Fool's Gold: A Kisses and Crimes Novel (15 page)

The mousy Isaac knows he’s in a bind. His position within Fletcher’s camp was compromised the minute I stepped into his hotel room.

He can tell me the truth and save his limbs… or life. Or he can tell me lies and possibly survive… but Fletcher would still assume he’d ratted him out either way.

It was a lose-lose situation for Isaac. Even I could see that.

I don’t give him much time to think.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” he replies shakily.

“Fletcher. His daughter. The Gafanellis.
Go
.”

“What do you want me to say? That the Gafanellis were funding Fletcher’s campaign? That they thought that more dollars in his pocket would give them more control over his votes, his decisions? You already seem to know that.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“She’s a wild child, that’s what happened. She should have listened to her father about staying out of sight and then…”

“I want to know
how
this happened.”

“It’s her own fault,” Isaac begins to ramble. “She never liked to do what was good for her. Ungrateful and conceited and…”

The interrupting yell comes from Dani this time.

“
No. I want you to tell me what the Gafenellis did to her!”

I stand there, shocked, watching Isaac gape at her sudden fury. Her lips are quivering, but her handle on the gun is surprisingly unwavering.

Her small, dainty fingers don’t budge a single inch.

“The Gaf—the Gafanellis?” Duvall squeaks. “They had nothing to do with Audriana…. Well, not yet anyway.”

“
Bull-shit
,” I interject. “No one else had motive to do this. Fletcher and I took the rap the
second
Dani got shot.”

I glare at Isaac, squinting.

“By now you should know who
I
am.”

“’Course I do…” he responds. “
I know all about you, Crow
.”

He spits the nickname as it were an insult.

“And word on the street… is the Gafanellis have a
much
bigger bone to pick with
you
than they do anyone else. The
least
of your worries should be Audriana.”

He trails off, leaning in.

“
What’d ya do, Crow?
What the
hell
did you do that made the Gafanellis so mad?
Mad enough to kill you the second you even think about steppin’ back in New York?

Duvall snorts dryly.

“Letting your woman take a bullet for you…”

“
Fuck did you say?”

I shove my fucking gun in his face.

Depraved prick.

I should blow his fucking head off while I still have the chance.

“
You’re not going to weasel your way out of this, Duvall.
Throwing blame where it doesn’t belong.”

I push him with the barrel of my Beretta.

“
Think again
.”

“I’m not trying to weasel my way out of anything.” He throws his hands up. “
You’re the target here.
I’m just trying to warn you poor suckers.”

He looks between us, growing a pair of balls he seemed to be missing.

“
Haven’t you been listening
?” Isaac almost raises his voice. “You’re on Don Gafanelli’s
shit list.
”

He stares at me.
Hard.

“Fuck talking about Fletcher and his daughter. From what I heard, the bullet Dani took came from a Gafanelli gun…”

BISHOP

Dani takes a page out of Jackson’s vocabulary book.

“We’re fucked.”

“Not more so than you were about to be with Miss Slovenia,” I comment dryly.

Dani balks as we exit the hotel.

“I didn’t want to make her suspicious,” she starts, rambling out an unnecessary explanation. “If I rejected her too soon, she would have wound up throwing me out and picking up the
next
prostitute or loner.”

“Hey, I get it.” I raise my hands in surrender. “You had to make a hard decision. A decision that, frankly, made
me
hard. But let’s not think about it…We got what we wanted.”

Dani, all legs in that red silk mini-dress, narrows her eyes at me. “What we
got
was a dead-end. A dead-end isn’t what we wanted.”

“No… but it’s still an answer. Maybe your family wasn’t involved in Audriana’s disappearance.

“But then who
was
involved?”

“I don’t know… Someone with
a whole lot
to gain, that’s for sure.”

In a white button-down and black slacks, I take Dani’s hand and cross the street, leaving behind the Grand Hotel Central.

The sounds of a nearby party rage throughout the cover of the night. For a three AM on a Saturday night, these festivities are definitely on track to last for the rest of the night.

Because Barcelona is a tourist town.

Young Americans in bikinis came to party, get some dick, pussy or both. And from the looks of the college-aged students on the corner, they also came to puke their fucking guts out.

I pass on the theatrics, holding Dani close to me as I try to hail a cab.

Any cab that will get us out of this area. Any cab that will take us away before Isaac the mouse and the sleeping Slovenian can escape the restraints we wound up tying them in.

I find one almost immediately.

Under the warm summer air, with my hand caressing a small sliver of sweat on Dani’s back, I guide her into the backseat of the taxi cab.

Once inside, I experience a tiny feeling of simultaneous despair and triumph. We may have eliminated one major suspicion in Dani’s hit attempt, but now we’ve opened the floodgates to a million others.

And I can’t get over what Isaac Duvall insinuated about me…

I wish I could figure this shit out, but before I can speak in my usual half-Spanish, half-shitstorm to the cabbie, Dani takes the reins.

Worldly and educated beyond her young years, she directs the cabbie in flawless Spanish to the corner of el Passeig de Garcia and el Carrer de Valencia, where our temporary room is based.

The Majestic Hotel and Spa.

It’s majestic as they say… but even their four-star restaurants and outdoor spa won’t calm my nerves. The only thing capable of that seems to be the beautiful woman sitting right next to me.

I put my hand on her smooth, silk-sheathed thigh.

“You did wonderful tonight,” I tell her.

“Thank you.”

“Really, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“What, so you couldn’t pretend to be a bisexual, partner-swinging nympho at the bar?
Shocker
.”

“Yeah,” I laugh. “Well, let’s just say you sure
shocked
me.”

I kiss her, but I can see the distress in Dani’s eyes. Her playfulness has turned serious.
Fast.

She touches my hand.

“Think there’s any truth to what Duvall was saying about what happened to me?”

Her pretty eyes are glassy, and in that moment, I want to comfort whatever concerns are bringing her worry.

But the sad part is…
that I can’t
.

I open my mouth to respond, and as soon as I do, the driver makes a sharp turn. We head down a street I don’t recognize at all, and before I know it, Dani is speaking quickly to the driver.

“Está tomando nosotros a través del camino equivocado,” she says to him.

I make out some of the words (s
omething about where he’s taking us
?), but not the rest. All I know is that the streets have gotten a lot quieter, so has the driver, and Dani seems to be in distress.

I grab her elbow to get her attention.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know… but this doesn’t seem right. We seem to be taking the long way or something. I tried to tell the driver, but he’s not listening… or doesn’t understand. He may speak Catalan instead of Spanish, but even so, he
should
understand me. Spanish is the second biggest language here.”

The rising panic in her voice unnerves me.

I turn towards the black-haired driver.

“Oye!” I yell in Spanish.
Hey!

“Did you hear what the lady said? She said put us back on the quickest path.”

My Spanish isn’t too great. I use the words I know most.

The terms I’ve mostly learned are the worst type of curse words, but they come in hand. They’re convenient and necessary at times like this when I need to get my point across.

I rip the cabbie a new one from the back seat.

“Motherfucker, can’t you hear? Stop the car. The lady and I want you to stop this fucking car right now.”

Several seconds pass, and then he answers.

He answers in perfect fluent fucking English.

“I heard
the
lady
,” he says sarcastically. “The purpose of my job is to make sure that you get to your
final destination
. And I want to do that… except I have very specific orders about what your final destination should be...”

My throat goes tight. The protest dies on my lips.

I take a look at the doors and realize that the back ones don’t seem to open from the inside. This thing is like a police car… and we’ve walked right into a fucking trap.

I pull my gun out.

“Pull this shit over, motherfucker, or I will blow the back of your…”

The black and yellow cab jerks suddenly, and I am thrown.

My heart hammering, my head goes slamming into the left-side window. Without seatbelts, Dani and I are slung like rag-dolls across the seats.

My gun goes flying. And just as I regain my wits, we are jerked again, this time to the other side.

The cabbie is playing Pinball with us in the car (
and we’re the
balls). It is only a matter of time before we end up dead. It’s clear that he is one of Duvall’s unsavory sort of men.

I grapple for the gun again.

Through the beautifully surrounded streets of Barcelona, we speed at a blinding pace. The sudden swerving makes it nearly impossible to get my bearings, and every time I think I can stay upright, the driver floors it.

He turns corners at a sickening pace. He starts and stops enough to make a passenger go ill.

My stomach dips and drops and gives.

I can’t even hold on to Dani the way I want to.

I grip for life onto the leather seats.

Options run a racing course through my mind. On the one hand, I can reach over and incapacitate the driver. But if I do, the likelihood is high that he will crash.

And if he does, we all die.

I’d put my money on the fact that Duvall’s driver would like to stay alive. If I can just reach my gun… I can bargain with him…

I stretch my fingers towards the floor.

Reaching. Scrambling. Scraping as my limbs are sent soaring each way.

My errant foot goes crashing through a window, sending glass spewing everywhere. Dani screams.

And I find the butt of the gun.

I brush it with my fingertips… and hear Dani’s angry voice, seemingly disembodied and rasping. Screeching at the driver as she holds her revolver at his neck.

“Don’t fucking move!”

She shoots a warning shot through the broken window.

The tires screech as the cabbie hits the brake to halt the car into a sliding stop, and before the man can run, I reach over, throwing the front gear in park before dragging the man face-first into the backseat.

I nearly choke him to death with my own hands…
before I recognize his face.

He’s one of the men I shot at outside of the hotel. The night that Dani was shot. That night that everything changed.

Reeling in a sense of panic, I unwittingly rasp the first thing I can think of.

“You’re
not
one of Isaac’s…”

The cabbie’s face turns a million shades of red before it shakes, swiveling quickly in a seizure-like fashion. His skin turns purple right before my eyes.

I nod towards the front seat, urging Dani to take it.

“Go,” I tell her, and she moves.

Behind the wheel, Dani puts the car back in drive. I instruct her to pull over to the closest parking spot she can find, and she obeys.

She puts us in park in front of a closed-down pharmacy and we wait.

I let the cab driver’s throat go, allowing him to cough and gasp. I let him think that he has time to breathe before cutting off his air supply with my hands once more.

I squeeze until my fingers almost ache.

“You hear that?
Listen closely…
That is the sound of your death.”

I squeeze until my knuckles begin to crunch.

I whisper.

“That is the sound of me crushing the life out of you.”

The man begins to break out in a rapid sweat, and unbelievably I find myself breaking out into a smile.

Killing a man doesn’t
always
have to be the first resort. You’d be surprised what you can find out with a good choking… or a few well-placed bullets lodged in well-placed…
places.

You don’t become “the Crow” by using violence.

You become “the Crow” by mastering the
threat
of violence. And I’m a goddamned surgeon at what I do.

“
Now, I am the fucking Crow.
And if you have any fucking sense… then you know what that means. You can die here in the back of this stinking ass cab or you can die in the comfort of your home when you have no teeth and your balls are grey. Make a choice.”

I pull him to me.

“
Now.
”

I look towards the front seat and watch Dani go pale.

“Bishop… don’t…”

“Don’t what?” I rasp.

“
Don’t kill him
. We’re better than that.”

“Yeah? Well, if he moves… you have my permission to put one between his eyes.”

She nods grimly at me, her face filled with determination and underlined by a layer of fear.

Dani backs up out of the space and proceeds to head in the direction of our hotel. My gun recovered, we decide to take our little guest somewhere where we can question him without witnesses.

I keep him facing me, praying that Dani won’t see or recognize his face. I don’t want her to panic any more than she already has.

I whisper again.

“You’re not one of Isaac’s men.
Tell me who you’re working for…”

The man flinches under my grasp.

“I can’t,” he wheezes. “She’ll have me killed...”

I loosen my grip around the driver’s neck, feeling my blood run ice cold. What did he mean
“she’ll”…?

But I don’t have time to think anything else.

Just as we round the next corner, our cab is rammed violently from behind. A car to our left suddenly pulls up and we are sideswiped, nearly knocked into oncoming traffic.

Tires squeal. Metal crushes metal, and just as I look for answers in the choked man’s eyes, his dark irises fill with fear and reflect back the alarm that I can practically feel in the cab’s now blaring horn.

He takes a labored breath.

“
We are dead already
.”

I stop breathing. We’re in a goddamned ambush.

And then the shots ring out.

Loud. Close.

Burning in my ears, and then burning in my chest as a rush of fire travels to my arm, making my vision turn blurry from the acuteness of the pain.

My grip loosens on the half-dead man in my arms, and as his body is riddled with bullets flying through the window, shattering the glass, I feel my own body slump across the seat.

It doesn’t even feel like my own.

Nothing belongs to me anymore. The only thing that feels like it belongs is the angelic voice that calls out to me. It tells me to “hold on.”