“I’ll be fine. It’s okay. God was looking after me, that much I know.”
Sean leaned past me, flipping the blade open, dried blood coating the sides. “I’m going to check the wound,” he said just before puncturing a hole in the Father’s sleeve.
“I’ve never met you before. Are you a friend of Mr. Booker and Sebasten?” The Father could have been the Catholic version of Mr. Rogers.
“I know them,” he said, his eyes focused on tearing the sleeve all the way around, then slipping it off the arm, exposing a nasty gash.
Sean used his only two clean fingers to pry around the blood pool on the outer part of the arm. “It grazed the skin. Doesn’t appear to be any muscle damage. Probably stings like hell. A good cleaning, maybe a few stitches. Might need to immobilize it for a day or two.”
He sounded like an Army medic.
“A dirty back alley probably isn’t the best place for putting him back together,” Sean said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Julio up on his hands and knees. His amigos stirred on the ground, still moaning from their injuries.
“We can’t let them go, and we can’t call the cops,” I said. “If they get word back to Amador, we’re toast, and we’ll have no chance of finding Esteban.”
Sean dug a finger under his wig and scratched his head. “If Julio and his buddies are late getting back to camp, they might think something is up.”
“But it’s Saturday night. Party night.” Bolt put a finger to his puffy lip, which had made him sound half his age. “No one will notice they’re gone.”
“That might buy us until sunrise tomorrow,” Sean said.
“First things first,” I said, jogging over to Julio. “On the ground.”
“Fuck you!”
Slipping my foot just inside his knee, I flipped him off balance and jammed my knee into his back with a thud as he landed face first on the pavement.
“Who da fuck are you?” he said.
Ignoring him, I held up my hands as my knee applied about two hundred ten pounds of pressure into his left kidney. “We can turn him over to the authorities after we get Esteban out.”
Bolt ran over. “Maybe we can force him to talk, to tell us where they have the kid.”
“This lying sack of shit? I wouldn’t believe a thing he said.”
Julio jostled across the graveled pavement, and I shifted my weight, jabbing my knee even further into his back. “I only have two knees. Any ideas, at least temporarily?”
“Damn, I almost forgot I carried a few spare ones,” Sean said, jumping out of his stance. He pulled out a zip tie. “Here, bring his hands back.”
“I got this,” I said, grabbing a tie and pulling it tight onto Julio’s wrists.
“Ahh!” he grunted.
“Perfect,” I said.
Sean hogtied the two others, although neither appeared to be much of a flight risk.
Pulling out my phone, I tapped the only other contact I knew on the island I could trust.
Fifteen minutes later a tan SUV rolled down the alley, squeaking to a stop just in front of Father Santiago.
“Father, Father please let us help you,” Valdez said the moment his foot hit pavement. Behind him was another man with round, wire-rimmed glasses, thinning hair. Barely taller than Bolt, he waddled more than walked over to the priest, then kneeled down, his hands covered with blue rubber gloves.
“A friend of the family,” Valdez said, shifting over to Sean and me, while appearing to study everything the doctor did.
“Can’t have enough doctors in the extended family. I’m just glad he’s okay working off the radar, so to speak.”
“Radar?”
I recalled that English wasn’t Valdez’s first language. “Sorry. Not many doctors would agree to leave a hospital or office. This isn’t a battlefield.” I questioned my use of the phrase the moment it left my lips, but I didn’t correct myself.
His rubbery face coiled a bit. “He’s not a doctor, not exactly anyway.”
My eyes shifted to Sean, then back to Valdez.
“He was a doctor up until five years ago. Well-respected even. But he got caught giving out more than prescriptions from his office.” He arched a full eyebrow.
“How did you get to know him?”
“Just like Alejandro. I put him behind bars.”
“Usually doesn’t work that way in the states. Back there, they hunt you down after you put them away.”
“He was an addict. Once he got clean, he knew what he did was wrong. Now he works as an accountant. Says it’s boring. He’s just itching to use his knowledge of medicine.”
The doctor waddled to us, pulling off his rubber gloves. “I’ve stopped the bleeding. We can transport him back to my house. I have an area set up in my garage. I have everything I need there to treat the wound. He should be okay, but I want to make sure he doesn’t get an infection.”
We spent the next few minutes explaining how our hike across town was interrupted by Julio, and the ensuing brawl that left us bloodied and beaten, but not defeated.
Valdez scratched just above his mustache. “Let’s put them in the car, tie them down somehow. I know of a warehouse where I can take them. I’ll pay Manuel a few bucks to make sure they don’t run off.”
“Thanks, Valdez.”
“Yeah, dude. Thanks, Tito Jackson. Woo hoo!” Bolt spun around and grabbed his crotch, à la Michael Jackson.
“That’s messed up,” I said.
“I can see why you have a fat lip,” Valdez said, rolling his eyes.
“Sean and I will take Bolt with us. Still have to try to get to Amador tonight, if possible. Can you fit everyone in the SUV and make sure everything stays calm?”
Valdez pulled back his coat, revealing a handgun stuck in a holster. “The doctor will drive. I’ll take care of the rest.”
We rounded up everyone, put them in the SUV, with the wobbly doctor behind the wheel as Valdez sat in the back seat facing the cargo area with his gun drawn. Father Santiago extended his good arm out of the window.
“Mr. Booker, I hope you and your friends will be careful, whatever your plan is.” His eyes caught Bolt walking by. “And watch out for that little guy.”
I turned to Sean as the SUV drove off. “I hope you have a spare shamrock. Something tells me we’re going to need all the luck we can get.”
13
Her black stilettos clipped the tiled flooring with an even cadence, her shoulders and hips moving in perfect rhythm. Turning my head as she strutted through the kitchen, she caught me out of the corner of her eye, her blue sapphires creating a heat wave up my back.
“One more minute,” Britney said, disappearing down a hallway.
Just as I realized I’d forgotten to breathe the last thirty seconds, Bolt ran right into me, his mouth hanging open.
“What you looking at?”
His hand was buried in a bag of popcorn.
“Mr. Booker, I’m almost fifteen. The same thing you were looking at.”
“Whatever. She has nothing over me. She’s just another pretty face,” I said, looking for a magazine to sift through.
“Is that what you were looking at?” He winked while walking past me, then plopped into an overstuffed armchair.
Shaking my head, I ran my fingers down the nail heads on the back of the sofa, checking out Britney’s apartment. She’d told me earlier that she’d kept her own place while she and Juan were engaged, mostly for appearances, given the mostly Catholic population. She only occasionally stayed over here, which was about two miles farther into the teeth of the city. It was a gated community, a nice skyline view on the fourth floor. The security was pretty stout. From a wall-mounted monitor off the main hallway, or off her main TV in the living room, she could punch up three camera positions, including one just outside her front door.
The décor was simple, yet elegant, like her the first time we met for lunch at a swanky café in Uptown almost nine months ago. A few days prior
to our lunch, she’d witnessed her fiancé dangling off the Old Red Courthouse clock like a puppet. For a few agonizing minutes, everyone watched in horror as he flailed around, his arms and legs tied to rope. Suddenly, he disappeared. A massive bomb exploded, killing Ashton Cromwell, with thousands watching in person, and millions on TV.
Tonight, for the first time since I’d found her in the Dominican, the Britney of old had resurfaced in many ways, but not all.
She suddenly appeared back in the kitchen. I watched her walk toward the bar in the far corner. Her gait was unmistakable.
“You can close your jaw now.” She smiled, knowing all four eyes in the room were on her. Sean had insisted on making a run by his place to pick up some equipment. I tapped my phone checking the time.
“While we wait on your mystical friend, I’m having a drink. Can I serve you one?” A decanter clinked against a glass tumbler. Looked like she was having rum, neat.
“You know my rule. No drinking while I’m on the job.”
She held up her glass. “Sometimes rules are made to be broken.” Arching an eyebrow, she sipped the liquor.
“Rules are one thing, laws are another. And for you, we’re not talking about racking up a stack of traffic tickets.”
“Touché. I guess I walked right into that one.” Her chest lifted as she took in a deep breath and held her gaze at me an extra second.
Her leer was addictive, as thoughts of us rolling in the proverbial hay filtered my mind. I forced myself to look away.
“Thank you for agreeing to do this,” I said staring at a woodcarving resting on a round table, trying to change the conversation back to the kidnapping of a helpless teenage boy.
“Seriously, Booker? I should be thanking you for finding out who kidnapped him,” she said, prowling in my direction.
“We’re not sure. But as I told you earlier, Amador is paranoid about this El Jefe group. By kidnapping the son of a famous, rich baseball player, he might be telling the world that he has all the power and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop him.”
“He’s sick and he needs to be stopped.” Her body went stiff, and she downed the rest of her rum. “Given my mission tonight, I need another one,” she said, raising her empty glass. “To be my best slutty self, I think it’s necessary, don’t you?”
I was tongue-tied, unsure how to answer that one. When we’d been fully immersed in our relationship, slutty was the last term I would have used on Britney. Classy, a lady of immense resolve and dignity were terms that had first come to mind, and it was hard not to share my thoughts with the world. She was intoxicating…up until the time she became oddly protective about me when there was never any competition.
I should have seen the signs.
Studying the wooden carving again, I finally was able to detect it was two people intertwined in some type of lovemaking position.
“You don’t like me using that term, slutty, do you?”
Her voice caught me off guard. I turned, relieved to find Bolt engrossed in a Spanish cartoon.
“It doesn’t matter what I think.” I just didn’t want to go there.
“So, Juan is okay with you putting your life at risk to try to find his son?” She’d agreed to be our bait, to try to seduce one of the most brutal men in the Caribbean, hoping to pull information about Esteban out of Amador. When I’d brought up the idea earlier on the phone, she didn’t hesitate for a second. Despite all of her personality warts—murderer at the top of that list—she had a huge soft spot for Esteban, and apparently a bigger one for Juan, the man she would never marry.
“He’s desperate to have his son back. When I told him the idea, tears bubbled in his eyes. It was tough to watch this larger-than-life man, a hero to so many, break down so easily. That’s when I knew I had no other choice. I’d do anything to bring that boy home to his father. Anything.” Her eyes stayed on me.
“But he still believes you’re Ana Sofia, despite your ability to change your appearance so easily?”
Setting a taut arm against her granite countertop island, she popped her hip outward. Her black dress wrapped her body like cellophane. It cupped her derriere and hugged her upper thighs as if it had been molded exclusively for her frame. Almost uncontrollably, my eyes zipped up and down her legs, long and slender. They never stopped.
And neither did the fashion tease. Slits of velvety skin were exposed up the left side. If that wasn’t enough to mesmerize the male population, the last slit exposed the side of her breast.
Damn, I needed a cold shower…or a kick in the crotch. She still had power over me like no one else. My lack of self-control, even if only in my mind, pissed me off.
“What’s wrong?”
She must have been talking. “Sorry, didn’t catch what you said.”
“I didn’t say anything. I could see that you’re thinking…a lot. Something has upset you.”
Not a fan of someone reading my body language, I could feel my face tighten a bit. “I’m fine. Just a lot that needs to go right tonight. And after today, it doesn’t appear that luck is on our side.”
She sauntered closer, moving within a couple of feet. I felt my butt hit the back of the sofa as she reached a hand to her face and licked a finger. She wiped the side of my cheek. I flinched a bit, which fired a spear of pain throughout my ribcage. I wondered if ribs were cracked or broken from the mugging just an hour or so earlier.
“You are quite jittery. I was just cleaning off a smidge of blood you missed earlier.”
Her touch created the strangest sensation I could recall, a bipolar combination of revulsion and intimacy. Once again, I chastised myself for going there.
Then my eyes found her lips, and I had to force myself from not running my fingers across her face and pulling her closer. Her skin color was a shade lighter than just a day earlier. I studied her hair, long and flowing but with an extra kick of frizzy curls, enhanced by some type of product.
“Is this the wig, or was your short, choppy brown hair fake?”
Her neck coiled back a few inches. “Is that a question you should really be asking a lady?”
“No, that’s why I’m asking you.”
“Another dig. Whoa, you’re getting good at this. Glad I don’t take your jabs too personally,” she said with a wink.
“You going to tell me, or do I have to pull your hair?”
She giggled. “I remember some hair pulling back when we were…an item.”
I turned over my shoulder, checking on Bolt. His eyes were fixated on the TV as he shoveled in more popcorn.
Filtering my thoughts to the cold shower side of my head, I planted my hands at my waist. “I don’t want to play games. It’s just a question.”
“A girl has to have some secrets, right?”
She quickly flipped on her heels, strutting back to the kitchen just as the alarm buzzed.
“That should be your friend, right, Booker? If it is, please let him in. If you don’t recognize him, call for me. I need to visit the powder room.”
Britney strolled down the far hallway as I made a beeline for the alarm panel in the foyer. The picture flipped between the three perspectives. On the third, I instantly recognized Sean, with his graying ponytail sticking out from his frayed Cubs cap. He actually tipped the cap, apparently knowing the location of the camera. I pressed a button, the iron gate clicked open, and Sean walked out of view off the bottom of the screen. About a minute later, the next camera shot showed him exiting the fourth-floor elevator. I counted to ten, and then the doorbell rang.
“Welcome,” I said, as he walked inside pulling a plastic garbage bag out of his shirt.
“Hola.”
“Hola, Mr. Sean,” Bolt said from the chair, his voice sounding tired.
“That kid’s been through hell today,” I said.
Sean walked over to the kitchen island and rifled through the bag. “I know, and it didn’t happen in the camp. It happened under our watch while we walked along the street. I sho
uld have spotted Julio and his buddies before we were attacked.”
“You really think you could have prevented that?” And here I thought my guilt factor was a tad on the high side.
“I was distracted, thinking ahead to all the possible scenarios with Amador tonight, as well as how this first conversation with…uh, what’s her name might go.”
I chortled. “You sound like me up until recently, unable or unwilling to say her name,” I said, looking over my shoulder, checking for any sign of her. It was clear. “At times, I got so riled up just by the thought of her, of everything she did right under my nose. I could have chewed off the leg of a chair.”
“Sounds like you were more pissed at yourself.” He turned his head toward me.
“Just like you are now,” I shot back.
“Yeah, maybe so.” Sean picked up a round, black object, no bigger than the size of a dime, domed on one side, flat on the other.
“By the way, why were you thinking ahead to this discussion with…Britney?”
“For many reasons. I thought it would be obvious.”
“For me, yes. You?”
He looked beyond my shoulder, keeping his voice low. “For one, we have to rely on an untrained citizen to be the main cog in this operation. It’s up to her to get close to Amador, pull information from a man who’s not only brutal, but likely paranoid. Secondly, can we really trust her? Look at her life the last year and her situation here in the Dominican. She’s a pathological liar, it sounds like to me.”
“I’ve used the same term,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek.
Dropping his head a tad, Sean paused. He turned his sights back to me. “Most importantly, she fucked up your life. She almost killed your mother, and she hurt you. She’s not on my top-ten list of favorite people. In fact, if it wasn’t for Amador—”
“You must be the secret friend of Booker’s.”
BOOKER Box Set #2 (A Private Investigator Thriller Series of Crime and Suspense): Volumes 4-6 Page 39
