“Hector Mendez, the head of the tri-state Dominican mafia?” Suro asked. He’d never met the man himself, but he’d been around long enough to have garnered a reputation even outside of the criminal world.
“Yeah, him. And the money being offered is insane,” Dexter said. “I told him The Silence doesn’t take on mafia clients and he doesn’t kill women, but the guy was pressing me hard. Said this girl killed the Mendez’s son in cold-blood and disappeared. The son was an A+ student, had nothing to do with the business, a real pillar of the community, and this girl shot him without a second thought and disappeared.”
“The police never found her either?” Suro asked.
“The police never even got involved. According to my contact, the police declared it a suicide. The gun belonged to the son, his prints were all over it, and he’d been shot at close range. They closed the case quick, but Hector’s sure this girl did it. She split town in the middle night with her pops, and Hector’s been looking for her ever since.”
“How did they find her?” Suro asked, digesting this information.
“Some stripper named Candy tipped them off that this girl was living under another identity in Chicago. But when they went looking for her, she’d already run. The name Candy helped me put it all together.”
Suro’s hand tightened around the phone “Lacey was the girl who killed his son.”
“Yep. I asked my contact to send me the details, just in case I was wrong. But right now, I’m looking at a picture of ol’ Dead Girl with a perm taken about thirteen years ago. Her real name is Tasha. And Hector Sr. wants her dead, but he wants you to bring in Sparkle alive. It looks like she’s his granddaughter, but he didn’t know that til recently.”
“So that’s what she was keeping from me,” Suro’s hand tightened around his phone. “That she killed her baby’s father and then ran away trying to escape the wrath of his father?”
“It looks like you might have dodged a bullet. Literally. According to this file ol’ Dead Girl was crazy. Got jealous or something and shot the kid for no reason at all.“
Suro’s jaw set. “Tell your contact I’ll take the case.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously,” Suro answered, his heart a block of ice in his chest. “I’ve got to get Kenji situated back in school, but this will be over by Christmas. He has my word.”
CHAPTER 19
“NO! No! No!” Lacey said, clutching her hair behind her head as a blue cross appeared on a pregnancy test for the second time in her life.
She had only arrived in Santa Fe three weeks ago. And she had finally gotten Sparkle—now Jennifer—enrolled in public school for the following semester. Getting her out of the house and into school would be a godsend, because Sparkle was more than a little angry with her for dragging her out of Chicago and making her cut her semester short at Rise Academy.
The twelve-year-old had been playing her electric keyboard non-stop, day and night, refusing to wear headphones, even when the neighbors started banging on their walls, yelling at her to cut it out already. Lacey had finally resorted to hiding the piano cord while Sparkle was asleep, but that hadn’t stopped her. Lacey now knew that the only thing creepier than a child revenge-playing a keyboard, was a child revenge-playing a keyboard that didn’t make any sound.
In a nutshell, she missed Chicago terribly and the new year couldn’t come soon enough.
Still, she was beginning to feel like she was finally settling into life in Santa Fe. This was her second week of work at the Greek diner, where she’d managed to find an under-the-table job. The pay was a joke, but it would have to do until she could find something else. The chances of her getting another gig like the one she had before were miniscule, but any money was better than no money until her daughter went to college.
Or at least that was what she had thought until she’d taken the pregnancy test during her fifteen-minute break.
This couldn’t be happening. This could NOT be happening. Not now, not under these circumstances. She needed the fatigue and nausea that had been dogging her ever since they moved to Santa Fe to be a prolonged version of a flu, a symptom of moving from Chicago, which had been in the forties when she left to the much warmer Santa Fe.
But it wasn’t the flu. The blue cross on the stick told her as much.
Her mind flashed back to the intense argument she and Suro had before they agreed to make nice until Christmas. Apparently more than a truce had come out of that session of brutally hot sex.
What was she going to do? Her mind reeled, trying to come up with possible scenarios, the first of which was getting the abortion she couldn’t agree to, even under the threat of violence, when she was eighteen.
She was in her thirties now, and though she still believed in God—the fact that she was still alive was enough to keep her a true believer—she was no longer a practicing Catholic.
She had learned the hard way that sometimes you had to bend the rules to survive. Still, despite all she had been through, she was only able to entertain this thought for a few seconds before her mind shut down.
Lacey had done a lot of awful things to survive, but she couldn’t get rid of this baby, not because of any belief system but because it was hers. Hers and Suro’s.
And she realized at that moment though she had done everything in her power to kill any love Suro had for her, she couldn’t just get rid of this last memento of him.
But how much longer could she survive like this? The money she’d saved would only go so far, especially when she factored in hospital bills and the cost of raising a newborn. Her mind reeled, overwhelmed by this latest twist in what was turning out to be a very, very ill fated story—until somebody pounded on the bathroom door.
“I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but we’ve got customers out here waiting,” Nestor, her new boss said, “And I’m not paying you to spend all your time in the bathroom!”
No, he was paying her peanuts to serve a clientele who were either too poor or too miserly to leave decent tips.
Lacey wrapped the evidence of her pregnancy in toilet tissue and threw it into the trash before turning on the water. “Sorry, just washing my hands,” she called back.
Nestor glared at her for the rest of her shift, but Lacey couldn’t bring herself to care. Sparkle-now-Jennifer had been giving her the close-to-silent treatment for days now. As far as Lacey was concerned, Nestor was just another name on the list of people who now hated Leslie, the waitress formerly known as Lacey and Tasha.