Unmanned Read online

  “How is work going? Last time we spoke you indicated you were concerned about anger issues where your students were concerned.”

  He sighed. Leaned back against the couch cushions. “Fifth-graders.” He looked introspective, inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils. “Makes me wonder why Grams let me live past middle school.”

  The way he’d explained it, Grams was the reason he had survived. She’d taken him in after his mother had overdosed for the third time. Taken him despite a myriad of protests, governmental and familial. “Do you have reason to believe she resented your presence in her life?”

  He stared at me a moment, then laughed, but the sound was coarse. He glanced out the window. “I threatened her with a switchblade once. Did I tell you that?”

  I didn’t answer. It wasn’t unusual for him to leap right into the fray, to slap my sensibilities aside and leave me mentally gasping.

  “I wanted to shoot hoops with the boys…” He paused. “‘The hoodlums,’ as she called them.” A glimmer of a smile appeared. I watched. He looked a little like Don Cheadle to me, but had a dark, damaged demeanor I couldn’t quite explain or condone.

  “Were they hoodlums?”

  “We were all hoodlums. Hoodlums or worse.” There was sorrow again in his soul-tortured eyes. Another careful breath. “They called me ‘Pit Bull.’ Or ‘Bull.’”

  “They?”

  He looked as if he hadn’t heard me. “Shi’s dead now.

  Terrence is doing life. And Cole…Haven’t heard from him in years. Could be he made it,” he said, but he shook his head, doubting.

  “You still wanted to be with them, though.”

  “They were my niggers. My dogs. They got me.”

  “What did they get that your grandmother didn’t?”

  He caught me with his eyes, panther black, startling in their intensity. “That I was damned. Worthless. Like the fuckin’…” He jerked to his feet, paced, angry and quick.

  I gave him a moment, then: “So your grandmother didn’t think you were worthless.”

  “She fed me spinach. Slimy shit from a can. Said it’d make me strong. Kept praying for me. Always praying till I wanted to…” His hands were curled around nothing. “So I pulled a knife. When I was fourteen. Said I was running my own life from there on out and there wasn’t nothing she could do about it.”

  “Were you right?”

  He glanced at me, cords pulled tight in his throat.

  “Was there nothing she could do about it?”

  He watched me for several seconds, then laughed a little. “The woman was built like a nose tackle. Backhanded me so hard I couldn’t walk straight for a week. Took my knife. You got any idea how embarrassing it is to tell your gang your grandmother took your blade?”

  I steepled my fingers and tried to imagine the terror and guilt of his childhood, but I couldn’t. By comparison, my own background looked pristine, a glittering mirage of normalcy.

  “Cole laughed at me. Called me a pussy.” He lowered his head, laughter eerily gone, looking past his brows, eyes gleaming with an emotion I couldn’t quite read. My breath clogged in my throat. “I coulda beat the shit outta him. But it wouldn’t a mattered.” He was slipping into a different dialect, a different place in his mind. “Made ’im pay, though.” His tone was throaty now, chilling the back of my neck, lifting the hair on my forearms, making it difficult to speak.

  “How so?”

  “He had him a sister.” The words were almost whispered. “Twelve, maybe thirteen.” He paused.

  I was gripping the arms of my chair and forced myself to ease up a little.

  “Met up with her in the alley between a crack house and the porn shop. She was with her friends. Her peeps. But she had a thing for me. I knowed it. Even then I knowed it. Told them to go on ahead.”

  I was holding my breath.

  “Biggest fuckin’ eyes I ever seen. Flirted with me like a…” He closed his eyes, swallowed, seemed to come back to himself. “She begged me not to.” His fists tightened, loosened. He wouldn’t look at me. “But I was a man. Had to prove myself.”

  Oh God.

  “Afterward…” His face was drained of emotion. “She never cried. Never…” He cleared his throat. “There was talk…later…that she got an abortion.”

  At thirteen. I felt like barfing. “Did Cole know?”

  He drew a careful breath, lifted his chin slightly, found my gaze. “She never told. And I was too much of a…” He glanced toward the door. “I told myself it would just cause trouble if her brother found out. I felt bad. And that was enough, wasn’t it? Guilt.” Anger flared in his eyes. “I prayed for forgiveness, just like Grams taught me.”

  “But you don’t believe you’re forgiven.”

  “I’m not,” he said, and I knew what he meant.

  “How about the girl?”

  “Kaneasha.” His voice was soft, mourning. I braced myself, fearing the worst. “She left. Went to live with her aunt.”

  “You haven’t spoken to her?”

  He tensed as if waiting for a blow. As if almost welcoming it. “Should I?”

  “Do you think you could be forgiven?” I asked.

  “I raped her.” He said the words through his teeth. “A child. A kid with eyes so big they could swallow you whole.” He turned toward me, his own eyes haunted, pleading. “Would you forgive?”

  No. “I meant you,” I said. “If you spoke to her, do you think maybe you could forgive yourself?”

  It was nearly two hours later that I stood up to retreat for lunch. But the doorbell rang again. I could hear Mandy’s hushed voice and then my intercom line lit up. I’d never been more proud than the day she’d figured out how to use it.

  “Yes,” I said, using the professional tone I keep for such occasions.

  “Yeah, Chrissy.” She sounded a little breathless. “There’s a guy here wants to see you. Got a face like one of them poet fellows and an ass like a frickin’—”

  I rubbed my forehead rhythmically. “He can hear you.”

  “What?”

  I felt old and pretty damn tired. “You know he can hear you, don’t you?”

  There was a moment of silence, then, “Even if I’m talking on the intercom?”

  I sat back and thought for a moment. “I miss Elaine,” I said.

  She sighed. “Yeah, she seemed like a good egg. You want I should send this guy in?”

  “That would probably be best.”

  I’m not sure whom I was expecting, but when the door opened I was surprised and temporarily uncertain.

  “Mr. Manderos?” I asked. I know my hesitation seems strange, especially since he’s one of the guys about whom I habitually fantasize, but Julio Manderos bears an unnerving resemblance to Senator Rivera, Lieutenant Rivera’s father. In fact, he’s been known to impersonate the good senator, but only at the other’s request…at least as far as I know.

  “Christina…” He was dressed well but casually and carried a leather satchel in his left hand. Setting it aside, he reached for my fingers and kissed my knuckles. His eyes were as dark and sexy as Belgian chocolate. “It makes me glad to see you.”

  The touch of his hand against mine was strangely erotic, dredging up feelings still simmering from hours before. And even though he was doing nothing more scandalous than holding my fingers, he was doing it with Latino intensity.

  Maybe it was that intensity that had helped him survive his early years in a backwater town in Mexico. He had, in his fifty-some years, been an orphan, a stripper, a businessman, and…well, the gigolo I mentioned earlier.

  We had met under rather unorthodox circumstances.

  Circumstances during which I had learned he had occasionally doubled as Rivera’s politically affluent father. By the time I realized there was a possibility that Manderos was also a murderer, I had gazed into his Puss ’n Boots eyes and heard his childhood story. Hence, I had kept his involvement to myself and seemingly gained his undying devotion. A devotion the jun
ior Rivera didn’t particularly appreciate. But Rivera and I weren’t exactly picking out china patterns and I doubted we’d find time during that brain-melting week he’d mentioned.

  I cleared my throat and remembered to take back my hand. “It’s good to see you, too. Please, sit down,” I said, and waved the still tingling digits in the general direction of the couch.

  He sat with an easy, masculine grace. His camel-colored dress pants sported a crease down the exact center of each leg. They were cuffed, accented with smooth leather loafers, and topped with a lime green dress shirt of some wrinkle-free fabric that looked moleskin soft. On another man the ensemble might have seemed effeminate. On him it looked good enough to snack on. Or maybe that was just my celibacy stretching behind me like a sex-deprived haze.

  “Christina…” He watched me for a moment. I watched him back, reminding myself of several things. One: He’d been known to charge money for sex. Two: He was closely connected to Miguel Rivera, whom the younger Rivera detested. Three: He was old enough to be my father.

  But technically, so is Pierce Brosnan. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

  “You are doing well?” Julio asked.

  “Yes. Certainly,” I said, but he was still watching me with those ever-earnest eyes.

  “Something is wrong.”

  “No,” I said, but I remembered the dead guy on my sidewalk and may have cringed a little.

  “What is it?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “Nothing.” I picked off some imaginary lint from my ivory slacks. “So how are you doing?”

  He sat back a little. “I am well,” he said.

  “Business is thriving?”

  He owned a place called the Strip Please, where fantastically good-looking men with slicked-up muscles and million dollar smiles took off their clothes to music. If I owned the Strip Please I would be well, too.

  “There has been trouble,” he said.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked, and hoped to hell he wasn’t expecting help from me. But why else would he have come?

  “I mean to say…” His voice was slow and melodious, his smile tender enough to make me want to cry. “…there is trouble with you. I can see it in your eyes. Little matter how you try to hide it.”

  “Oh.” I cleared my throat again, played with a snap on my tailored black blouse, and failed to meet his gaze. “Well, okay, yes, there’s been a little…” Will’s sightless eyes stared at me from my memories. Who had he been and why had he pursued me? “…maybe a little bit of trouble,” I admitted, glancing up.

  Manderos had the smooth, tan features of an Aztec warrior, with all the cares and hardships of his people laid across his capable shoulders.

  “What is it?” he asked, and sliding off the couch, knelt by my feet to take my hand. “What is it that troubles you?”

  I felt my tears well up at the feel of skin against skin, and though I tried to be tough, the words slipped out. “I met a man yesterday.” I swallowed, trying to be all grown up. “He seemed really nice.”

  “Good. That is good.” He stroked my knuckles. “You deserve nice, Christina. Indeed, I believe—”

  “I think he might have been planning to kill me.”

  The stroking stopped. His brows lowered. “I do not understand.”

  I shook my head, thinking. “Me, either.”

  “Surely no one would wish you harm.”

  I laughed. There was a little hiccup at the end.

  “Except Mr. Peachtree,” he amended.

  Robert Peachtree had been a friend of Senator Miguel Rivera. He’d tried to kill me with a poker. Actually, he’d tried to kill me by several different, and rather ingenious, methods. I cleared my throat and refrained from telling Julio about others who had been similarly inclined. “They think he might have been a hit man.”

  He canted his head a little. “They?”

  “Rivera. Lieutenant Rivera.”

  He thought about that for a second. “And you think this man meant to…” He shook his head. “…to kill you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. Because he’s dead.”

  Manderos’s eyes went wide. “Not the lieutenant.”

  “No. The hit man. Someone shot him by my garage.”

  For a moment there was absolute astonishment on Julio’s face, but I was still kind of surprised, too.

  “Dios mio!”

  I nodded, having no idea what he’d said. The King’s English is almost more than I can handle.

  “You have suffered a great shock. Yet you are here at work, laboring to help those who are troubled.”

  “Yeah, well…” I sniffled a little. “…they’d probably do better just watching Dr. Phil.”

  He smiled gently. “I was correct,” he said, “you are the most brave of women.”

  I remembered myself sniveling and cursing and crying as I crawled on bloody knees toward the house after the shooting.

  “I hate to argue,” I said, “but I think you might be wrong.”

  “One moment, please,” he said. Rising to his feet, he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. But in a moment he was back.

  “Christina,” he said, gazing at me. “You must not be here this day.

  “I—” I began, but he raised a peaceful hand.

  “It is good for neither you nor your patients. I spoke with your Ms. Amanda. She has agreed to reschedule everything. I shall take you to dine, then see you safely home.”

  “I can’t,” I said. Partly because he was right, I was in no condition to see anyone, including him. But mostly because there was just a shitload of baggage tied up with this guy, and jumping his bones wasn’t going to simplify matters. Not that I would do any such thing, of course. I mean, I’m a classy, well-educated woman with a Ph.D. and everything, but sometimes, when guys kiss me, then die on my property with a bullet in their brains, I feel a little needy.

  “Christina…” Julio held me with his eyes. “…you are a strong, capable woman, yes. But even so, you must care for yourself. Eat…”

  “I eat enough.”

  “Please don’t tell me you think yourself too plump.”

  “Okay.”

  He smiled and took my hand. “You are a beautiful woman.”

  I felt my defenses topple like trailer houses in a windstorm. “That’s what Will said.”

  He studied my face with solemn, sympathetic eyes. “The man who died.”

  I cleared my throat and glanced out my window toward Sunset Coffee. My hand trembled a little in his. “Yes.”

  “Amanda.” He barely said the name above a whisper, but my secretary popped in as if on springs.

  “Yeah?”

  “I will be taking Ms. McMullen home. Notate any messages she receives but do not call her. She needs some time for rest and meditation. Do you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  If she did it would be the first time, I thought, but somehow I didn’t care, and let Julio lead me out of my office.

  “If you like, I can drive your automobile so that you need not bother retrieving it,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and numbly pointed to the Porsche. For one crackling, paranoid moment, I considered insisting on driving, but taking a nap on the express lane seemed safer in my present condition, so I handed over my keys.

  “A handsome automobile,” he said.

  “It’s a friend’s.” I got in. He did the same, put his satchel between us, and started the engine. I dropped my head against the cushion as he pulled smoothly out of the parking lot. But in a moment, a realization struck me; he hadn’t asked for directions. I jerked upright. “How do you know where I live?”

  He scowled, eyes concerned. “What?”

  “How do you know how to get to my house?”

  “I fear there has been a misunderstanding. I meant to take you to my home.”

  “Your house! Your—No!” My heart was humping like an unneutered poodle. Yeah, sure, a minute ago I was afrai
d I wouldn’t be able to keep my pants on if he gave me a glance from the corner of his Latino eyes, but now I was pretty sure he was going to kill me. Eventually most people give it a shot. I don’t know why.

  “Christina, there is no need for you to fear me,” he said, and reached across the seat. Maybe he meant to reassure me, but in that second his bag toppled toward me, spilling a gun into my lap.

  6

  If you don’t scare the neighbors while copulating, I’m afraid you’re doing something terribly wrong.

  —Eddie Friar, Chrissy’s favorite gay ex-boyfriend

  “HOLY CRAP!” I SAID, and plastered myself against the passenger door.

  Reaching out, Julio retrieved the gun, then wheeled to the right and brought the Porsche to an abrupt halt.

  But all I could think of was the weapon. It looked cold and black and deadly in his ultra-steady hand. Our eyes clashed.

  “I am sorry, Christina. Truly I am,” he said.

  I could barely breathe, but my mind was scrambling in circles, trying to make sense of things. To understand why. “Sorry for what?” My voice was breathy. His gaze held mine, firm and steady, just like his hand on the pistol.

  “For frightening you,” he said, and after a moment, wrapped his fingers around the muzzle and handed it to me.

  I scrunched more firmly against the door. “What are you doing?”

  “Christina…” His tone was melodious, his eyes sad, but he could have been Mother Teresa and my heart would have still been thundering along like a runaway freight train. “You have been good to me. Kind when you could have caused me grave trouble. You are brave and noble. I may not possess a bold soul such as your own, but I do not harm my friends.” Picking up my hand, he pressed the pistol into it. The metal was cool, smooth, and heavy. I swallowed, as afraid of the weapon as I had been of him only moments before. “Do you know how to use it?”

  I shook my head.

  “It is not complicated. One does not need a fine education to take a life.”