Moving heel to toe, I watched a seagull land on a dumpster. Marta had said to look for a dumpster with red graffiti. The seagull did his business over the edge, where I saw plenty of bird poop but no red graffiti. Up ahead, I could see two more trash bins. From my angle, I didn’t see any graffiti.
With no sign of anyone, I started jogging. Moving past two vans and a motorcycle, I ran up to the next dumpster. No graffiti on my side. I ran to the other side. There it was—peace symbols sprayed with red paint. Off to my right, I could see a back door with AAA stamped in the middle. Four compact cars, white, with red and blue signs on the side. I reached the first car and looked inside. It was empty.
A car engine cranked. Two cars down, I saw Mona sitting in the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel, her body rocking. She must have been pumping the gas; the engine whirred but wouldn’t turn over. Dexter sat in the passenger’s seat. Both looked toward me, faces coated with panic. Mona’s lips moved, as if she were yelling something. As I moved in that direction, I heard a horn honking behind me. It sounded like Black Beauty’s horn.
I flipped around and saw Cristina waving a hand out of the window. No clue what was going through that girl’s mind. I ran over to Mona and Dexter’s car and knocked on the driver’s side window. “Where are you going? We just want to talk to you,” I said.
Mona didn’t even look my way as she continued yelling at her husband. He was waving his arms, yelling back. I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but they were clearly in a state of hysteria. Just as Cristina pulled to a stop, Mona finally got the engine started on the little cleaning car. She slid the gear in reverse, jerking the car right into my Civic’s door. Cristina flopped like a bobblehead doll.
“Are you okay?” I ran over to the car, but then noticed that Mona was angling her car forward. She was trying to change direction so she could slip between Black Beauty and the other parked car.
“I’m fine, just stop that bitch,” Cristina said, a hand on the side of her neck.
A quick glance around. Next to the dumpster were two bricks. I picked them up and ran to the fidgeting car. Mona saw me and raised an arm up to her face. She thought I was going to throw a brick through the window. Instead, I wedged one brick under the back of the tire nearest me and the other one behind the front tire. Gravel peppered my face as she gunned the gas and tires spun out of control.
Quickly, she realized the car wasn’t moving, and she began arguing with her husband, her arms whirling like a helicopter blade gone awry.
Finally, the engine sputtered to a stop. Both Mona and Dexter looked straight ahead. She crossed herself. What was she expecting to happen next?
“We’re not here to hurt you. Anika sent us,” I said, my palms flat against the driver’s side window.
Mona turned to face me, her hands at her chest. A single tear rolled down her cheek.
Cristina had crawled out of Black Beauty and made her way to the other side of the car. We locked eyes, neither of us able to verbalize what I knew we were both thinking: the Hamricks were looking at us as though we were about to murder them. Like we were professional, cold-blooded killers.
31
Adult beverages were out of the question, that much I knew. The Hamricks were recovering alcoholics, and even though my nerves were frayed, I wasn’t about to ask if they wanted to drop by a bar and have a drink.
First things first. Mona and Dexter had thought that our representation of Aunt Beatrice was nothing more than a ploy to find them, kill them. It took some convincing, but they came to realize we hadn’t come to SPI to knock them off.
Mona and I both spoke to Marta, helping alleviate her concerns that her company was mixed up in anything illegal. “Every family has disagreements,” Mona said about her Aunt Beatrice. Marta seemed to understand. She gave Dexter and Mona the afternoon off to work through any legal paperwork related to Aunt Beatrice’s will and said she’d have a full day of work waiting for them bright and early tomorrow.
The Hamricks didn’t own a car of their own, so they rode in the back of my Civic. With the driver’s side door crushed to the point we couldn’t open the door, we all had to crawl in through the passenger’s side. Not much was spoken on the brief trip to Isla Blanca Park, a county-owned area for RVs and campers on the south side of the island. It even had private-gate access.
Their camper was “cozy,” as Mona put it, but she said they’d come to accept it as their home. She cleared clothes off four feet of bench space so Cristina and I could sit down while Dexter made us all peach tea.
“Please tell us how our Anika is doing,” Mona said, attempting to cross her legs. They were so short, I thought they might not stay crossed for long.
“She gets by,” Cristina said.
Dexter handed us glasses of tea, and I took a sip. Cristina just held the glass and kept talking. “Living on the street isn’t easy, especially when you’re a teenage girl, but she’s a survivor. I guess you know that already, since it was your resentment that pretty much forced her to move out.”
I gave Cristina the eye.
Dexter rubbed his face full of whiskers, while Mona pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t tell you how much we’ve grieved over what we put Anika through,” she said. “It has torn a hole in our hearts.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t been easy.” My eyes scanned the inside of the camper. It had to be as old as Anika, if not older. Plastic was cracked everywhere I looked. Discolored cloth seats, warped cabinets, and a stench that reminded me of Zorro’s litter box. Not exactly home sweet home.
“Oh, my, you don’t know half of it,” Dexter said, releasing a heavy sigh.
“I’m cool with hearing the other half. Anika won’t be here for another two hours,” Cristina said.
I looked at her, surprised. “She’s flying?”
“Yep. I didn’t ask how.” Cristina kept her gaze on me. For now, neither of us said anything about Sara Litvin and Chicago. What was the point, anyway?
I turned back to Mona and Dexter. “As you know, Anika hired us…uh, asked us to help find you. Can you share why you think someone might want to harm you?”
“Simply harm? Not a chance he’d let us off that easy.” Dexter chugged his iced tea, then brushed his lips with his arm.
“Who is ‘he’?”
The couple looked at each other, their chests lifting in unison.
“We didn’t want to hurt Anika even more by dragging her into our hellish lives.” Mona took a quick drink of her tea, then got up and opened a drawer, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Do you mind?”
Reluctantly, I said, “That’s fine.”
“If you have to.” Cristina looked for a clear place to set her tea. She appeared to give up and placed the glass between her feet on the dirty floor.
Mona opened the door to the camper and then lit a cigarette. I welcomed the sense of not feeling as boxed in. Looking beyond her, I could see brush strokes of purple and yellow against a darkening sky.
“Look, we haven’t spoken to Anika in a while. And I’m assuming she told you about the…events of the past,” Mona said, extending a hand, apparently looking for affirmation. Cristina and I both nodded, not offering additional commentary. Clearly avoiding her son’s name, it seemed like Mona still couldn’t really cope with Trent’s death, or perhaps her and her husband’s negligent role in his passing.
“When the time came, we had to leave. As it turns out, it was a good thing that Anika wasn’t living with us. Kept her out of danger. In fact, that’s why we didn’t bother finding her to say goodbye on our way out of town. We didn’t want anyone going after Anika.”
She’d yet to address Dexter’s alarming comment about imminent danger.
“Then again,” Dexter said, scratching the back of his hairy neck, “the two of you found us.” He looked at his wife, then back to us. “You said it yourselves, you got your ECHO business set up to help kids out; you don’t have the staff
or resources or know-how to find people like us. How’d you do it anyway?”
“A lot of digging and some good, educated guesses,” I said, not wanting to segue our talk into a drawn-out discussion about our investigative approach.
I picked up my glass and sipped. That was when I noticed the glass was foggy, part of the edge chipped away. I set it down before I cut my lip.
Cristina smacked her hands to her jeans. “Shit, is anyone going to spit it out or what? Your daughter tried to convince us that someone was after you. We couldn’t find any evidence of that, and, frankly, we doubted it was true. Now that we find you, we learn that you’re fearful. Please fill in the gaps for us.”
I wasn’t pleased with Cristina’s outburst, but she was practically speaking the words on the edge of my tongue, so I let it hang for a moment.
Dexter lifted from his seat, walked over to his wife, and took a drag off her cigarette. “We don’t waste anything, living like we do. It’s all bare bones,” he said, turning to look outside, as if he were searching for stars. Or maybe a miracle.
I just saw it as another avoidance.
I took in a breath, thinking about who I was dealing with. Mona and Dexter were addicts, which was another way of telling us they were professional liars. As we’d already seen, they could juke their way out of any question. A direct approach was required.
“Mona, Dexter.” I raised my hand to get their attention.
“Can I get you some more tea?” Dexter rushed over to pick up my glass, but found it mostly full. “Mona, you got any more of those quesadillas you made the other night? Those things never get old.”
“Hold on,” I said, my tone firm.
The both froze like statues.
“No more games or dodging our questions. Your daughter is on her way. We’ve spent countless hours working to find you. While it would be nice to be reimbursed for our work, we’ll settle for honest responses and a happy family.”
My own voice echoed in my head from the stillness in the room.
Undaunted, I continued. “You’ve mentioned that you were forced to leave town. Why?”
Mona and Dexter glanced at each other, and then Mona took the lead. “We owe a lot of money to a very powerful man.”
Cristina snorted. “What else could they want? Your house has been repossessed. You don’t have a car, and you live in this shithole.”
“Cristina.” I gave her a stern look.
“Sorry,” she said, holding up her hands. “But it’s true. What the hell is going on that makes anyone think you’ve got any money?”
Dexter tugged at his face, his eyes falling to the floor. “A few months back, Mona and I went to Vegas. We called it our last hurrah. We were going to drink and do drugs and gamble all week long. And then once we hit rock bottom, we were going to stop cold turkey.”
“Again,” Cristina said. “Anika said you had stopped after…you know, the incident a few years ago.”
Mona took a drag of her cigarette and then puffed smoke out the side of her mouth. “We’re not perfect. We screw up, and then we try to get back on the wagon. But what Dexter said, that was our plan.”
He swallowed while looking at Mona, and then his hands found the back of a chair. “We partied like there was no tomorrow. Did shit neither of us are proud of. We probably did enough drugs, drank enough booze to kill four people, but for some reason, we both survived. And when we woke up from our stupor…” He paused, his jaw flinching, as if he couldn’t get the words out.
“He’s trying to say we were in trouble. Big trouble.” Mona’s eyes narrowed as she puffed on her cigarette.
“Did you rob a bank or something?” Cristina asked in her usual blunt way.
“Worse,” Dexter said. “Far worse.”
My eyes shifted back and forth between the pair, wondering who was going to let us in on their secret.
“Mona had—” Dexter heaved, as if he was starting to cry, but he covered his mouth with his hand.
Mona stepped in our direction. “I fucked anyone that would have me that last night. To get more drugs and to open a larger line of credit at the casino. That’s right. I’m not only an addict, I’m nothing but a worthless whore.”
“Mona,” Dexter barked. “You know our program. We can’t relive our past. And there’s only so much self-pity we can throw on ourselves. Please don’t go there. It’s not good for you, and I don’t think I can take it.”
She eyed him and then sucked in more nicotine. For a moment it was so quiet I could hear the crinkle of the burning cigarette.
Cristina drank some of her iced tea, which broke the silence and lack of movement.
“How much gambling debt did you rack up?” I finally asked.
“Almost three hundred thousand,” Mona said, as if she were talking about the price of a gallon of gas.
“I guess it doesn’t matter, but I’m wondering how you convinced them to give you that much credit.”
“If you got the balls of the right guy in your mouth, they’ll do anything you want. Anything at all.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
Mona gave me a cold stare, her eyes partially hidden by the swell of smoke. I think she was trying to intimidate me in some strange way, or maybe just shock me into backing off. I didn’t turn away from her gaze. “So that’s why you’re running?”
No response from Bonnie or Clyde.
“I’m guessing the head of security from this Vegas casino left you a couple of threatening phone calls?”
Still nothing.
“Maybe he hired a repo man and took your cars away?”
Just more staring.
“I could keep guessing all night, but when Anika gets here, she’s going to want to know the truth.” I jabbed my forefinger into my thigh. “She deserves to hear you two tell her the truth for once.”
“You don’t know shit about us.” Mona blew smoke out of her nose. Her face took on the look of a bull that was about to charge at me.
“I’m trying, Mona. We’re both trying to understand how you got to living like this.” I picked up a dirty T-shirt from the seat next to me and let it drop. Their eyes watched it fall on top of a pile of trash near my feet.
“We had no fucking money,” she said, her voice on the rise. “What were we supposed to do?”
“We thought they’d just go away once they found out we didn’t have much,” Dexter said. “We got back to San Antonio, put ourselves in rehab, and tried to forget about every stupid thing we’d done.”
I saw Cristina open her lips, but she kept quiet. Thankfully.
“But they never went away,” I said.
Dexter chewed on his lip for a moment. “They’re like cockroaches. They never go away.”
I stared out the door again, noticed a sprinkling of white lights from the island in front of a black sky. It seemed serene, the opposite of the mood in the camper. “If someone was harassing you, or threatening you, you could have gone to the police. This isn’t 1965 Vegas. I’m pretty sure most of those places are run like corporations.”
Mona shook her head. “We…I was so over the top, I think they had to make an example of us.”
“Which meant?”
“They sold our debt to some Italian guy in Chicago.” The city name caused me and Cristina to both cease movement. Mona continued, oblivious to our reaction. “When we were contacted by one of his lackeys, they said we had to become drug runners to pay off our debt. We told the guy we were both recovering addicts and running drugs was the last thing we should do. On top of that, knowing our luck, we’d get caught and thrown into jail, probably somewhere south of the border.”
All I could do was shake my head in disbelief.
“This isn’t exactly the American dream we’re living,” Dexter said, trying to chuckle but not quite getting there.
“Did he put you on some type of payment plan with a lot of interest?” Cristina asked.
All three of us guffawed at her question.
“What?�
��
“It would have had to be a fifty-year plan,” Mona said. “And they weren’t going to wait fifty years to get their money back.”
“When they finally realized we had been putting them off, trying to avoid discussing this drug-runner option, we got this call,” Dexter said. “It made the hair on my arms stand up.”
“What did they say?”
“This guy said if we didn’t report to Chicago, ready to run drugs, in two days, then he would come find us, and…” He bit into his cheek before continuing. “He would tear off each appendage on our bodies before he killed us. And then he would just leave us in the same room until we died from loss of blood.”
Cristina lifted from her seat and started to pace in the little space available.
“I feel strange asking this,” I said. “Does this guy have ties to organized crime?”
Mona and Dexter cracked out a laugh. “You kidding me?” Dexter said. “This guy is organized crime.”
I felt my phone buzzing, and I saw it was Stan. Before I tapped to answer the call, I asked if they had his name.
“Vincent Sciaffini. They call him The Shark.”
32
With the scent of lilac wafting in the air, Zahera leaned back in her acrylic bear-claw tub, resting her head on the bath pillow. Bubbles, so many bubbles, covered every inch of the water, two feet high in some places. She moaned out loud, rubbing her feet together, allowing the bath salts to soak into her aching toes.
That pair of Christian Louboutin heels had done her in again. Hadn’t she learned her lesson two months ago? She thought she had, up until she found a new pair of black high heels online. They had red soles. It was too much of an enticement to pass up.
You only live once, she had told herself as she clicked “submit” on the page that would charge her credit card just over twelve hundred dollars. Her father would have a cow if he knew how she spent her money.
Gazing around the bathroom, she chuckled at herself. “He’d know,” she said. She’d been lucky. Well, she’d been lucky and smart. She’d graduated with honors from Georgetown and picked up her MD at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, then followed her latest boy toy to Texas—where her father lived, of all places. But it had turned out well. She just happened to open her practice at the right time—after her second divorce—and the right place. San Antonio was busting at the seams with professional women who felt like they couldn’t wait another year before starting motherhood.
The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 1-3: Redemption Thriller Series 7-9 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 44
