He nodded, and they both stood up.
She tilted her head with a rueful smile. “I guess I’ll just give you a hug goodbye since there are people watching, and we don’t want to encourage the kids any further than we already have.”
Again his face remained impassive, but his eyes glinted with humor. “I’ll take the hug for now,” he said.
However, when she wrapped her arms around him, he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “But I’ll be taking much more later.”
BUT LATER NEVER CAME. To her credit, the woman from the bar only made them wait twenty minutes beyond the appointed time when the room phone finally rang. It was the front desk, saying someone who had referred to herself as “Sparkle’s mom” had asked the receptionist to convey the message that something had come up and she and her daughter wouldn’t be able to make it to lunch.
“Is that all she said?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the receptionist answered.
He thanked her for the call and placed the receiver back in its cradle.
“Who was that?” his son asked.
“Sparkle and her mother won’t be able to make it to lunch,” he repeated, his voice almost as flat as Kenji’s.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t say,” Suro answered.
“What about you two getting married?”
Suro had to fight hard to hold on to his patience then. “You’ll have to let that notion go. It’s unlikely I’ll ever see her again.”
“No,” Kenji said, suddenly morphing from a musical prodigy into a forlorn toddler. “I want to work on the opera with Sparkle! I know you liked her mom. You were talking to her and you never spend that much time talking to people other than Uncle Dexter and me. What did you say to her? Why isn’t she coming?”
If Kenji had been a normal twelve-year-old, he might have tried to reason with him or even done what his own father would have in the same situation, reminded his son who was the adult and who was the child.
But then if Kenji were a normal twelve-year-old, he and his mother, Yumiko, would still be married and Suro wouldn’t find himself in the position of having just been stood up by his one night stand.
As it was, he didn’t say anything to his son. Kenji was advanced far beyond his years in the I.Q. department, but when he got upset, he reverted to the temperament of a three-year-old. Suro knew from experience anything he said would only make the coming meltdown worse.
So he remained still as the boy cried and kicked and screamed until he finally wore himself out and let Suro carry him into the second bedroom to sleep it off. Kenji hadn’t had a fit that bad in years.
Anger filled Suro’s heart as he walked out of his son’s room, quietly closing the door behind him.
Let it go, he said to himself. She wasn’t an enemy of one of his clients, or someone he had good reason to remove with a few shots from his silenced gun. She was just a woman, someone he’d met at a bar. She wasn’t worth it.
He clenched and unclenched his fists.
But he couldn’t let it go. She had made him feel things like desire and need and camaraderie and at that moment, anger. More anger than he had allowed himself to feel in a very, very long time.
He picked up his cell and called Dexter, “I need everything you can find on Sparkle’s mom,” he said when the other man came on the phone.
“So you going to ask her out after you get the background check?”
If only Dexter knew. “Don’t worry about why. I just want everything you can get on her.”
“Well, do you have a name other than ‘Sparkle’s mom?’” Dexter asked. “That might be a good start.”
Another wave of anger stole over him as he realized he didn’t even know her name. And when he looked back on their conversations, he realized it was more than that. He didn’t know her name because she hadn’t told him. She had talked more than any woman he’d ever been intimate with, but she hadn’t told him one specific detail about herself, not her name, not where she lived, nothing he could use to track her down.
“Hack her daughter’s school records and go from there,” Suro said.
Dexter whistled. “It’s like that, huh? Alright man, I’ll get back to you.”
Suro and Kenji were back at their house in Miami before Dexter called back with any real information.
“Listen, are you sure you want to pursue this woman?” Dexter said after a short greeting.
“What did you find?” Suro asked.
“A goddamned mystery that’s what,” Dexter answered. “First of all, her name is Lacey Winters, but the address she gave the school is bogus. It looks like a crack house in Philadelphia has been on the receiving end of a lot fundraising mailers from Rise Academy.”
So she hadn’t just failed to let him know any personal details, she’d actually submitted falsified information to her daughter’s school.
“So after finding out the address was bogus, I did what we always do, followed the money. But there wasn’t nothing to follow. Sparkle ain’t on scholarship, so her mom didn’t have to fill out any financial paperwork on the kid. And according to her online docs, Lacey paid the whole tuition up front at the beginning of the year in cold, hard, untraceable cashier’s checks. So though this is usually the point where I start investigating the parent, you know what I had to do next, right?”
“Work the kid.”
Dex and he weren’t the most upstanding men on the face of the earth, not by a long shot. But they had hard and fast rules that they lived by. They only took on clients they respected, ones without current ties to criminal or drug trafficking operations. They never killed women, even if the proposed target was as evil or even more so than the men Suro agreed to take care of for a very high price. And they always tried to keep kids out of their cases. Both Dex and Suro knew from experience what a shit hand you could get in the parent department through no fault of your own. They didn’t like using kids to get to their parents.
But while adults could cover their online footprints better than most, unless parents kept their kids completely sequestered, it was impossible to keep them out of electronic systems, mostly because they had to attend schools and get doctor forms in order to attend those schools.
“Her medical forms were all filled out by some free clinic in South Dakota—again, I doubt she lives there. It’s one of those places where they’ll see anyone, don’t matter if they have insurance are not. So yeah, I had to hit up the kid’s social security number. You said Lacey told you Sparkle was in public school before she came to Rise, so I’ll probably be able to track her down that way, but it’s going to take me a few days to get an exact location.”