Page 41 of Because I Need You
“How do you do it?” I asked Nadia. “How do you let your husband walk out of the house knowing he may not come back?”
“It’s part of the job. How do police officers’ wives do it? Or firefighters? Or military wives? They know what they sign up for when they get married. Is it easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? God, I hope so. For me, it is,” she said, smiling sadly, “If there’s ever a day he doesn’t make it home, it’ll be devastating for me and the girls. But losing is the price you pay for falling in love with anyone, regardless of what they do for a living.”
18
GIO
I watched William Hamilton walk into the movie theater with his security detail in tow. I wanted to pounce right now, but I needed to wait until Dean Russo finished his cigarette — which he was taking his sweet ass time with — so he could finally give me the information I’d asked for. I’d learned to keep my cool and practice patience from him. It was an art to him. He once told me he’d gotten three men to crack without physical torture, just by sitting across from them smoking his cigarettes. I didn’t have half the patience he had, but I tried. In front of him, especially. Still, I was fighting the urge to pace the sidewalk.
“Will you chill out?” he said beside me.
He couldn’t be serious. “I’m just standing here.”
“You’re fidgeting.” I wasn’t fidgeting. I looked at him. He wasn’t even looking at me. I sighed. “What did you find out? I asked for this over a week ago.”
“Your girl,” he said as he tossed his cigarette, and damn I liked hearing him refer to her as mine for some weird fucking reason. “Is Charles’ daughter, as you know. He met her mother, Carolina Marrero, in Miami where she was a waitress at a club he frequented. She was with him for about eight years on and off, while he was married to Vinny’s mom. Isabel was born there after they’d been together six years, raised by her mother and grandmother. They moved to Queens when she was fourteen, probably to be closer to Charles.”
“Where’s the mother now?” I asked, since I already knew where the grandmother was. Isabel was visiting with her at the nursing home, as I stood there.
“Spain. She remarried just after Isabel finished high school.” Dean took a breath, exhaled. “There’s really not much on her. It’s probably one of the reasons Will picked her. No dirt to bring up during elections, teacher, middle class, half-Latina, half-Italian. It makes him look good.”
“Does she live with him all the time?”
“The house in Queens is vacant but looked after. They either have a cleaning lady come once a week, or she stays there sometimes. She hasn’t been here long enough for me to have her followed.”
“Mike knew her from the neighborhood. He mentioned something about her being fierce. The way he said it…I didn’t like it. Any idea what it could mean?”
“Honestly, dude, no clue. The girl’s past is squeaky clean. Eerily so.”
“What does that mean, eerily so?” I met his eyes.
“When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you always find something. Something usually stands out. If this girl wanted to disappear, she easily could, and even I probably wouldn’t be able to find her.”
Fuck. That rattled me more than anything else. “What about the containers?”
“I got the locations. No keys, but unless you have beef with your Colombian cousins, you can get to them.”
“Colombians?” I frowned, clicking the file he’d airdropped me. “You sure they’re the right containers?”
My father was adamant about not doing anything with the Colombians, whether I was related to them or not. For him to keep his precious cargo anywhere near theirs was odd. I looked at the drone images of the containers, and sure enough, they were in Colombian territory. Why would he lie about this? I knew there had to be a good reason for it, and maybe whatever it was, wasn’t important enough to dwell on. Not right now, anyway. I looked back up at Dean, who had moved on to something else.
“Where are the locations and keys?”
“They have to be in Isabel’s possession…or the vault? Maybe a safety deposit box under Charles’ name?”
I thought about the break-in. She hadn’t gone back to her father’s house after it happened, not because I didn’t want her to. I had enough men who would surround and protect her. She said she couldn’t face it. That was the only thing she’d told Nadia. “I can’t face this yet. I need to process it and lock it away in my memory before I go back.” Those were her exact words, according to Nadia, who’d text messaged me as soon as they left Isabel’s mouth. I wondered how many other things she’d had to process and lock away. I looked at the movie theater again. Her stupid boyfriend watched a movie with his mother every Thursday morning without fail, before the theater opened to the public. It was just another thing I hated about him. I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his fault that my mother was a piece of shit.
