“Hey.” He got up and headed toward the train’s dining area. He didn’t want to disturb any of the restful passengers.
“Where are you?” Carly asked.
Hearing her sweet voice over the phone did give him a lift. “I’m on my way home.” He was actually on his way from Little Rock, Arkansas to an airfield in Memphis where his personal plane was waiting to fly him home. But that was a technicality. “You okay?”
“Oh, yes, I’m fine, Trevor. You needn’t worry about me at all.”
Trevor leaned against the side wall. That was what he loved most about Carly. The world was his battleground. She was his sanctuary.
But he could still detect some concern in her voice. “So what’s up?” he asked her.
“I was just checking to see if you were going to make it home tonight. That’s all.”
Fear. That was what he was hearing. She had fear in her voice, the kind of fear that made her wonder if she was going to call one day and discover that he wasn’t alright. Carly came from a family of hard-ass men. Mostly mob men, like her Uncle Mick and her cousin Sal Gabrini, both notorious mob bosses, but also hard-edged Reno Gabrini, a hotel and casino owner with significant mob ties too. Even her straight-shooter cousin and business mogul Tommy Gabrini wasn’t above dealing in dirt when he had to either.
But her background made her the perfect counterpoint for Trevor. She knew he made his living as a wealthy businessman: she worked for him. But she also knew what he had to do for his government. She knew once in, always in, just like the mob. She knew what the shady side of life looked like. She was perfect for Trevor.
But, and this was a big but in his eyes, was he perfect for her?
“I’ll be there,” he said.
“So everything went smoothly and you’re on schedule then?” Carly asked him.
“I was a little delayed,” Trevor said in the understatement of the year. “But I’ll be there.”
There was a sigh on Carly’s end. She knew what being a little delayed meant. But she also knew how to suck it up. “Okay, babe. I’ll prepare you a wonderful dinner. At least wonderful by my standards.”
He laughed. “Sounds good,” he said.
“I’ll let you go. Oh, I forgot! I had to let Abe Edison go.”
Trevor was surprised. “What do you mean you let him go? You fired him today?”
“I fired him yesterday actually, but Abe being Abe didn’t show up for work yesterday to get the notice. He got it today though.”
Trevor smiled. “You’ve got some balls firing one of my oldest managers without giving me the heads up.”
“It couldn’t wait. When a couple of his staffers came to me last week and told me the extent of his malfeasance and the way he was treating them, and I checked it out for myself, I wasn’t going to delay.”
“What about his division chief? He never reported any shit like that to me. Did you fire his ass too?”
“Couldn’t. Division chiefs are in your lane. Only you can fire them. That’s your company policy.”
Trevor smiled again. “Always quoting policy on me,” he said, and Carly laughed. “I’ll handle it when I get back,” he added.
Then they said their goodbyes and ended the call. And Trevor was still smiling. Despite that bullshit life he was caught up in, and all of those bullshit assignments he had to handle time and time again: he still had Carly.
Which made him feel, despite it all, as if he had everything.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hancock Beverly came out of the big house with a cell phone in his hand. “Where is he?” he asked the bodyguard who stood at the door.
The bodyguard nodded toward the other side of the property. Hancock looked and saw their boss sitting on a lounger at the edge of his infinity pool. He felt that sense of impending doom he always felt when he saw him. But he hurried over to him just the same.
When he got there and saw that the boss was not alone and that a woman was actually on her knees giving him a bj, he quickly turned his back. And rolled his eyes.
After several seconds, his boss, Scrathland Buroot, responded to his presence. “What do you want?” he asked him.
“I have them on the line, sir,” Hancock responded.
The boss looked over at Hancock. Hancock’s back remained turned. “Well give me the phone, you idiot!” he said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Hancock said and handed the boss his cell phone without turning around.
The boss snatched it and put it to his ear as his companion continued to work on him, although, in Hancock’s opinion, it appeared to be doing little good. “I told you,” he said into the phone, “that when the time would come, it would be time to act.”
“I know what you said,” the voice on the other end of the phone call said.
“It’s time to act,” the boss said. “Do it and do it right. You miss this opportunity to impress me, I will not miss my opportunity to kill you. Get it right.”
“You don’t have to remind me.”
“I know what I don’t have to do! And it had better not look calculated,” the boss said.
“I won’t. I already told you it won’t.”
“It had better look as if it has nothing whatsoever to do with that asshole.”
“Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”
Then Buroot ended the call and handed the phone back to Hancock. As Hancock turned to retrieve the phone, he realized that the woman on her knees had sweat pouring from her face as she tried with all she had to give their boss a rise. She was trying as if her life depended on it.
And as soon as he collected the phone and was turning to leave, he could see the boss, frustrated with her efforts, lift his foot and kick her away from him. Then he pulled out his revolver and shot her through the head as if she was right: her life had depended on it.
She fell into the infinity pool. Hancock nearly stumbled getting away from there.
“Wasting my time,” he heard the boss say out loud.
But he didn’t wait to hear anything else. He hurried back toward the house. His fate could easily be her fate if he ever made any misstep, too, and he knew it. That was why he gave up all pretense of hurrying politely and ran back to the house, as if his life depended on it too.
It was startling true to him and everybody else forced to labor at that compound: if the boss could be that callous with a woman who wasn’t at all to blame for his impotence, they could not even imagine what the boss had in store for them, or for the one man he was obsessed with bringing down: Trevor Reese.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Carly Sinatra?”
Carly was in the grocery store, tossing everything she needed to prepare Trevor’s dinner into her handheld shopping basket. She had hoped to get in, and get out quickly. She turned when she heard her name.
“Or, I meant to say, Carly Reese?”
When she saw her good friend Melissa Cohen standing in the fresh fruits aisle with her big rolling shopping cart, she forgot about making a hasty retreat and smiled. Melissa, if she had to pick among the many girlfriends she had in Boston, was one of her favorites. “Hey, lady! What are you doing here?”
“Picking up a few things for dinner that’s turned into fifty things.”
Carly laughed and did a hand-sweep of her cart. “I know what you mean.”
Melissa looked into Carly’s little cart. She only had a few items. “I hardly call that a lot, Carly,” she said. Melissa was a full-figured lady and her husband was no small guy either. “But you eat like a bird anyway,” she added.
“But Trevor doesn’t,” Carly said. “I feel like I’m cooking for ten people whenever I make him a meal. He can eat, I’m telling you!”
“He’s a man, Carly. Men eat. You have brothers. I’ve seen Bobby Sinatra and Tony Sinatra and Brent Sinatra. And Big Daddy Sinatra? They’re all big guys just like Trevor. You can’t tell me they don’t eat.”
“Oh, they can wolf it down with the best of them. Now that’s the truth. But my mother
prepared those family meals. I never had to. Now I’m a wife. I have to.”
Melissa stared at Carly. She could see the strain in Carly’s big eyes. “Still weird to you, isn’t it?”
Carly exhaled, and then nodded. “Very weird. Dad was in town earlier today and I was telling him the same thing. But I’ll get used to it.”
“You’ll be okay. Trust and believe. I was in your shoes too. But unlike you, when I married my old man, I had never even been around white people that much. Then all of a sudden I’m married to one? It was weird.”
Carly looked at her. “And now?”
“Now it’s the most natural thing in the world, girl. That’s why I get on Shay’s case a lot. Because after a while, you stop seeing color. You see the heart of the individual. And Trevor seems to have a good heart.”
Carly smiled. “He does. That’s what I love most about him. He’s really sweet beneath that rough exterior.”
“Sweet?” Melissa asked with a smile. “I won’t go that far,” she said, and they both laughed. “But anyway, I’d better get back at it. We don’t want to keep our hubbies waiting.”
“No, we do not,” Carly said, they said their goodbyes, and Carly watched Melissa head further up the aisle. Melissa’s hubby was a world-class dog, who slept around on that woman and treated her like dirt most of the time. But she kept forgiving him and kept being the perfect wife to him. Carly wouldn’t stand for it, but she never told Melissa that. She received enough judgment from their circle of friends, she didn’t need it from Carly too.
Besides, Carly thought as she continued to shop, she knew how love had no ready answers. She knew how love could make you accept things you swore you’d never accept. Like, in Melissa’s case, being married to a cheater. Like, in Carly’s case, being married to a man who had to risk his life on a regular basis because of a decision he made to sign onto the CIA when he was still just a teenager. A decision he wanted to reverse, but couldn’t. And she married him anyway.
Love did that, she thought, as she made her way to the checkout counter, paid for and grabbed the two plastic bags containing her groceries, and made her way toward the exit.
But as she was going out, a white man had rounded the corner outside and was walking in as if he was hurrying in. They bumped into each other with a hard thump, with Carly’s small frame bouncing off of his big frame. One of her bags fell out of her hand.
“Oh, wow, I am so sorry!” the man said apologetically as he reached down to help Carly retrieve her bag.
“It’s alright,” Carly said, as she reached down for the bag too.
And that was when she saw it.
He wore a short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt that didn’t hide the tattoo on his upper arm. The tattoo of a red sportscar with a lady behind the wheel and a scarf blowing around her neck. And it had the same oddity that Carly remembered: there were no wheels on the sportscar.
It was an odd tattoo that Carly would never forget.
She froze when she saw it.
Her big eyes looked up from that tattoo, moved up along that blue Hawaiian shirt, and up to that face. And when she looked into that man’s face, and saw those same eyes that were so dark green they looked black, and that same scar across his right eyebrow, her heart literally stopped.
She could not breathe.
“Are you alright?” he asked her, seeing her distress. “Miss? Miss? Are you alright?”
It wasn’t until he reached out his slimy hand and touched her arm, did she exhale. And jerked her arm away from his hand with a violent jerk. And then she got up, forgetting the bag of groceries that had fallen, and backed up into the doorframe, unable to take her eyes off of him.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked her, as he stood back up tall.
When he stood back up, and Carly realized she was trapped between him and that doorframe, her heart fell. And she ran. She ran as fast as she could across the sidewalk, into the parking lot. She dropped her second bag of groceries as she ran. People had stopped and were looking at her, all wondering what was wrong with the crazy black lady.
But Carly didn’t care what they were wondering, or what they were calling her. She just had to get away from there.
She ran to her Jaguar F-Type SVR Convertible, the car Trevor had purchased for her, and got in feeling scared and miserable and so desperate she could hardly press the Start button.
When she did manage to press the button and the car started, she just sat there, staring at her shaking hands. Her entire body was shaking like a tree in a windstorm. How in the world was she going to drive?
But then she thought about him. And looked back quickly, with terror in her eyes, and then she pressed the gas and took off.
She burned rubber she drove away from that grocery store so fast.
And those same words that man had just spoken to her were the very same words he used to speak to her whenever he caused tears to form in her eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Those were the words he used to always say to her, as if she should have been perfectly content and not bothered at all, while he was raping her.
CHAPTER NINE
It was his fourth time calling that boy. It was the fourth time his phone went to Voice Mail. He waited for all of that talking Amari did on his Voice Mail before the beep would come. Trevor was in his living room, pacing the floor with his cell phone in his hand, worrying about that son of his. Carly hadn’t heard from him since he left their home two days ago, and he hadn’t returned any of Trevor’s calls. Which wasn’t like him. Had he confronted that angry husband after getting his ass kicked for sleeping with the man’s wife? Or was something else wrong?
The beep finally sounded, and Trevor left a fourth message. “Amari, this is your father. Answer your gotdamn phone!” And then he tried to calm himself back down because he really needed to hear from his son. “Call me,” he finally said, and ended the call.
He was about to throw his phone across the room in anger, when it began ringing. When he looked at the Caller ID and saw who it was, he answered quickly. And frowned. “Why the fuck didn’t you return my calls, boy?” he angrily asked.
“I hadn’t realized you had phoned.” It was Amari. “Has something occurred?” he asked in his perfect African-English diction.
“Yes, something occurred,” Trevor said, almost marking that diction. “When I phone you, I expect you to answer my calls. That’s what occurred! Where have you been?”
“I have been . . . with a friend.”
“A friend? For two days straight?”
“Yes, Father. That is not unusual.”
Trevor knew what that meant. “A woman?”
“Is she of the female persuasion?” Amari asked. “Yes. Very much indeed!”
Trevor shook his head. “Didn’t that shit that happened two days ago teach you anything?”
“Yes. It taught me to leave that particular woman alone. This particular woman, however, I am happy to report, does not have a husband to beat me up. So I’m in the clear!”
Trevor almost smiled. There was no hating Amari. To know him was to love him. And Trevor loved that boy from the depths of his very soul. He impregnated Jessica, Amari’s African-American mother, when they both were college kids and when they both had been recruited by the CIA. She left Trevor before she gave birth, and got Trevor to swear he’d never try to find them. She claimed she didn’t want their son to have anything to do with the CIA or Hammer Reese, or anything connected to that part of their world. She wanted to raise her son free of danger, and get herself away from it while she was at it. And Trevor agreed to let them go, because he wanted that too.
But it didn’t turn out that way.
Amari ended up almost as steep in the CIA as Trevor was.
When he got Amari to America, Trevor worked out a deal where the government would use Trevor on more assignments, but they would end their alliance with his son. He would be allowed to get out and stay out. Amari was young to the g
ame and expendable. Trevor was neither.
But when Amari came to live in the States, Trevor fell in love with his son’s sweetness, and his happy-go-lucky spirit, right away. And their bond had only gotten stronger.
“Just be careful,” Trevor said.
“Careful is my middle name, as you say. I will be careful.”
“And check your messages sometimes. I left four of them.”
“Four? My goodness, Father. What did you say four different times?”
“The same thing: fuck you.”
Amari laughed with a booming laugh.
“What your ass need is a job,” Trevor said.
“I have a job.”
Trevor frowned. “I told you that shit was over. Didn’t I tell you that, Amari?”
“I’m just kidding! Can you not take a joke?”
“No. Not about that, no.” Then Trevor exhaled. “I want Carly to interview you. See what position we can find for you at TRM.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get in touch with her and schedule something.”
“Okay.”
“I told you to do so last week and it hasn’t happened.”
“I’ll schedule, Father. I promise.”
“Just make sure of it. And answer your damn phone when I call.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Bye boy,” Trevor said, and ended the call. He stood there and leaned his head back. At least he was okay. But he was still upset with him for leaving him wondering about it nonetheless.
“Sir?”
Trevor turned. His Grounds Security Chief had entered the home and was standing just beyond the foyer. “Yes, what is it?”
“Mrs. Reese has arrived, sir.”
Trevor nodded. “Okay, good.” But then the man just stood there. “Yes?”
“We opened the gate for her to pass through, sir, but she just sat there.”
Trevor Reese: His Protective Love Page 5
