by Gina LaManna
“You’re back,” Anastasia said, whipping the door open before we’d set one foot on the staircase. “Where have you been this whole time? The sauce nearly burned.”
“If you tell me that the sauce is crisped and inedible...” I shook my head, hearing a rustle as if I had a crown of leaves lining my scalp.
“You ladies look terrible,” Anastasia said. “And where is your sock?”
I glanced down at my feet, realized they were still clad in socks and that she wasn’t talking to me, and then looked over to Meg. She had one shoe on, one shoe off, and Ying slung over her shoulder.
“Long story,” Meg said. “But I’m in extreme pain right now, all for this sauce. So if we can just get the jars and be on our way...”
Unlike the previous instances, Anastasia didn’t invite us into the house first. “Do you have what I’m looking for?”
“Lady, I already thought we bonded over being psychics. Where is your trust?” Meg shook her head then pulled the phone from her pocket. Ying leapt off of her chest and scooted past Anastasia’s ankles into the house. “I got a huge butt-hole because of this photo.”
“That would be a scratch. Just a scratch on her rear end,” I clarified, worried that Anastasia would want to call the police if she found out the truth. “Minor skin wound. Nothing that major.”
Anastasia didn’t react to our chattering, however. Her mouth was agape at the photo. “This – this is him?”
“Yeah,” Meg said. “A real turd. Not a pleasure to meet him.”
“Ever seen him before?” I asked. “He’s up to no good, clearly.”
“He’s...he’s so tied up in this photo,” she said. “Is he all right?”
Now that I looked at it, he did look a little uncomfortable in the photo. His lips were set in a grimace, his arms were awkwardly tied behind his back, and the large gun was sitting on his lap. Meg’s over-sized vest hung over his shoulders and made him look like a Grizzly.
“He shot at us,” I said. “So we had a reason to tie him up. Can we please get the sauce?”
“Will he be all right?” she asked. “Where is he now?”
“Look, Miss Seeing Eye,” Meg said. “I am all for twenty-one questions. I’m all for Guess Who. I’m even okay with Monopoly about once a year. I love games, I really do. But not right now. Right now, I want sauce and a shower.”
“Your sauce – yes,” she said. “Come in, come in.”
“She’s so distracted,” I muttered to Meg. “She has to know who he is.”
“I got the same vibe,” Meg said. “This whole thing is weird.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Anastasia asked, slowly picking up a box full of sauce.
I looked into the box, counting six large jars. “These aren’t burned?”
“They’re perfect,” she said. “Just as you sampled before. Now about—”
“It’s none of your business,” Meg said. “It’s not like you know him, anyway.”
Anastasia wrung her hands, looking suddenly frail in her draping black robes. She looked the part of a confused grandmother instead of a woman who’d sent us to investigate a man who’d aimed a round of bullets at us.
I didn’t let up eye contact with the woman, however; the good ol’ Sugary Senses told me not to step foot out of Anastasia’s place until I got some information.
“His name is Oleg,” she said finally. “I saw him at the—” she turned and looked around, as if someone would be listening. “At the grocery store.”
“Why do you know his name then?” I asked. Math wasn’t my strong suit, but something wasn’t adding up. Nothing about today was adding up, from the switch in barbecue time to the events of our witchy friend.
“He, uh, he works there,” she said, her eyes staring at her feet.
“Well, thanks for the sauce,” I said, giving Meg the eye. I was getting to the point where I didn’t really care about Anastasia’s information, quite frankly. Plus, she was Horatio’s grandmother – we could find her again if we couldn’t get answers from the Grease Ball himself. At the moment, I was more focused on getting home to the barbecue. I was tired, hungry, and exhausted.
This whole thing had gotten out of control. I needed to talk to Carlos about Dave’s Special Sauce and see what he was playing at – I simply couldn’t believe that he made everyone jump through these hoops as some sort of hazing rite of passage. In fact, I was beginning to seriously doubt Dave had ever existed.
Why had he sent me on a wild goose chase, then?
Besides the sauce, I needed to talk to Anthony. I desperately wanted to get Grease Ball – or Oleg – off my hands. Carlos and Anthony would know what to do; they might be Family, but they weren’t ruthless. They’d get to the bottom of the matter and figure out the best course of action with which to proceed. Probably they’d scare Grease Ball enough with this whole debacle, and then let him go with a slap on the wrist and a warning to get rid of the guns.
Next, I needed to seriously talk to Horatio about his grandmother. Anastasia was a whole separate issue.
But since speed was of the essence and Meg needed medical attention, we didn’t have time to go through Anastasia’s hesitant explanations at the moment. We needed answers, a shower, and a hamburger. In reverse order.
“Don’t hurt him,” Anastasia said. “Please.”
“Lady, if we wanted to hurt him, we would have,” Meg said. “In fact, we cat-napped Ying for an hour and you didn’t even notice. I treated that guy like a king.”
“It’s a she,” Anastasia said, looking a bit sheepish. “Ying and Yang look a lot alike. It’s hard to tell them apart sometimes. I would have noticed eventually.”
“Then I treated her like a queen,” Meg said. “More than I can say for your man A-Leg out there. He treated me more like a rhino than a queen. He called me fat.”
“I’m sure Oleg didn’t mean it,” Anastasia said, her hands wrung tighter than a sopping wet dish towel. “Make sure he’s okay. Are you bringing him to Carlos?”
“Look, you won’t answer our questions,” I said tiredly. “Why should we answer yours? A deal’s a deal. You got your picture, we got our sauce.”
“I didn’t expect you to take him,” she said. “Just leave him here.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “He knows our names, and I think he has a personal vendetta against us now, thanks to you. If it weren’t for your interference, we wouldn’t have even gone to the house on Sixty-sixth! We thought we were just going to say hello to a new neighbor for you.”
“But—” her lip shook, and it was all but obvious she had some sort of personal connection with the Grease Ball in the back of our car.
“Look, clearly you know Carlos,” I said with a sigh, waving my hand dismissively. “And anyone who has ever heard of him will say one thing about him. He’s fair. He’s got a lot of downfalls, but one thing he’s not is rash.”
“What will he do?” she asked, her voice lilting up in a mixture of fear and curiosity.
“Probably just scare him,” I said. “Tell him not to come near us again. Ask him a few questions.”
“Really?” Anastasia asked, sounding almost disappointed. “Well in that case, good; take him.”
“Good?” I asked, looking at Meg.
Meg gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Carlos isn’t in the habit of making unnecessary messes. Grease Ball is unnecessary in my mind.”
“So he won’t be hurt?” Anastasia asked.
I shook my head. “I really don’t think so. But we’re going to head out now, if that’s okay.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Anastasia said, pumping my hand as I stepped from the door.
“Nice meeting you, fellow psychic,” Meg said. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you soon. Get it? Get it?”
Anastasia waved with a smile that said not really, but was friendly, all the same.
Chapter 13
“WAS THAT WEIRD OR WHAT?” Meg asked.
“I wonder how s
he knows him,” I said. “You think we’ll get it out of Grease Ball when we get back to the car?”
“I think so,” Meg said. “After all, I still got my other sock.”
“Seemed to work well enough last time,” I said.
“We—” Meg started, but was interrupted by the ring of my phone.
“Probably Anthony,” I said. “I’ll answer and let him know we’re coming back. Go check on our friend.”
I clicked to answer and fished out my keys, all in one motion. Meg snatched them from my hand and whistled Mary Had A Little Lamb – the only song she could perform – on her way to the car.
“Hello?” I said.
A man cleared his throat on the other end of the line. When he spoke, his voice sounded croaky. “This is Martim.”
I stopped walking. “Martim?”
“The food critic,” he said.
“Right...” I glanced behind me. Meg was nowhere in sight. Her whistling had stopped, which probably meant she was already at the car. Anastasia’s house was now quiet and the cats were nowhere to be seen. The stillness was almost spookier than the wacky events of the afternoon.
“I was just calling to tell you I remembered something,” he said. “About Dave’s Special Sauce.”
“What do you mean, you remembered?” I asked, my voice harsh. “Who put you up to this?”
“Dave doesn’t sell sauce anymore. He moved away,” Martim said with a cough. “His stand doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Too late,” I said. “I figured that out. But what I want to know is why you called me with this sudden memory gain.”
By the time I finished my sentence, however, all that met my ear was a dial tone.
“Weird, weird, and more weird,” I said. “Meg?”
There was silence. No whistling, no muffled chatter – nothing.
“Meg?” I asked again, walking a bit faster. Maybe she was sitting in the car with all the windows rolled up and shut.
Yeah, right, I thought. She’d been sweating so much that she’d at minimum keep the windows rolled down. There was no way she’d be suffocating inside that hot car.
“Meg!” This time, it wasn’t a question. I covered the last few steps as I rounded the corner at a jog.
But when I came face to face with my little Lumina, hoping to find Meg engrossed in a conversation with a tied-up Oleg, I was sorely disappointed.
Instead, leaning on the hood of my car was a man of medium height with medium black hair and medium skin tones. The only thing not medium about him was the pair of wide, pale blue eyes that popped from his face.
“Who—” I started to ask, but he gestured lazily towards the hoodie he wore over a pair of well-fitting designer jeans. It didn’t take a genius to see that he had a gun pointed directly at Meg.
“This lady is getting into the backseat with our mutual friend,” the man started. “And you’re going to get in the front seat of this box on wheels and do exactly as I say, or your friend is in for a much worse injury than a scratch.”
I nodded, my mouth going dry. What had we gotten ourselves into? My exhaustion turned into panic, my tiredness turned into a rush of adrenaline, and my desire for a hamburger disappeared as the amount of sweat on my palms increased exponentially.
“What does this have to do with us?” I asked casually. “Meg, get in the car.”
Meg, independent woman that she was, couldn’t resist a glare at the gunman despite our rather precarious position. Still, she did as she was told and got in the backseat.
“Time for questions later,” he said. “Your turn, darling.”
My stomach flipped in a nauseating somersault at his words. I followed his instructions as he climbed into the front seat. Leaning his gun on his lap and ensuring it pointed dangerously at Meg, he gave me a smile so pleasant he might’ve been a Starbucks barista taking my coffee order.
“Drive,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Wherever you were going,” he said.
My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember where I was going. The barbecue. I had to get to the barbecue, now that it was today. That’s where all the guards would be.
However, I didn’t want to lead a man with a gun towards my Family, assuming they’d all be there, too. Maybe I could go to my apartment? Or else...
“Don’t think about it so hard,” he said. “Or I can tell you’re lying.”
I hadn’t realized that I’d been frozen in my seat, my hands gripping the steering wheel with fervor. “Right, sorry.”
I pulled away from the driveway, wishing suddenly that Ying would run away from Anastasia and the little witchy woman would come out, see the gun, and call the police. Or someone. Anyone.
“Very good,” he said. “You’ll take a right here.”
I turned right onto the highway. It was the highway that would lead us in the general direction of home. I had about ten minutes to figure out where to take him or how to alert Anthony. But I also had to be careful. If he could tell I was formulating a plan – well, I didn’t want to test him. The new addition to our little vehicle seemed much sharper than the Grease Ball in the backseat.
“According to my calculations, you have ten minutes to talk before arriving at your destination,” the man said. “I suggest you use them wisely.”
“What should I call you?” I asked.
“I don’t have a name,” he said. “Not one I feel like telling you at the moment. But Lacey, what I’m curious about is whether it was Anthony, Carlos, or Clay who figured it out?”
“Figured what out?” I asked, my mind immediately leaping towards the fireworks case.
“I can tell you know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m impressed, is all. The guns were barely across the border before—”
“Guns?” I asked, not faking my surprise. “What are you talking about? Neither Anthony nor Carlos nor Clay told me about this guy.” I gestured towards Grease Ball, who still had a sock in his mouth, gurgling around the fabric.
“I don’t think you’re lying,” he said after a moment of analysis. “That makes me confused. Why were you at Oleg’s house?”
“I was trying to find some stupid sauce for a barbecue,” I said. “It’s a long story, but the woman whose house we were at sent us to his place in exchange for sauce. You should ask your friend back there – Oleg.”
Though the man in the front seat didn’t seem completely fazed, Oleg’s eyes widened in surprise at his name.
“You know the woman?” the brown-haired man asked Oleg. Turning to Meg, he continued, “Please, my dear, take the sock out of his mouth so he can answer.”
“Don’t you dear me,” Meg said, reaching a hand over and popping the sock out of Oleg’s mouth.
“She was nobody,” Grease Ball said. “Nobody at all.”
“So you don’t mind if I take care of loose ends?” the man smiled at Oleg, whose face went white.
“Please – no,” Oleg said. “My grandmother. She’s my grandmother.”
“Why would your grandmother send us to spy on you?” I asked, realizing that my own grandmother wasn’t above meddling in my life.
“Uh, uh, uh,” the man in the front seat said, wagging his finger. “Not your turn to ask questions, Lacey.”
“What are you going to do with her?” Oleg called out. “My grandmother.”
“Stop talking,” Meg growled, shoving the sock back into his mouth.
“Feisty,” the man in the front seat said, his eyes twinkling. “You know how to pick your assistants, Lacey. Is Meg for hire?”
“I’m her psychic,” Meg said. “And I’m not for sale, ass-hat.”
“Is that the adult term for butt-head? I like creativity,” the man mused. “I pay good money if you’re looking to change teams.”
“What exactly is your team?” I asked.
“You really don’t know anything, do you?” he asked.
I assumed it was rhetorical because that wasn’t true. I knew some st
uff.
The man grimaced. “Interesting. I’m not completely surprised. If I know anything about Carlos, it’s that he’s intelligent. He’d never send his granddaughter after me – he loves you too much.”
I flinched as he lifted one hand, holding the gun with the other, and ran his fingers across my jawline. He stroked the skin under my chin while examining my face with excruciating detail.
“And he knows I’m much too dangerous to involve you,” he said. “Smart man, Carlos.”
“That’s not true,” I said, feeling creeped out and angry all at once. “He entrusts me with large cases. He knows I can handle any job that his men can.”
“Which is why he sent you looking for sauce?”
I had no response. My gut felt hollow, empty. Was I Carlos’s pawn? Did he only keep me around out of pity?
“I can see you going through the typical dilemma now,” he said. “But don’t read into it too deeply. View it as a compliment; it’s a rare thing for Carlos to care so much about a person. He doesn’t protect many.”
“He protects the whole Fam – he is a good man,” I said, catching myself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s the image he likes to give off, yes – I’ll give you that.” The man withdrew his hand from my chin and pulled back, caressing his gun up and down as if it were a lover’s arm. “But you’ll be surprised to see how fast he fails to protect his minions when I turn up.”
I stared straight ahead as the car continued down the highway.
“I owe him some payback,” the man said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “And when I infiltrate every little corner and niche of his handsome estate; when I test the loyalty of every single member of the Family; when I hold the lives of everyone he’s ever cared about in my grasp, then we’ll see how he protects his own.”
