“The man on the motorcycle this afternoon was much smaller. I thought the feds broke up the Lords in that bust back in the eighties,” she said, changing the subject. Eddie’s own son from his first wife had been a member of the motorcycle gang. His trial had been coming up when he’d been fatally stabbed in a bar fight over an ex-girlfriend.
“They did.”
Behind Nick’s beautiful dark eyes she saw his wheels spinning. Whatever he was thinking, though, he wasn’t going to share it with her. She opened the car door, and her purse banged against her side. Everybody had their secrets.
“A lot of them served out their sentences and have been released the past few years. Enough to set up a clubhouse and a grocery-store operation over on Third Avenue. So far, they’ve kept a low profile.”
“You think the Lords have something to do with my mother and Jo Jo’s disappearance?”
“One of their members is working at the bar.”
“And Eddie’s son was a member.”
Nick started up the car. “That firebombing that killed my cousin. The bar’s owner was a rival of Eddie’s. No evidence was ever found, but word was Eddie’s son and his buddies were behind the bombing.”
She put her hand on his, gazed at his hard profile, but knew enough not to say anything.
Nick drove, watching the street. “You need to get a room.”
“Okay.”
The glance he shot her said he’d been expecting an argument. Her compliance was equally suspect. Hard man to please.
“Where to?” Nick headed the car uptown. “Americana? The Towers?”
Cissy thought of her depleting resources. “Didn’t we pass the Bel-Air on the way over?”
Nick sent her another look. “What are you doing? Trying to relive your misspent youth?”
She hadn’t remembered until Nick’s remark that the Bel-Air Motor Lodge had rented rooms by the hour, earning it the nickname the Make-Out Motor Lodge from the high school students who frequented it.
“No, trying to relive yours.”
He cracked a grin, completely shameless.
“Okay.” He swung into the outer lane. “The Bel-Air it is.”
Several minutes later he pulled into the parking lot.
“You have my number?” She stalled. It was easy to play big and bad when cruising around with an Italian hard body with a mean-streets attitude and a fully licensed weapon. She looked at the Vacancy swinging beneath the motel’s sign. Story of her life, she thought.
Nick eyed her with a narrow gaze. “Let me take you to my sister’s. You remember Mary Theresa. She married a lawyer. A good guy. She’s got a Colonial in a ritzy development outside the city. Keeps popping out kids and making Mama happy.”
He was stalling, too, Cissy realized. A puppy-dog warmth spread through her limbs. She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth midsentence. It wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, but as her lips met his, tasting his own sweet shock, it was the most satisfying.
She let it ride, lingering, as their lips clung. Her mouth relaxed as if to sigh, as if it’d been searching a long time for something, someone to take away the hunger. Her mind marveled that in all these years she hadn’t realized she’d already found it. She’d sworn she’d forgotten him. She’d lied.
She knew she’d have to be the first to pull away. To begin with, there was the male maxim that said a woman kisses you, you kiss back—hard. Second, she’d initiated the action; it was up to her to end it. Another unwritten code of sexual conduct.
She knew all this, but she did nothing about it except lean deeper into the kiss, letting all else go and listen to the purr build into a roar. She lengthened her tongue, loosened her lips and took from Nick the one thing he was so willing to share. Damn generous. Damn good.
Of course, like any proper Catholic girl, even the blood rushing to all her sensitive parts and the drunken wash of desire couldn’t block out her mother’s voice warning what happens to bad girls who neck in boys’ cars. Firmly etched in her universal Catholic consciousness were her mother’s dire prophesies about boys and back seats, even though Cissy strongly suspected it was how she herself came to be.
Still, it wasn’t her mother’s cautions that caused her to push away, hadn’t been for a long time. It was her mother’s disappearance and a million more questions concerning the mystery.
She drew back, her arm wrapped round Nick’s neck, her other hand tight to his bicep. She pulled away slowly.
“Did we just break some sort of law here or something?” Ah, she liked the glaze in his eyes. One blink and it was back to the edgy stare, Nick-style. God bless. Gone was the man who’d had his socks rocked, but she’d seen him, confirming what she’d always suspected. Nick Fiore had a heart. He just preferred to keep it hidden beneath a body built for pleasure and an A-1 bad-ass manner. She didn’t blame him one bit.
“Not unless I missed something,” he answered with his bad-guy grin.
She smiled back. I’m on to you, Fiore. “So, making out in a law-enforcement vehicle? That’s not violating some kind of statute or something?”
“I’ve never seen anything about it in the code book.”
She deliberately said nothing, staring him down, giving him the chance to grab her—or maybe she’d grab him again. He was the first to look away. She’d won. He was scared. Scared as she. Or he would have wrapped his hand around the back of her head and dragged her to him and not cared less.
She leaned over, whispered in his ear, “You’re going down for the count this time, Fiore.”
She slid across the seat, opened the door, and almost made it out when his hand caught her upper arm and pulled her back onto his lap, the steering wheel pressing into the back of her head and his mouth moving into hers without retreat. For several minutes, he kissed and coaxed and nipped and stroked her until her nails dug into his shoulders and her hips pressed to him, her entire body thrusting forward as if having discovered a new natural law of physics. He didn’t let up. No let up at all, and what a fine thing it was.
He stopped as he’d started, looked down at her, the conqueror in his eyes. She leaned her head on the steering wheel, a violence between them. Cut from the same cloth, they’d either kill each other or love each other like no other. Either way, they were doomed.
“If I go down,” he said, “you’re going with me.”
It was the best offer she’d had in a lifetime. She slid out the door, grabbed her bag from the back seat, propped her arm on the opened door and leaned into the car. “You’ll let me know if you get anything from Eddie.”
“What are we? Partners now?”
“That’s right. Call me.” She slammed the door and walked to the motel office, giving him her best backside show. She didn’t turn and look as she heard the car shift into reverse, roll out of the parking lot. If she were sixteen again, and he was seventeen, he would gun the engine and peel out. But she wasn’t sixteen. He wasn’t seventeen. She was thirty-two with a missing mother and sister and only a month of severance between her and the streets. He was thirty-three, a detective who had seen human depravity in all its many incarnations. Still, she’d bet her last year of decent dividends as he eased the unmarked vehicle into traffic and pulled smoothly away, he was smiling. Just like her.
Chapter Five
The two-story house with Victorian flourishes was part of a sprawling residential development named Grandview Estates, in the hope of distinguishing it from the numerous other developments that sprouted like goosegrass twenty minutes from easy access to the interstate. The houses were moderate Capes, long ranches, with the occasional brick front and thirty-three thousand interior thrown in. Cissy drove slowly past number eighteen in her rented Buick. The house was cream; its trim, white. The yard was tidy, the walk trimmed with lush hosta, the flower beds beneath the half porch’s rail bursting with petunias and pansies. Certainly not Cissy’s idea of a killer’s lair. Then again, motorcycle-riding, gun-wielding maniacs didn’t usually dress
in Botany 500 either.
She drove several blocks over, the deepening night dark enough for her to turn her headlights on. Several people were still out walking, most with dogs. Children splashed and yelled in a pool. Balls and swing sets littered the yards. Many waved as she passed despite the fact that they didn’t recognize the car. Nothing like suburbia to bring a lump to your throat.
Cissy circled, came back toward number eighteen. What was the plan here? She couldn’t just walk up and ask, “Excuse me? Did you try to off me today at the corner of Manning and Maiden?”
She parked at the far edge of the lawn, not wanting to circle a third time. She’d already seen some of the welcoming looks turn curious. Suspicion was next. Suburbia was sweet but it wasn’t stupid.
She rolled down the window and stared at the house and its example of everything true and pure and great about America. Maybe Nick was right. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe what she thought was a gun had been the sun’s glare, a reflection off the metal handle bars, an illusion from the mirror’s refractory rays or simple female hysteria. She closed her eyes, again pictured the motorcycle, the man and saw the gun again as clear as holy water. The son of a bitch had tried to kill her.
“Can I help you?”
She gave a squeak, her eyes flying open. An elderly woman, her light blue eyes and features gone from pretty to kindly by way of numerous wrinkles, stood small but sturdy-looking in her Reeboks and culottes and canvas fisherman’s hat. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’m looking for Phillip Lester’s house.”
“You found it. Right on the money.” The woman’s face folded up within itself more as she smiled and gestured to the cream ranch with the white trim. “Such a nice young man. Keeps a nice place too, don’t you think? Don’t know if he’s home, though.”
The house did look dark. The garage doors were down. “Maybe I missed him. I’ll just go and ring the bell to make sure. Have a good night now.” Cissy attempted to get the woman moving on her way. She got out of the car and started up the drive, a queasy sensation in her stomach, like the time in college when she’d washed down guacamole and tortilla chips with several pints of dark beer. Well, if ol’ Phil was home and answered the door, he certainly wouldn’t kill her on his front porch, she reasoned. Not with all the cream and white and weedless flower beds.
She rang the bell, waited, waved to the elderly lady who had turned the corner and was continuing up the street parallel to Lester’s house. No answer. No sound of life inside. At least she’d tried. She turned to go, met the black garage door windows. She stepped off the porch, strolled to the drive, looking up and down the streets. The mother across the street was busy shrieking at the children in the pool. A jogger going by was focusing in front of him, probably trying to envision the end of his self-imposed torture. Cissy cupped her hands and peered through the dark squares into the garage.
Centered in one half of the cement floor, black and arrogantly shiny even in the gloom was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. A satisfied smile came to Cissy’s face. She peered harder as if expecting to find an answer. Nothing. The garage was as neat as the house’s exterior.
She stepped back, studied the house. Imagined the inside reflected it’s owner’s fastidiousness. Not the type of person to chase a woman in broad daylight and attempt to shoot her on one of the city’s busiest corners.
She stared at the house. Was the answer inside? Had this man of the monster motorcycle and the tended flower gardens tried to kill her? Did he know what had happened to her mother and sister?
She circled the garage to the back door, knocked again. Hard. Still no answer. She fumbled through her purse for a safety pin, bent it open, shaped the tip, inserted it into the lock and jiggled, a technique everybody had known back in the neighborhood but she hadn’t employed since returning from a midnight rendezvous at sixteen and finding the front door locked, the key under the mat removed by her mother.
Five minutes later, she heard a click, opened the door. No chain and bolt. Nice neighborhood. She stepped into the kitchen, more than the air-conditioning going full force making her shiver. Technically she wasn’t doing anything wrong, she told herself as she scanned the room. She wasn’t going to take anything. Just look for something, anything that might help her find her mother and sister.
She shut the door. Plus the man had tried to shoot her. Justification enough for her to tiptoe across his linoleum. She crept into the hall, staying close to the wall in her best emulation of every Dirty Harry movie she’d ever seen. She poked her head around the corner, then drew back again. Slower this time, she peeked, her back pressed to the wall. A typical living room with the customary couch, early Colonial style, blue-and-red plaid. A chair and ottoman, the same shade of blue as in the couch, were nearby. Two maple tray tables with elegant legs served as a coffee table. Phil Lester had better taste than most men Cissy had known. She moved down to a room set up as an office with a variety of computer equipment. Most men loved the gadgets and gizmos of this age, taking a primitive pride in the size of their RAM and hard drive. Phil was obviously one of the ranks. She stepped into the room. A changing multicolored shape swam in and out of the twenty-one inch monitor screen. She looked around, pressed a button on the keyboard. Program icons in even rows filled the screen. Cissy read the names. Many were typical software needed for personal computers. Others were unfamiliar to Cissy, but from the icons and their names, most seemed to be some kind of game. All this told her was Phil was a gamer. Not a killer.
She sighed a deep supersleuth sigh and tried to think like Nancy Drew. When that produced nothing, she climbed the stairs. At the top to her left was what appeared to be a spare bedroom. Directly in front was a bathroom and to her right, what had to be Phil’s bedroom, with its masculine hunter green colors and vertical blinds across the windows. She walked into the bathroom. Freud, Jung and others had their theories on personality but Cissy believed the essence of a man lay behind two doors—his refrigerator’s and his bathroom medicine cabinet’s. She slid back one mirrored door on the cabinet over the sink. After-shave, razors, aspirin, toothpaste, mouthwash, dental floss. Phil followed an excellent hygienic routine. She had not expected otherwise. She slid the mirrored panel closed and slid over the other one.
Several bottles of different types of antacid in varying colors and sizes sat on the clean glass shelves. Two prescription bottles, half-filled, sat on the shelves. Cissy turned their labels toward her. Nexium. Prilosec. Medicine prescribed to counteract nervous stomachs. Two-thirds of the brokers Cissy had known had popped them daily. She moved to the bedroom, faced the tall dresser on the opposite wall. She wasn’t really going to go through his drawers, was she? Okay, the man had tried to shoot her but something about rifling through his skivvies seemed very un-Nancy Drew-like. She darted her gaze around the room, hoping for deliverance. Several books were stacked evenly on the bottom shelf of the nightstand. A clock-radio and telephone sat on top beside a reading lamp. Her gaze swung to the closet. She moved toward it in the gathering dusk, trying not to let the shadows spook her.
She pushed back the sliding door. It stuck halfway. She pushed harder when a ringing made her jump. She glanced wildly around, her heart banging against her chest. Realizing it was her cell phone did nothing to spell the hammering of her heart. She groped in her purse, sweat trickling under her armpits. Nancy Drew would have turned her cell off. The ringing continued persistent as a mother’s guilt. Oh, screw Nancy Drew. Cissy dumped her purse on Phil’s bounce-a-quarter-off-it bed and grabbed her phone. She jabbed Talk. “What?”
“Where the hell are you?”
Nick. “Why don’t you strap me with one of those electronic ankle bracelets and we can skip the formalities.” Propping the phone on her shoulder, she scrambled to shove everything back in her purse, including the two stacks of cash that she still didn’t know what to do with but couldn’t leave in the motel room.
“A call came in from Standish Security. A silent alarm
was triggered at Eighteen Pleasant Pond Drive.”
Uh-oh.
“Get the hell out of there.”
The line went dead. For once she’d do what she was told.
Her purse tucked under her arm, she ran down the stairs without a plan. She froze, pulled up flat against the wall as headlights swept the room. A car pulled into the driveway. She heard the whir of the garage door opening. Lester. Most likely, he would come in through the back door. On her hands and knees, she crawled past the side windows toward the front door. Still on her knees, she reached up, unlocked the front door, wincing at the click. She pressed on the handle, inch by silent inch swung the door open. Only then did she straighten up and step out into the hot night, pulling the door carefully closed behind her. She tensed every muscle as she waited for the final click. She released her breath, turned.
“Hi, honey.”
Coming toward her up the stairs was a medium-built man with dark hair and a mean smile. Past the man’s shoulder she saw a patrol car come down the street. It slowed, pulled into the drive, its headlights sweeping the front yard.
She was enveloped in a bone-crunching hug. The man’s arm slithered down her side to pull up his loose-fitting shirt, slip out the gun in his waistband, press its snout to her navel. “Don’t give me any problems,” he muttered.
She had finally met Phillip Lester.
Chapter Six
“What’s your name?” the man growled in her ear.
“Candy,” Cissy lied.
Two uniformed cops got out of the car. Her captor flattened his lips against hers as he pressed the gun deeper into her belly’s soft flesh. She found his lower lip, pulled it into her mouth, heard his delighted moan and bit down hard.
He snapped his head back. Go for it, her gaze openly challenged him. If she was going to die, it wasn’t going to be without a fight.
His back to the police and several curious neighbors looking on from their yards, he glared at her as he cocked the gun’s trigger.
Unmarked Man Page 6
