Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto (13 page)

“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 this 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. But 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.

Every year like clockwork, she’d check in with their parents before she went to midnight mass. With the six-hour time difference, Marisela had until five-thirty this afternoon to recover her sister without causing a family panic.

Max drove them to a home in Town and Country, a neighborhood west of the airport, where Marisela had established a safe house. She hadn’t known that Max knew where it was—but then again, it was his job to know everything. While he showered and changed into spare clothes, Marisela cleaned Rick’s wound and left him to sleep on the couch, gravitating to the kitchen, where Frankie was boiling pasta and warming up sauce from a jar.

“Look at you, Chef Boyardee,” she quipped, watching her manly ex-boyfriend stir the bottom of a pot bubbling with red, garlicky deliciousness. Her stomach growled. Since she knew the pantry held nothing but protein bars and various boxed and canned foods that she’d stocked there over two months ago, she snagged a piece of al dente spaghetti from the pot, wanting something warm and comforting and familiar.

“Hey!” Frankie objected, grabbing for the tongs, but she managed to keep them away, even after he pinned her against the grimy kitchen counter.

“This place is a dump,” she said, trying to ignore the scent of Frankie’s skin, which was infinitely more delicious than that of the pasta and sauce, despite the fact that she was starving.

“You picked it out,
vidita
,” he reminded her.

“I never thought I’d have to use it,” she countered.

“Didn’t you?”

She pushed out of his hold, unable to concentrate while his tight body was pressed so intimately against hers. “No. I mean, I was glad when Titan gave me the office, but I never expected any dangerous cases. The way I figured it, when something exciting came along, I’d be jetting off to New York or Miami or LA. Tampa was supposed to be a layover with just enough busywork for me to earn my keep.”

He shook his head and chuckled. “You’re never going to get it, are you? Titan will never be what you expect, good or bad.”