Bulletproof Princess

by Craig, Alexis D.

  He shook his head as he turned off his tablet completely and set it on the concrete next to his chair. “Not quite. I know you’re not technically a witness, but I still need to know you can’t be tracked here. Until I get more from Ange, I’m sorry.”

  Cassie sighed and nodded. She appreciated what he was saying, even if she felt a bit adrift without her friends and family with her. Leaning back on the lounger, she watched as the stars blinked on seemingly one-at-a-time, filling the sky with glitter.

  They settled into the silence of the evening, listening to the desert tuning up as the heat of the day receded. She felt, rather than heard, when he turned to look at her. “I’m sorry for your loss. I know we didn’t really get into that last night because of everything, but I am very sorry.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Cassie dropped her chin to her chest around the tightness in her throat. Her hands clenched at her sides as she actively fought against her tears. She didn’t want him to see her as some fragile, weepy woman, regardless of the brittleness she felt spreading through her.

  * * *

  Mack watched her slowly rein herself in. He’d gotten pretty good at that himself over the years and didn’t begrudge her. He didn’t mean to upset her or challenge her dignity. In his real life, he was more than happy to not get too emotionally involved with his witnesses. He looked after them, but was careful not to befriend them. This was nothing like his real life. “You gonna be okay?” The urge to reach out and touch her to offer her comfort was strong, but he ruthlessly kept himself in check. He wasn’t a touchy-feely guy, and the desire to be so for her was unnerving.

  Cassie chuckled without humor. “Yeah, I’ll be all right. I just miss my friends.” She took a deep breath and admitted, “I don’t do separation well.”

  He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the chair and braced his arms on his knees. “Let me guess, close family, small town?”

  She still didn’t look at him, but nodded slightly. “Yeah, something like that. I don’t see my blood family as often as I should, but I spend so much time with Trista and Clint, it’s like they’re my family. We’re always together.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “And it’s not like Santa Fe is really that small.”

  Taking advantage of the lightening of the mood between them, he shrugged as he stood up and grabbed his tablet from the table. “So what I’m hearing is that you’re just a small town girl. One who’s been living in a lonely world, right?”

  Cassie snorted as she rose, her face in a scowl that was fighting valiantly against a smile. “Journey? Really? Besides, if you were raised out here, you don’t get to call yourself a city boy.”

  He held the door for her as they went back inside to the cool embrace of the air conditioning. “Oh no?”

  She shook her head and crossed her arms, ready to defend her position. “No, and this is about as far away from South Detroit as I can think of.”

  Laughing at her outright, he tossed his shirt over his head and pulled it back on as a defense against the sudden chill. “Really, now? You ever seen Detroit?” Admittedly he’d only been there a couple times in the course of his work, and both times had been scarier than he would like to recall.

  “Well, yeah.” She blinked at him like he was a special kind of stupid.

  Now he was the one with crossed arms. “When?” he demanded skeptically.

  Cassie raised her chin regally. “Last year on tour.”

  Mack swallowed his instant bark of laughter at her answer. “I see, so then the answer to that question is ‘no’.” Rather than continue bantering, he turned and headed toward the kitchen. The squeak of her shoes against the floor told him she followed.

  “I’ve been there, like May of last year,” she insisted. “It was a show with Luke Bryan and Chris Young. It was a good time.” She climbed onto the stool she’d occupied when they’d had breakfast while he went to the fridge.

  “Detroit from an arena or a tour bus is quite a bit different than actual Detroit.” He really didn’t want to get into the whys and wherefores because that was a dark path most citizens shouldn’t be exposed to, so Mack sought to distract her. “What were you thinking of for dinner?”

  Cassie blinked for a moment, obviously flummoxed by the question. “I…it’s not my house, I don’t know. What is there to eat?”

  He stuck his head back into the fridge for a moment. “We have leftovers from breakfast I can heat up, or I’m sure I could dig up some salad stuff if you’d prefer.” He rose with a plastic dish in his hand, opening it. He sniffed and was immediately sorry. “I have some cold pozole that may or may not take up arms if we reheat it…”

  “Let’s just not.” She shook her head with a slightly apprehensive expression. “Is Conchita going to be eating with us?”

  Still digging through the fridge, he called over his shoulder, “No, it’s her bingo night at Saint Joe’s. You don’t get between her and her marker if you want to live.”

  His mamita had few rules, but this was definitely one of them. He remembered going with her to St. Joseph’s in Winslow when he was a child and his parents were out of town, and hanging out in the rectory with the padre. There were many things he learned spending time with the older priest, such as his love for baseball and the skills to fix the brakes on an ’81 Chevy station wagon by himself by the time he was eleven.

  As he pawed through the fridge, an idea coalesced, and he stood and looked at her seriously. “How do you feel about bacon?”

  Her eyes narrowed in confusion. “What? Philosophically? It’s bacon, what’s not to love?”

  “Good answer.” The next few minutes he pulled a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and found a frying pan.

  “You don’t have to do anything big, Mackenzie. I’m probably not going to eat too terribly much.” The more stuff he fried, chopped, sliced, and mixed, the bigger her eyes got.

  He stilled when she said his full name, a little stunned by how much he liked it on her lips, but recovered quickly. “Trust me,” he said as he got out the whisk from a drawer and went to work on the small bowl in his hands. “This is not big at all; the prep work just looks imposing.”

  “If you say so.”

  He dipped into the fridge again and tossed her a bottle of water. “Here.” It was only a couple more minutes before he joined her on a stool at the breakfast nook, each with a BLAT.

  “A what?” Despite her protestations to the contrary, Cassie laid siege to her tortilla wrapped creation like the walls of Jericho.

  Mack held up a finger while he finished chewing. “Bacon, lettuce, avocado, and tomato. There’s Dijon and mozzarella on there, too, but I can’t find a good place to stick the ‘D’ and the ‘M’.”

  “In my mouth works.” She nodded as she made her way through the sandwich.

  “Glad you approve.” Tempted as he was to comment further, and inappropriately, he figured it was safer to finish dinner.

  He showed her around the kitchen while she helped him clean up. “If you’re gonna be here, you should feel free to eat what you want, when you want to. This isn’t a prison.”

  Cassie smiled shyly. “I appreciate that. Thanks, Mackenzie.” She put the last piece of silverware in the dishwasher and leaned against the counter next to him.

  “No problem.” He opened his mouth to ask her why she called him by his full name when Ange’s ringtone filled the air. “Hey gorgeous,” he answered and winked at Cassie. “How’s it going?”

  “Oy, I’m up to my ears in financials and bookies.” The weight of the sigh over the phone damn near made his shoulders sag. “So many bookies. The man bet on everything including the possible next Pope. It would be impressive if I wasn’t working on a two hour nap and a two-day hairstyle.”

  Mack snorted a laugh and cut a glance over to Cassie, who was doing nothing to disguise her curiosity. “I see, and how’d that work out?”

  “Not good.” He heard a click-hiss and her deep inhalation. It had to be bad if she was smoki
ng again. “It started okay at first, he was winning and losing pretty evenly. Then it took a turn about six months ago. The bets got bigger and the losses started multiplying like tribbles.”

  “How bad?”

  “‘Sold my wife, sold my house, sold my kids…cocaine.’” She sang with no irony.

  Mack hissed in his breath on a wince, glancing at his charge again, whose eyes had only gotten bigger. “Yikes.”

  “Oh yeah, house, boat, horses, cars…it’s a laundry list I wouldn’t want to claim. And when he ran out of his own cash…” Ange trailed off.

  Mack picked it up immediately. “Oh no.” Now he didn’t even want to look at the blonde practically leaning on his arm to hear the other half of the conversation. “At the risk of repeating myself, how bad?” The idea that Cassie’s dearly departed manager was skimming off her was not something he relished having to reveal.

  “Well,” Ange started, then sighed and spoke to someone in the background, but it was indistinct. “With the money she makes, and holy lord it is a fucklot of money, I could see him getting away with this for a while. That said, he was still into a lot of people, both above and below board, for a lot of money. Like pay for a first home in Scottsdale outright kinda money, and those people he owed? Yeah, more than a couple of them trace back in a roundabout way to the Salazars. Not the big man, but enough known associates to host a very large family reunion.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” Not only was he embezzling from Cassie, but Clint’s murder was beginning to look a lot less like a crime of opportunity and more like a repossession. As if Cassie needed this added to her burden. He pulled a hand down his face and reached out to absently take her hand in his. The connection grounded him in ways he refused to address. “So, how does the shooter fit in?”

  His partner sighed. “Well, near as I can figure, he was doing a solid for his boss that went sideways. He’s not normally in collections, so when collecting the cash developed a body count, he reverted to type and took care of it the way he normally would. Cassie was just an unwitting bystander.”

  “Damn, that’s unfortunate.” There was a lot of that going around as far as this case was concerned. The finer points of distinction between her friend being killed for money and being killed because of money were not something he felt like explaining to Cass right now. The whole idea of it gave him a headache, so he focused on what he could communicate. “Any word on the shooter?”

  “Actually…” Ange’s voice brightened as he could hear her shifting around in the background. “Do you have Skype there? You’re gonna want to see this.”

  Chapter 6

  Cassie, over the course of the conversation, had given serious thought to climbing up Mack’s body to get to the phone. She didn’t take being in the dark well, and she certainly wasn’t one to keep her opinions to herself. The longer he spoke to his partner, the more concerned his face became, leading her to imagine a whole host of horrible conclusions. Her complete focus on him had her mirroring his movements as he stepped to the table and snagged his tablet. A few swipes of his finger and he was logged in to the program so he could speak to his partner face to face.

  He set the phone down on the table after disconnecting and taking a chair. Cassie chose to loom over him as she stood behind him. “You look like hell, Ange.”

  The woman’s dark eyes narrowed in the screen as the speakers filled with a menacing growl. “You would, too, princess, if you’d spent as much time as I have running down leads for your case. You owe me, huge.”

  Cassie flinched at her tone, but Mack just laughed in the face of a woman who would most likely beat him to death when she saw him next.

  “I do,” he conceded immediately.

  “Like a villa on the isle of Capri huge, mister.” She nodded for emphasis, but Mack only shook his head.

  “Keep dreaming. But I am sorry. Whatcha got for us?”

  “Cassie.” Ange turned her attention to her and held up a mug shot. “You know this guy?”

  The face in the picture caused all her muscles to lock up at once, and then become watery a moment later. Her hand groped for the back of Mack’s chair and dug her nails in to give herself something to concentrate on. She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out, just like the previous night.

  “I’ll take your sudden pallor as a ‘yes’.” She took the picture off screen and handed it off to a tall man behind her. “Okay, that’s Jesus Reynaldo-Hinojosa, ‘Chuy’ to his friends, ‘The Second Coming’ to his employers. He is a one man killing machine with an impressive record of proven kills and scores more of suspected. He’s on every watch list from here to Indonesia.”

  “And yet,” Mack turned around to look up at her before turning back to his partner, “you’re not telling us he’s in custody.”

  The tall man knelt down next to Ange, only he looked substantially more refreshed than Mack’s partner. He was good-looking, if a bit severe with his hawkish features and piercing eyes. “Hey, Mack.”

  Mack nodded at the screen after sneaking another unreadable glance in her direction. “Hey, Eli.”

  “So, the reason he’s on every watch list in the known world is due to his ability to vanish like a ghost. That’s not going to stop us, obviously, but it’s going to be more difficult.” He looked down as he shuffled some papers before holding two up, side by side. “Miss Witt has an amazing memory and a very accurate eye. We were able to get an ID from the sketch fairly quickly when we combined it with the facial rec software. Additionally, there’s footage of the scene in the hallway with some very high def cameras. So, making the case is not difficult.”

  Mack pulled a hand down his face again and set it next to his tablet, drumming his fingers lightly in a show of growing impatience. “Excellent, so any leads on running him down?”

  Eli stood with a grimace of obvious pain from his previous position. “We’re working on it.” He paused to whisper in Ange’s ear before turning back to the screen. “We’ll call you as soon as we know any more, Mack. We will get this done, I promise you.”

  Mack nodded.

  Eli looked straight at Cassie. “It was lovely to make your acquaintance, Miss Witt. My niece is going to lose her mind when she hears I got to meet you, as it were.”

  Cassie smiled in spite of the situation. “Tell her I appreciate her being a fan, and I’ll see what I can do about an autograph, okay?” She figured it was the least she could do for the man who was hunting her friend’s killer. Eli grinned broadly before wandering off the screen.

  “Actually, Cassie, there is some good news.” Ange shuffled the papers in front of her. “I got a message from Trista today to pass along to you.”

  The worry she’d been courting since the beginning of the phone conversation jumped immeasurably and dropped the bottom out of her stomach. “Is Trista okay? Please, don’t tell me—”

  The dark haired woman held up a hand to forestall any further freak out. “She is fine, and has a protection detail I worked out myself. She’s great, and she is doing a helluva job keeping your career going and managing the press while we deal with this.” She waved a hand toward the room behind her for emphasis. “You have the number one single, and album, in the country, Cassie. Congratulations.”

  The shock of debuting at number one was greatly tempered by her current circumstances, leaving the triumphant feeling hollow to her. “Thank you, Angela. Really. Tell her I’m okay and this will be over soon, okay? I miss her.” She sniffed and pressed her lips together to keep any more words from spilling out, or any tears from breaching her walls.

  Ange nodded, and a male voice in the background called out, getting her attention. “All right, I have to go. I’ll be in touch tomorrow, okay? Mackenzie, you’ll take care of that other thing?”

  Mack nodded. “I got it. You be safe, and get some sleep for god’s sake,” he teased with palpable affection.

  His partner nodded and stood. “I’ll add it to my list.” The screen went black in front of them, leavi
ng them in the quiet of the kitchen, the only sound being the ice maker in the freezer turning over a fresh batch and the swishing of the dishwasher.

  “So what’d she say?” Cassie asked as she sank onto a stool next to him. At his blank look, she prompted, “Angela, on the phone. What did she tell you about Clint? I know she said something because you looked like she punched you in the gut and threatened to do it to your face.”

  Mack dropped his head, chuckling at her analogy. “Well, kind of. Do you drink?”

  It was an interesting diversion, the idea of drinking with him beyond a simple beer, but she needed answers. “I do sometimes,” she allowed. “But I need to know what your partner had to say. This is my life we’re talking about here, and I have a right to know.”

  “I never said you didn’t.” He rose from the table and wandered into the living room, returning with two crystal tumblers and an unlabeled crystal decanter. A quick trip to the freezer, he poured after taking a seat, and pushed a glass in her direction. “I just think this might be the kind of conversation you have over whiskey.”

  “You don’t say.” As a country musician, she could appreciate all he said in his choice of alcohols alone without a protracted explanation. She wasn’t going to like what he said at all, and he was trying, in his own way, to soften the blow. Sniffing the glass, she was pleasantly surprised to find the amber liquid reminded her of Sunday brunch after church with bacon and waffles.

  Once they were situated with their liquor, he looked her over with eyes narrowed in speculation. “You know Clint had a gambling problem?”

  The sip she’d taken stalled in her throat, and it was a fight to actually swallow. She wasn’t prepared for the directness of his approach given the roundabout way they’d arrived at the conversation. “I know he’d been going to GA for a while. I was proud of him for facing his problems head on.”