive through New York, then up through Vermont until you get to Canada.” He swipes the phone out of my hand. “In the glove compartment you’ll also find a burner phone. I’ve got the number. I’ll be calling from a burner myself. You don’t call anybody else, you hear?”
“What? Give me that.” I dive for my phone, but he tosses it to the ground and quickly puts a bullet through it before putting his gun back into his pocket. “This is really happening?” Tears sting my eyes as I look to the man I’ve regarded as a second father for my entire life.
“It’s really happening.” His eyes grow glossy as well. “Goodbye, Stella. That’s the last time I will ever say your name, and the last time you’ll hear it. You got that?”
My head wobbles back and forth. “What’s my new name?” I swallow hard to keep from bawling like a baby.
“Bowie Binx, with an X.”
“Bow wow what?” I snip, highly annoyed that I had no say in this. “Are you kidding me? I’ve waited my whole life to crawl from under the name my parents gifted me and you did what to me now?”
“Bowie Binx.” He shrugs. “What can I say? I was working under a very tight time constraint. You have no idea how hard it was to put together a fictitious life in less than twenty-four hours.”
“Bowie Binx.” I try it on for size. “How in the heck did you come up with that whopper?”
“I happened to be listening to some good music. David Bowie was playing at the time, and I went with it. And as for Binx, I asked Minnie what she wanted to name her next kitten and it’s the first thing that flew from her lips.”
Minnie is Uncle Vinnie’s thee-year-old granddaughter who thinks she’s married to her stepfather because her mother, my cousin Jackie, thought it would be cute to have him put a ring on her finger, too, during their wedding ceremony.
“Great. I’m named after a legendary singer and an imaginary cat. I couldn’t have done better myself.”
“You keep up with the sharp tongue, little lady. You’re going to need it to survive. It’s a tough world out there. Even in Canada.” He wags a finger my way. “You’ll see how cold and unfeeling it is without the warm, strong arms of the family around you.”
“Yeah, well, the family wants me dead. I think I’ll take my chances with a bunch of cold, unfeeling Canadians.” I suck in my bottom lip as I look to my uncle for what feels like the very last time. “I love you.”
“I know.” He pulls me in and holds me for a small eternity, and I truly do feel the warm, strong arms of family around me. “If the burner phones don’t work out, we’ll find another way to communicate. The code word is meow.”
I make a face. “Another contribution from Minnie?”
He gives a somber nod.
And then, just like that, he turns me around and instructs me to run.
And run I do.
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to Canada I go.
Let’s hope I don’t run into Johnny Rizzo there or I’ll kill him.
And that’s one prognostication I can guarantee will come true.
Chapter 2
The envelope Uncle Vinnie left me was smaller than I imagined.
The driver of the dark sedan was stoic and quiet as a church mouse as he drove me to the state line. I asked him a million questions on the way over and he ignored every single one. I’m betting Uncle Vinnie made him take an oath of silence. And seeing that the Santini men are prone to secretly recording auditory events, my Uncle Vinnie was probably taping the entire one-sided conversation, just in case he needed to fire a bullet into this poor man’s skull.
The driver pulls up alongside a beat-up red Honda hatchback that looks to be from another millennium entirely and hitches his thumb for me to get out.
The hatchback is more of a rust color than it is a cherry red. The seats have long gashes running through them intermittently, letting me know this tub of stee
l was witness to a violent crime at some point in time. There’s cash in the glove compartment just like Uncle Vinnie said there would be, along with that burner phone. The old car sputters and kicks as we make our way through endless desolate highways, and I reflect on all I’ve left behind.
My mother, Marie Santini, most likely won’t know I’m gone until at least next week when she comes looking to borrow another one of my Louis Vuitton bags. She likes to cycle through them about every seven days and she just borrowed one yesterday. And as it stands, she’s officially now the owner of the entire collection whether she knows it or not.
I have a brother and a sister, too.
My brother, Lorenzo, is twenty-nine. He’s older than me by one year. He works down on the waterfront as a mechanic, and between work and his hypersexual love life, he may not notice I’m missing for a solid year.
My sister, Stephanie, younger by one year, works at her boyfriend’s mother’s nail salon and I feel as if I haven’t seen her for a solid year. Once her feet outgrew my shoe size, she outgrew the practicality for a sister like me. Steph and I have never been close, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t crave it. I craved a lot of things, and almost all of them revolved around a normal family whose definition didn’t include anything about a hierarchy of leg breakers.
The red beast I’m driving coughs and sputters her way halfway through New York before I decide to duck into a Denny’s and scarf down a couple of scrambled eggs and a heap of bacon even though it’s well past dinnertime. Once I’m through inhaling my food, I duck into their restroom and run that box of dye Uncle Vinnie gifted me through my hair, contemplating how I went from being a pampered princess to a fugitive on the run.
Not surprisingly, the hair dye doesn’t take. It looks less Ariel the mermaid and more like I ran a can of Cherry Coke through my tresses. The red rim of dye along my forehead isn’t so flattering either. As if my failure to conceal my appearance wasn’t enough, I ripped a hole in the back of my yoga pants as I struggled to pull them up after I used the restroom.
I bang my head against the stall for a good long while. I’ve never been a horseshoe, but then I’ve never been such a magnet for bad luck either. Something tells me any luck I did have just ran out for good. And I flush the toilet to cement this theory.
I hop back into the red catastrophe I’ve nicknamed Wanda. Roadkill was a more appropriate moniker, but I had the sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be wise in the event my supernatural powers decided to manifest themselves in a whole new direction.
We hit the highway again until my vision grows blurry and my long blinks start turning into short naps, so I pull over and curl into a fetal position until the sun comes up and screams for me to move again.
I yawn to life as I drive out of New York and into Vermont. Winter just turned to spring and I can’t help but take in the beauty of the verdant fields dotted in honeysuckle and bluebells.
I’m just about to crest the Canadian border when Wanda starts to sputter again. This time she’s blowing out steam and all of the gauges on the dashboard are spinning every which way at once, so I do exactly what she’s telling me to do—get the heck off the highway before she blows up.
“Next exit, Starry Falls, Vermont,” I read as the highway turns into a thicket of woods on either side of me until low and behold a small blip of a town percolates to life and I end up on Main Street in hopes of spotting a mechanic’s shop. Heck, at this point I’d take a veterinarian’s office. A rabies shot or two, and Wanda just might be good to go.
Then in a rather unceremonious burst, Wanda lets out a loud whistling scream and a rather obnoxious series of claps that don’t sound all that different from one of my brother’s flatulent episodes. She gives a hard jerk and I pull her to the side of the road where she rolls to a sputtering finish.
“She’s dead.” I smack the steering wheel. “No, no, no, you can’t be dead. You can’t leave me in Podunk, Vermont to die along with you. We’ve got to get to Canada. We made a pact, remember?”
Okay, so we didn’t make a pact.
I pull forward the envelope Uncle Vinnie left me and shove my new bevy of IDs into one of the zipped pockets of my Lululemon running jacket and I grab the rest of the gas money and shove it into my other pocket. It takes great pains to uncoil myself from the driver’s seat. Every muscle in my body is sore and stiff from last night’s impromptu slumber party with the newly deceased automobile.
A crisp breeze hits me where the sun shouldn’t shine, and I quickly tie my jacket around my waist to hide my newly acquired ripped seam. No use in scaring off the residents just yet. I’ll save that fun for later when the feds come at me with their weapons drawn.
I head out and stagger my way down the innocent street lined with a happy looking yarn shop, a candy store, a realty office, a rundown diner, and a Chinese joint. There’s an Italian restaurant across the street, a post office, an aerobic studio, and yet there’s not a single auto mechanic in sight.
The streets are lined with rows of maple trees with their branches full of young spring shoots a brilliant shade of green. I look down as far as my eye can see and spot two rather odd sights that force me to blink in the event I’m hallucinating.
The first is a gray stone structure that looks as if it could easily dwarf any of the buildings lining the street. It sits crooked on a tiny hill and has a haunted mansion appeal. It’s clearly out of place and has that whole I-was-just-plucked-from-the-English-countryside-and-dropped-from-the-sky look about it. It’s either a castle or a mansion and it sits at the end of Main Street with a sign staked out front, but I’m too far to read it.
The second odd sight is what’s nestled in the hillside behind the overgrown structure. A gorgeous set of double-tiered waterfalls stands proud, rushing with white streams of glittering liquid that never seems to end.
My feet zoom in the direction of the overgrown stone building, and as soon as I’m close enough I spot an entire legion of cats napping on the lawn out front, dripping down the porch, and nestled in just about every window that faces the street. Cats of every shape and size, white, brown, orange, striped, spotted, angry looking, innocent looking, and a few that look as if they’re plotting to eat me for breakfast.
A tan cat with both spots and stripes bravely traipses my way and juts its head out demanding to be petted.
“Oh, aren’t you sweet,” I whisper as I do just that. “Something tells me this is your circus and these are your adorable monkeys. As soon as I get something in my belly, I’m going to roll around on the lawn with all of you and see if I can make any new furry friends. God knows you can’t be any cattier than the friends I left behind.”
A sign up ahead catches my attention. Mortimer Manor— good coffee, good food, and more! Head on into the café!
“Coffee,” the word hums out of me like a groan from the pit of my very being. “Coffee.”
The sound of female voices escalating comes from somewhere inside the structure, but I’m undeterred. Yelling is my family’s love language. No matter how loud it gets, it won’t scare me away. If anything, it’ll draw me near and make me homesick in the process.
A brass sign sits in front of the door that holds a poster with the picture of a decent looking guy in a ten-gallon hat holding a guitar. It reads Welcome country crooner Perry Flint, Friday night at seven! Tickets sold at the door.
A couple of cathedral-style double doors sit open and welcome me inside. It’s cool in here. It holds the scent of cloying perfume and bacon, an unnerving combination if ever there was one.
The interior is rife with dark wood and deep crimson carpeting with some sort of a navy paisley pattern that eats at my eyes. There’s a grand foyer and an even grander entry and it looks as if there are signs staked in front of the cavernous rooms that lie ahead. But I’m not interested in venturing off in that direction. Instead, I follow the sign that promises me one-dollar coffee.
Up ahead, a glass door opens, amplifying the sounds of that raucous argument
, and out speeds a body that quickly slams into me and I sail back, staggering and moaning as I struggle to keep from falling.
“Whoa,” a deep voice strums as a pair of strong arms wrap themselves around my waist, and before I know it, I’m looking into a pair of light blue eyes rimmed with navy, giving them that Siberian Husky appeal, and for a moment in time I forget about the mob, the feds, my idiot ex, and Wanda my dead Honda and swoon directly into those magical peepers. The rest of him isn’t so bad either. His dark hair and the appropriate amount of stubble peppering his cheeks highlight the fact he’s brutally handsome.
He leans in and gasps. “Geez,” he belts it out as he takes a full step back. “My God, are you bleeding?”
“What?” I lean over and inspect my reflection in the glass door before me, and what stares back has me gasping in horror as well.
“Oh no.” I groan at the sight of myself. My hair is rising to the sky, disheveled and matted. My mascara has run down to my nose and there’s a red ring staining the skin that circles my hairline, giving off the effect of a head wound. “Oh God. How is this my life?”
“Are you okay?” The man wastes no time in pulling out his phone. “I’ll call the paramedics.”
“No!” I practically dive for his phone and he quickly holds it up over my head. “I’m not bleeding. I dyed my hair in a Denny’s last night, and as you can see, I had a little bit of a runoff.” I pat my forehead. “Hey, do you live here? I’m kind of homeless at the moment, and believe me when I say being homeless is a heck of a lot harder than it looks. I had to spend the night in Wanda last night. That’s the death trap my uncle gave me, but she’s dead now and I’m carless and houseless and I only have enough cash to keep me in hot coffee for thirteen days. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could spend the night on the cheap, would you?”
He leans back as if he suddenly found me repulsive, and it’s only then I note his dark suit, that plain navy tie, and the fresh scent of his thick cologne. Leave it to me to find the town hottie and stumble in front of him like the queen of hobos.
Flag Cake Felonies (MURDER IN THE MIX Book 23) Page 17