Bad Ballers: A Contemporary Sports Romance Box Set

by Bishop, S. J.

  I closed my eyes and saw the man holding Nikki, saw the gun outlined against the back of his shirt. “Okay.”

  * * *

  We went to Andre DeMarco’s house first, and I stayed in the car as Law dropped Nikki off. Where Law lived in the center of Miami, the DeMarcos lived in Coral Gables, in a gated community full of enormous houses. I could see the security cameras mounted on the sides of the house and relaxed slightly when an enormous linebacker opened the door carrying a two-year-old boy. Nikki would be fine here.

  After dropping off Nikki, Law drove us back downtown.

  In Law’s steady presence, I was beginning to calm down. The fear from earlier was dying, leaving me exhausted. When Law reached over and took my hand, I let him, dropping my head back against the headrest and closing my eyes for a moment.

  When I opened them again, we were in the heart of Little Havana, parking in front of a restaurant called The Cubano. Law parked the car in a spot marked “reserved,” and we were greeted at the door by a dark-skinned man who was as wide as he was tall. Law introduced me to his cousin Tito, and we sat down over a meal of Ropa Vieja. Tito smiled at me but didn’t say anything; Law switched into Spanish and began speaking to Tito in a low, rapid voice. I heard the words “Mia” and “Joey Bones” and “Solanos,” so I knew he was talking about what had happened.

  I was irritated at not being included in the conversation, and I was uncomfortable being seated in a place that was clearly run by the Cuban mafia. I couldn’t eat anything that was in front of me, so I sipped at my water and tried not to look as upset as I felt.

  But I think Law understood my mood because he glanced over at one point and sighed. He placed his hand on my shoulder and said something else to his cousin, who nodded and glanced at me understandingly.

  “Do you want to go?” Law asked me, and I nodded.

  He said something else to Tito, who put his hand over his heart as he responded. Law bent down to embrace the man and then put his hand on my back, escorting me out of the restaurant.

  I found that I was irritated enough to not welcome his touch. I stepped away from him as he walked outside.

  Law sighed as I slid into the car, and when he got into the driver’s seat, he looked at me once, sharply, and said, “What?”

  I pressed my lips together.

  “Come on, Gwen. I’m trying to help you out here. Why are you all of a sudden upset at me?”

  I inhaled through my nose. “I’m not upset at you. I’m upset with the situation.”

  Law snorted, seeming uncharacteristically impatient. “I wish you’d just fucking stop,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wish you’d stop judging everyone. Jesus, Gwen! You were flat-out rude in there.”

  “I was rude!” I gasped. “You were speaking Spanish the entire time!”

  Law waved a hand, dismissing that. “You stared at your plate, looking around with your lip practically curled! God. It’s like if something doesn’t meet your unrealistic standards, it’s not worth your time!”

  I gaped at him. What the hell was he talking about!?

  “First of all!” I snapped. “I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe in right and wrong! And that place was clearly run by an organized crime syndicate! There was a table full of huge men sitting in the back staring at us!”

  “What you don’t seem to understand,” said Law, interrupting me, “is that money and power are actual, real currencies. It’s all well and good to have your moral standards, but those aren’t going to keep you safe! Whatever your sister was into, her death makes it your problem, and if we did this your way, my niece would probably be dead because you decided not to listen to a clearly worded warning from some very dangerous men!”

  “Which is exactly why we should go to the police…”

  “For fuck’s sake, Gwen! Would you trust me?! Would you stop judging me, and judging me friends, and judging my family?! They-we-I am trying to help you!”

  The last was shouted loudly enough that I shut my mouth. And sunk into my seat.

  Law took one look at my face, cursed, and started the car.

  15

  Law

  I shouldn’t have shouted at Gwen. It’s not every day that your two-year-old niece is kidnapped and you get threatened by a hit man with a gun. I knew she was under a lot of stress. But I was upset: upset that she’d turned on me this morning, upset that I would have to battle for custody of Nikki, and upset that Mia had gotten herself into this mess and potentially gotten my brother killed.

  Gwen cried on the way back to my apartment. It was silent, and I almost didn’t notice it, but she’d rifled through her purse, come up with a tissue, and used it to surreptitiously dab her eyes.

  Once we entered the apartment, she sat on the couch and turned on the television. I went to my office to respond to a few work emails, and when I came out into the living room, she was asleep. She’d curled up on the couch, put her head on the arm rest, and passed out.

  In her jean shorts and blouse, with her hair tied back, she looked so much like the Gwen of my past that I was, for a moment, breathless. The Gwen I used to know had been so sweet, so fun, and funny. When she’d come up and visit me at school, we’d go hiking, and she’d pass out like this at the end of the day.

  I’d been such a jerk then. Whenever Gwen had come to visit, I’d spent most of the time trying to keep her in bed. She’d pass out exhausted from a day in the woods, and I’d wake her up with my tongue between her legs. I felt myself stiffening at the thought.

  I wondered what she’d do if I woke her up like that again, and I sighed. Leaning down, I lifted her gently into my arms, my heart aching as she stirred, and tucked her chin into my shoulder. I walked her down the hall and, for a moment, thought about putting her in the guest bedroom, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it.

  I tucked her into my bed, undressed down to my boxers, and slid beneath the covers. Closing my eyes, I wrapped an arm about her waist.

  16

  Gwen

  That next morning, I woke up in Law’s bed, not entirely sure how I’d gotten into it. I would have been embarrassed, but Law wasn’t there. He usually wasn’t in the mornings.

  I showered and slid back into the clothes I was wearing yesterday. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. How was this the second night in a row I’d slept at Law’s house? God. It was like fighting fate.

  I was also embarrassed about what had happened at The Cubano. Law was absolutely right. This mess wasn’t his fault. It was Mia’s. And he was trying to help.

  I found Law in the kitchen. He’d put a pot of coffee on and, when he saw me, poured me a cup and handed it to me black. Just the way I liked it.

  I found I was having trouble meeting his eyes, but when I did, he didn’t look as angry as he’d been last night.

  “I want to go back to Mia’s apartment,” I said.

  He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. He was dressed casually, in shorts and a pale blue t-shirt that highlighted his dark skin and magnificent teal eyes. I wanted to wrap myself in him and forget that any of this was happening.

  “Is that a sideways way of asking me to go with you?” he inquired. “Or were you planning on grabbing an Uber?”

  The thought of returning to Mia’s apartment by myself gave me the shivers. What if Joey Bones was there? “Would you go with me?”

  “I have to be at practice at one,” he warned. “But I can go with you until then.”

  We drove over to Mia and Eric’s, the silence between us thick with a strange tension. My body wanted contact with Law’s. I wanted to reach out and touch him. I wanted to be skin to skin with him – an odd reaction to all the drama that had unfolded yesterday. “What is it you’re hoping to find in Mia’s apartment?” he asked as we pulled up out front. I watched his eyes dart toward a dark SUV that was parked across the street. He looked indecisive for a moment before he reached over and opened the glove compartment.

  I couldn�
�t suppress the cry of alarm.

  “It’s not loaded,” said Law as he reached across me and pulled out the gun. He took out the clip and showed me that it was empty. “But if there’s anyone upstairs, the sight of a gun is often motivation enough to keep someone from shooting theirs.”

  I didn’t say anything when he tucked it into his waistband and pulled his shirt over it.

  I licked my lips, trying to remember the question he’d asked. “I want to know,” I said, “how Mia got ahold of six million dollars and if it really is the Solano’s money.”

  Law nodded and got out of the car. I followed him into the building and up the three flights of stairs.

  “Stay back,” he said, calmly, as we approached the door. He used his brother’s key to open it slightly, waiting a moment before sticking his head inside. Then he nodded. “They’ve been here. Brace yourself.”

  I followed him in.

  Mia’s place had been turned upside down and barely put back together. The couch cushions were on the floor. Most of the drawers were half-open, and somebody had left the freezer door wide. The inside was still cold. They hadn’t been gone long.

  “Don’t worry,” Law called. “They’re not coming back. Your sister wouldn’t have hidden six million dollars here, and they know it. They were just covering their bases.”

  Covering their bases? It hurt to see my dead sister’s apartment trashed, her picture frames on the floor.

  “Looks like they tried to get into her computer, too,” said Law, his voice coming from down the hall and out of Mia’s office.

  When I got there, Mia’s computer was flashing a warning. Apparently, the Solanos had tried out a few passwords, and her security system, suspecting intruders, was one failed password attempt away from wiping its memory.

  Law wasn’t over at Mia’s desk, though. He was over by Eric’s, his hands tracing over the notes that Eric’s students had written him. I realized that while I’d been mourning my sister, Law was also mourning his brother. I wanted to go up to him, wanted to hold him, wanted to let him release the emotions that were doubtlessly spoiling inside him.

  But there was no time. I wanted to get out of Mia’s apartment before the Solanos decided to come back.

  “Do you know her password?” Law asked, turning abruptly and approaching Mia’s desk.

  I nodded and fished Mia’s phone out of my purse. The combination to get into her phone was Nikki’s birthday, and once I was in her phone, I could pull up the note with all of her different passwords written on them.

  I prayed that the password marked “computer” was updated and typed it into her angry system. Immediately, the screen swirled and opened up on Mia’s desktop. I took a deep breath.

  Law pulled over the chair from Eric’s desk, and we sat, side by side, staring at my sister’s screen. “All right, Gwen,” said Law. “What are we looking for?”

  When we were little, Mia accused me all the time of snooping. Mia didn’t like to share, and I was nosy. I used to read her diaries, I knew her email passwords, and I knew where she kept them when she changed them. Mia believed that shortest pencil was better than the longest memory and kept everything written down. We started in her Word and Excel files, and then moved on to her email (that password was also in her phone). We spent three hours going through her things, printing out certain pages and writing down other pieces of information, and by the end of it, I didn’t know what to say.

  “Gwen…” Law didn’t know what to say either.

  “God, Law. What do we do?” I whispered.

  17

  Law

  Mia Mathers was in deeper than anyone could have imagined. Not only had she been working as an accountant for a small firm in Miami, but she’d been working as an accountant for the Solanos. She’d kept meticulous records of her transactions, taking photographs of pages and screenshots of transactions. Gwen and I did the math and, based on a translation of some of her short hand and looking at her Excel sheets and her Word notes, it looked as if Gwen had, over a period of time, stolen about 6.4 million dollars directly from the Solanos’ accounts. And the Solanos had so many accounts that stealing six million hadn’t seemed to put a dent in the numbers. Mia had cooked their books.

  But it was what she had been doing with the money that had perplexed me. She hadn’t just been holding the funds. She’d had plans to donate the money to charities. The bank hadn’t been lying to Gwen when it had told her that the money had come in earmarked for charities. We found emails between Mia and at least twenty different local and national charities, pledging sums that amounted in total to 1.2 million dollars. Based on her bank statements, she’d already given away about 400,000 dollars.

  “I can’t believe your sister would do something like this,” I said. Stealing six million dollars and making it look like nothing was a feat in and of itself, but stealing from the Solano crime family… “Why on earth would she do something like this?”

  Mia was playing Robin Hood. But the real question was why?

  Gwen was shaking her head. She’d gone pale and kept staring at one particular printout of a screen shot. Mia had annotated the Solano’s shorthand; for every system of initials, she’d translated, writing “Cocaine,” next to the letters SYSP and “slots” beside QTM.

  “Because of our dad,” said Gwen after a moment, so quietly I barely heard her. I waited. Gwen almost never spoke about her father. Fred Mathers was a taboo subject. I knew a bit about him, of course. I’d picked up enough things from Gwen over the years to know that their father, like their mother, had been mentally unstable, that he’d abused drugs and died of a cocaine overdose.

  “What about him?” I asked, gently.

  “He was a gambler and an addict; he would gamble his paychecks away almost as soon as he earned them. And what he didn’t lose gambling, he’d spend on drugs. He’d gamble in Solano clubs and snort Solano cocaine. One time, he couldn’t pay back what they’d loaned him, and they broke his arm, beat him up… He died of an overdose when I was ten and Mia was eight. In high school, when Mia started dating Val Solano and my mother found out… that was when she told us. She told us about who the Solanos were and what they’d done to our father. How he’d left us in financial ruin…”

  Gwen shook her head. “Mia broke up with Val almost immediately. She’d loved our dad.” Gwen went silent, as if she were about to say something that she didn’t want to say. She looked at me, almost sheepishly. “He had his ups and his downs. And when he was up, he was a lot of fun. Until he got scary.” She shrugged. “My mother used to defend his behavior all the time. In his manic coke-states, he used to hit her and scare us, and she’d tell us it was okay because he loved us and that was what mattered.”

  She shook her head, as if shaking off a memory. “Mia blamed the Solanos. I blamed our dad. But the Solanos exploited him, and they exploit others like him.”

  I didn’t know what to say. All of a sudden, there were so many things about Gwen that made sense. Her complete belief in right and wrong, her unwillingness to accept flaws or weaknesses in others, even her social work with traumatized children.

  “How is it we were together almost four years, and I never knew?”

  Gwen shrugged. “Why would I want to bring that up? I’d rather pretend those years didn’t happen. I was free when he died. But not my mother, and apparently not my sister.” She waved a hand at the screen, then she sat back and closed her eyes.

  “What do we do?” she whispered again.

  I inhaled, knowing she wasn’t going to like what I was going to say. “We have to give the Solanos back their money.”

  Gwen’s eyes shot open. “No, Law. Mia understood. They got this money illegally…”

  “And they’ll go after you if they don’t get it back,” he said. “Like it or not, Gwen, Mia was engaged to Joseph Juliano’s great nephew, which connects her to the Juliano family. Now that the Solanos know this, the tentative truce between the Solanos and the Julianos will be over. Hell,
it might already be over. We’ve got to get this money back to the Solanos before matters get worse.”

  “Absolutely not!” said Gwen, standing up and shaking her head vehemently. “There’s right, and there’s wrong, Law, and I don’t care if Mia stole from the Solanos; this is blood money. We should go to the pol…”

  She didn’t get the words out of her mouth. There was a vicious banging on the door. Gwen paled. I acted quickly. I typed in a series of keys that enacted a manual overdrive. I set Mia’s hard drive to “erase.”

  Gwen gaped at me as I folded up the thick wad of documents we’d printed, turned her around, lifted her shirt, and slid them beneath her bra strap just as we heard the front door fly open.

  I rushed into the hall, Gwen hot on my heels.

  Standing in the doorway of my brother’s apartment was Joey Bones and three other Solanos.

  18

  Gwen

  Four enormous men stood in the shattered doorframe of my sister’s apartment.

  The one who’d taken Nikki, Joey Bones, was standing in the front, his gun out and trained on Law, who was standing in front of me calmly, his own hand behind his back on his pistol.

  “I see you’ve brought in a friend, Ms. Mathers,” said Joey Bones, speaking to me past Law’s head.

  “I’m sure, Joey, that you’re well aware that Ms. Mathers and I are more than friends,” Law said, his voice, deep and calm, settling me. I swallowed, willing my throat to relax and willing myself to breathe. “Just as I’m sure you’re aware of who my uncle is.”

  Joey Bones bared his teeth at Law in a frightening imitation of a smile.