Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (15 page)

Ella

I cancelled my sessions for the following day. I hated to do it, and I needed the money, but there was so much on my mind that I couldn’t have focused anyway. Especially not if I saw Mike and there was no way I wouldn’t. Not when he lived over the gym. For that matter, what if I decided not to continue this thing with him? I’d probably have to find another place to work, which broke my heart but… the Mob? That was some serious stuff.

The thing was, and I knew when I thought about this that I was possibly not thinking clearly in the first place, it wasn’t so much the mobster thing that really bothered me. Tony had even said that Mike didn’t actually work in organized crime, and he was so… weirdly honest about things that I was inclined to believe him about it even though Tony was scary as hell himself. No, what really got to me was Pembry. That wasn’t Mike’s fault, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly I was getting myself involved in.

A gentleman mobster was one thing. I didn’t particularly like it, but you can’t help who you’re related to. A stalker cop who was about to possibly lose his job and maybe go off the rails; that was an added, dangerous complication to an already tangled, messed up situation.

Mike, on his own, when we were alone together, seemed to be above all of that. Like he was removed from it and safe. And I was not above including in my consideration the absolutely mind blowing, body rocking sex, either. He was sweet, and strong, and as different from Robert as sunshine was to the rain. I couldn’t lie to myself about how I felt for Mike. It was obvious. Fluttering stomach, thinking about him all the time, looking forward to going out with him again, finally opening up my body to a man again…

So, the man made me feel like I was a princess, like my pleasure was the only thing that mattered to him. Put that in the ‘pros’ column.

Mike was honest with me, mostly—he’d avoided talking about his family much and now I knew why, but he hadn’t lied to me about them; not really. I understood the omission. So, net yield: honest. Two pros.

But you couldn’t weigh every pro and con equally; some were heavier than others. What if he pissed of the Don or something? I’d seen The Godfather movies. I didn’t want to wake up with a sawed-off horse head in my bed one morning because Mike looked at someone wrong, or forgot to go to a wedding, or violated some other insane Mafia etiquette.

Then there was Tony.

Tony had offered, apparently not for the first time, to kill Pembry on Mike’s behalf. To kill him. Murder a man for messing with his brother. Sure, he said he would never harm a woman or child out of some psychotic version of a moral code but… what if things didn’t work out between me and Mike? What if after everything, I broke his heart? What if he got angry about it and then one day afterward, in some back alley where no one would hear me scream, I had an unfortunate accident or something—I wasn’t privy to the reality of Mob hits. Maybe they just shot you and paid off the police? The thought of cement shoes made my stomach twist and curl in on itself.

I pondered these thoughts while I walked back up-town from having lunch at the pasta place Mike and I had gone on our first real dinner-date to. I hadn’t slept very well the night before, and had woken up too early, already thinking a mile a minute, rehashing everything over and over again, like the math might add up to something different if I recalculated enough times. Thing was, with emotional math it sometimes did, and I just needed a positive number, just once, to prove to myself he was worth the trouble.

Because I really, really wanted him to be.

I missed my street by a block, lost in thought, and turned around. I wanted to be safe in my apartment, free to ruminate without interruption. It was a slippery slope, I knew. I had given myself a deadline. I would wallow for a day, and then get back to work and make some kind of decision. It wouldn’t take much for me to slide right down into that soft, still cushion of depression that had caught me after Robert and just stay there. In some ways it was easier to just throw in the towel, accept that life sucked and men were all monsters. Maybe if I tried hard, I could just be a lesbian instead.

I sighed. Probably not. If Chelsea hadn’t done it for me—she was the hardcore, butch, muscle bound sort of lesbian who, even lacking a dick, was basically a dude already—then I doubted any other woman would. I’d end up too old to date, running marathons when I wasn’t tending my twelve cats.

My apartment was in sight, so I fished around my pocket for my keys.

I had never actually heard a gun cocked before—not from that angle, and not an actual old-school revolver, which is what it turned out to be—so when my ears picked up the mechanical snap of it my first confused thought was that I had stepped on something, like a phone or maybe a toy car. I actually glanced down at my feet before I spun around and took a step back.

Pembry was glaring at me. His face was red, the capillaries over his nose standing out, busted and swollen from having been on an obvious bender. He pointed a revolver at me, his hand shockingly steady despite the fact that he actually swayed just slightly from side to side. “Hey, girlie,” he said, his voice nasty and hoarse. “Betcha didn’t expect to see me again, didja?” He slurred his words.

It was bad. My heart pounded in my chest, and I know that I was shaking but my mind was trying to pull it all into focus. Come on, Ella. Chelsea trained you for this. She’d said that the best defense against a gun was to get cover, run, get away. The next best set of techniques she’d given me were at close range, and Pembry was a smart yard or two away.

“Officer Pembry,” I started.

Pembry barked at me, and waved the gun. “Shut up! I’m not an officer anymore, thanks you to and your fucking criminal shit-stain boyfriend. You think I don’t know you filed those reports? They fucking took my badge, my sidearm, my whole goddamn life, you fucking bitch!” He took a shaky step forward, and I stiffened to keep from cringing. I was absolutely not going to be weak for this man.

“They took my pension. Gone, poof,” he threw the fingers of his free hand up in the air, “just like that. Fucking twenty eight years I put into that job. I’m a good fucking cop, Emma!”

I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t know my name, or was so wasted that he just flubbed my name, or if he actually though I was someone else. It didn’t matter, I rolled with it.

“Okay, well, Pembry… listen, maybe I can talk to them. Tell them that, you know, it wasn’t all that serious, that I just meant for them to warn you and—”

Again, he shook the gun at me, and I tensed with the desire to jerk away from whatever vector it was pointed at when he drunkenly pulled the trigger. He didn’t, though. Still, his finger wasn’t off to the side of the trigger, ready to jump in there if the need arose. It was resting on it, and probably as tightly wound as he was. “No. No, you done enough damage already, girlie. Now I gotta do some damage of my own. Mob style, right? You like that shit, don’t you?”

Shit. Think, Ella. Think, don’t freeze.

“Get in the car,” he said. He jerked a thumb behind him at some beat up beige towncar that look like it had seen much better days. “Back seat.”

I held my hands up, and looked both ways on the street. Jesus, how was this place so empty? Surely someone was at least watching from a window, calling the police? I swallowed loudly as I sidled around him, one step at a time, no sudden movements. I thought, if I could get close enough…

“Fucking go!” Pembry shouted. I flinched, and sped up, moving past him and to the car. He pointed to the hood. “Hands on the hood, legs apart. No, not there,” he kicked my feet where I had braced them just a few inches from the car to keep my center under me, “out here.”

I did as he instructed, very conscious of the revolver’s nearness to my skull. I stepped back a foot and a half or so and had to lean forward to brace myself against the hood of the car. A horrible thought crept over me that he might try something, right here on the street, try to get my pants down and take me in public while I screamed and no one did anything. I wasn’t going like that. No. I’d let him shoot me instead. Go out fighting.

But, he didn’t seem to have that in mind. Instead he yanked one of my hands away from the car and twisted it behind me. Cold steel slipped around my wrist and clamped down too tight. When he snatched my other wrist, I fell forward onto the car, my cheek pressed against the glass of the window.

A second later he hauled me away from the door by the cuffs. It hurt, they bit into my wrists and felt like they might dislocate my shoulders. He turned me around, and shoved me sideways to get me clear of the door while he opened it. My phone was in my back pocket. While he opened the door, I tried to slip it out, and glanced quickly over my shoulder to find the red emergency call button on the lock screen. I didn’t need to talk, just needed someone to answer, and hear this and—

“Fuck you, lady,” Pembry grunted, and pulled the phone out of my fingers. I heard it hit the ground, and then grimaced when I heard it crunch.

“Don’t do this, Pembry,” I said, as calmly as I could. My voice was shaking. “There’s no coming back from this. It won’t end well, you’ve seen enough of these things to know that, right?”

“Nothing ends well, bitch,” Pembry muttered. “I don’t need it to ‘end well’. Fuck… just fucking get in the goddamn car.” He pulled the door open the rest of the way and shoved me in, heedless of my head that almost hit the doorframe going in. This wasn’t an arrest, of course, it was an abduction.

And if he didn’t care how it ended, he was more than willing to shoot me. Maybe he hoped he could still get away with it all, skip town—was he taking me somewhere to put me down? And why me?

“This is between you and Mike,” I said when he slid into the driver’s seat. “I don’t know what you want with me.”

He turned in the seat to look at me, and swigged something cheap and foul from a dark bottle before he spoke. “Can’t just put a guy like Mike Frazetta down, darling. I’m not stupid. He’s gonna come, and I’m gonna do him, and he’s gonna let me because he’s a fucking… a…” he trailed off, bleary eyed, and instead of finishing just snarled at me and swigged again.

The first thing I did when he turned around was try to slide my arms down, get the cuffs in front of me. I could choke him from behind, kill him if I had to.

But Pembry angled the rear-view to look at me and waved the gun back and forth once. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You sit still back there, or I’ll put a bullet in your pretty knee, you hear me?”

All I could do was nod. Timing. I just had to wait for the right time.

Damn, I should have gone to work today.

Michael

All I could do about Ella, I thought, was try to focus on training and just hope that she came around. Tony, in one of his Rain Man moments of brotherly wisdom, said that sometimes women just need space to think stuff over without a man leaning on ‘em to make up their minds. Made sense. And what was I gonna do, anyway? Try to convince her the Mob wasn’t so bad? They were; she was right to be worried.

I managed to go about five minutes without thinking about her, at one point. Not that I was counting minutes or anything. I trained with Jarome, and he laid me out time and again until finally he took his gloves off. “You’re distracted, man. Can’t fight like that. Hit the heavy bag or something, clear your head. We’ll try again later.”

I hadn’t told him what had happened, it seemed a little too personal to get into. Plus, even though it wasn’t really a secret, Ella and me worked together, technically; last thing I wanted was Jarome changing his mind about overlooking that detail.

But hitting the bag didn’t get me focused. Neither did running myself hard on the weights or the mat. I kept checking the door to her room to see if she was almost done with a session I forgot she didn’t have—her book was cleared out when I got downstairs, that day and the next.

She was the last thing I thought about when I went to sleep that night.

The next day I decided Tony was an idiot who probably didn’t know women all that well. Women that weren’t hookers, anyway. I texted Ella, but didn’t get an answer. So after my workout with Jarome and my only trainee for the day, I took the afternoon off and decided to go knock on her door and talk things out. Maybe lay on a little charm. Honestly, if I had to choose between Tony and Ella… I loved my brother; I really did. But he made his choice a long time ago. He lived the Mob life. The Family was his family.

I rehearsed the talk to myself all the way there, right up until I got to Ella’s block. Some old nasty town car peeled off the curb and flew down the street. Maybe once I was fighting regular I could get Ella outta this rundown neighborhood. If she’d have me.

Something shiny caught my eye when I got to the end of the block, where Ella’s building was. A phone; nice one. Somebody probably dropped it out of a window, it looked smashed to shit.

The case was familiar, though. Red, with black spots, like a ladybug. Just like Ella’s. I knelt, turned it over. Stuck behind the case was one of her business cards, the hold out she kept in case she met a client. I looked up at her fifth floor window. Had she seen my text? Gotten pissed, thrown it out the window?

No. The screen was cracked along an arc, and had dirty prints on it, like a boot. Not like Ella’s sneakers. I’d never seen her in boots.

My stomach twisted, and I stood up, holding the remains of her phone. Before the tumble of thoughts screaming at me took over, I jammed my thumb into the buzzer for her apartment. And then again. And again. No answer. Shit, shit, shit…

I started to call 911, and then stopped, cancelled the call. Instead, I called Annemarie.

She answered, irritated and short. “Ward County parole office, this is Annemarie Blunt.”

“Annemarie,” I said, and had to deliberately slow the fuck down, “this is Michael. Frazetta. Look did you file those reports?”

“I faxed them as soon as you two left, Michael.”

“You know if anything happened yet?”

“They don’t tell me these things, Michael; I just file the reports. Have you seen Pembry again? I haven’t gotten a call from him.” She shuffled papers in the background and muttered to someone. “If so, come in and fill out—”

“No, no… look, I found—” No, Annemarie would just call the cops. “Can you find out for me? It’s important.”

“I can find out,” she said, slowly. She muttered again to someone on her end of the line. “Michael, is something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just find out for me and call me back. Please.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call right away. Shouldn’t take a minute.”

“Thanks, Annemarie,” I told her, and hung up. The next number I called was Tony’s, and it made me sick to think about what a favor like this would cost. “Hey, Tony,” I said when he answered, “meet me at the gym. Fast. Like right now fast.”

“Sure thing, Mikey.” Tony didn’t ask questions, and would be there as fast as he could. Probably with one of his boys, or more. He knew the sound of someone in trouble.

I took off to the gym again, the remains of Ella’s phone in my hands, at a dead sprint until I got back.

Tony showed up about five minutes after I did. His sleek black Mercedes squealed to a stop and sure enough he got out of the back, and one of his boys, the kid who’d picked me up and dropped me off before—what was his name again; Sonny?—and the two of them pushed through the gym doors like bona fide goodfellas in their black suits, white shirts, and dark shades.

I didn’t say anything right away, just waved them both back to Jarome’s office. Him I’d filled in as soon as I got there.

I pointed to the ruined phone when Sonny shut the door behind them. “Whaddya make of that?” I asked. Tony was better at this kinda thing that I was.

Tony pulled his sun glasses off, gave it a look and frowned. “Somebody stomped it. Boots. Big. Size ten or eleven. A guy.” He looked up at me with eyes that were already smoothed over into Tony’s calm, focused, killer look. Business. “Girl’s phone. Ella?”

I finally lost it. “He fucking took her. I know it. Pembry, that son of a bitch, he fucking grabbed her off the street.” The town car hit my memory like the thing had actually plowed right into me. “I think he might be in a beat up Lincoln.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Broken tail light, maybe… dark tan, almost brown… like a eighties hooptie kinda car, the kind Luchese’s brother used to drive, but old; beat up.”

Tony nodded slowly. He glanced at Sonny, and then back at me. “I need the Getty boys. They don’t work for me though. I can get ‘em, but… it’ll cost.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll do whatever; I’ll work for Luchese if he wants. You think they can find her?”

“The Getty boys can get anybody. They do all kinda computer shit, cameras and all that.” He looked at Jarome a long moment, then stuck out his hand. “Hey. I’m Tony Frazetta, Mikey’s older brother.”

Jarome took it. “A pleasure to meet you, Tony.” His eyes flickered between us, and then settled on me. “This have to do with why you went away?”

“More or less,” I spat. “Pembry set me up because of my… associations. He figures we’re all crooked.”

“I’m definitely crooked,” Tony said. “The kinda crooked Pembry’s gonna wish he never fucked with.”

For once, I didn’t bother to reign him in. Frankly, if Tony didn’t kill Pembry, I probably would.

Annemarie called back. All she could do, though, was confirm everything I was worried about. “Pembry’s disciplinary hearing was fast. He was suspended indefinitely pending further investigation. Jim seems to think he’ll be fired and possibly even charged with misconduct. Whether you and Ms. Robinson file further charges will be up to the two of you.”

All this did was drive my heartbeat through the fucking roof. That was it then. Pembry was screwed. That made him dangerous, too. More than if he’d gotten a slap on the wrist. Screwed men had nothing to lose.

Tony had dug up shit on Pembry. Bad shit. A history of violence, mishandled arrests, even two fatal shootings that the department quietly swept under the rug even though both victims were unarmed and hadn’t run. Both were under seventeen. I guess with all the media noise over the higher profile police shootings, these two hadn’t quite made the cut. “He’s a fucking monster,” Tony had said. “I’d kill him for free, if you wanted.”

And I had told Tony to stop offering to kill Pembry because I was worried somebody would get suspicious. I should’ve let him do it the first time he offered.

“Alright,” I told Annemarie. “Thanks for checking.”

“Michael,” she asked me before I could hang up. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing you gotta worry about, Annemarie,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ll see you when I check in tomorrow.” I hung up before she could ask more questions. This wasn’t the sort of operation you discussed with a parole officer.

Just a few seconds after I hung up, Tony answered his phone, and scribbled something down. He muttered to whoever had called, glanced at me and sighed, and then muttered something else I didn’t here.

“This gonna be okay?” Jarome asked. “I mean… you know, taking favors from your, ah, Family?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know, Jarome. Doesn’t matter. I gotta get her back before…” I didn’t want to say it.

“Ella is a hard ass woman,” Jarome said. “If he took her, she’s giving him hell. You know that.”

I nodded. But the truth was, I knew about Tony’s work. I knew what happened to hostages that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, and it wasn’t pretty.

Just be okay, baby. Just fucking be okay.

“Got it,” Tony said. He waved a bit of paper. “Headed east. There’s a seedy little motel that direction. I used it a couple times, when I first started out. Good visibility. That’s where the Getty boys think he’s headed.”

“That was fast,” Jarome said. “How did they find him?”

Tony shrugged. “They got ways. Cell phones, credit cards. Once, there was this guy on the run, right, cause he filched a couple grand from the Don—seriously, like pocket change, like five grand—and he fucking checked in on Facebook a couple towns over. Dumbass. The Getty boys shot me a message, then tracked him through his phone.”

Jarome shook his head slowly, eyes wide. “Shit. I might go back to land lines and cash.”

Tony nodded sympathetically. Then he turned to me. “Thing is, Pembry’s either fucking dumb as a goddamn brick and a shit cop; or he figures somebody’ll track him down. I say you and me go in, do it quiet, professional style, get out. Luchese can send cleaners in after.”

I looked at Jarome, who only shook his head and kept his lips sealed. This is all yours, buddy, he seemed to say.

First the Getty boys, then the cleaners. It was the kind of debt you didn’t pay off with cash. Favors were the currency the Don banked. Favors that could fuck me hard later on. Throwing a fight, doing enforcement work like Tony, or bounty work on people like the guy that stole from Luchese.

Even if I did get her back, Ella might not want me. Not when I was in it deep like that.

But that didn’t matter.

“Let’s go,” I said. We didn’t waste time, just turned, and left the office, and got on the road.

Please just fucking be okay, Baby. Please, God, just let her be okay.