Games Divas Play (A Diva Mystery Novel) (35 page)

CHAPTER 35

Vanessa

I
shivered in the cold metal chair to which I was tied. Underneath the stifling hood, I struggled to regulate my breathing and stay calm and not panic. We had to make it out of here alive, and home
to Damon.

I still wasn’t sure what was going on. Marcus and I had both been taken out of the car, but then we were separated. I had been relieved to see Marcus in the back of the car, but now I didn’t know who I had killed with Laila. But what about the text messages I saw between him and Laila? Had someone
set me up?

I could hear a group of men standing around us, their voices, speaking in Spanish, echoed around the cavernous space. From the different tones of their voices, I imagined there were about five or six men in the room with us. Suddenly I heard heavy footsteps on the concrete floor heading in my direction. The hood was pulled roughly off my head. I shook my hair out of my eyes, squinted, and adjusted my eyes to the dim lighting in the
warehouse.

The large space was also an airplane hangar. Two black SUVs and a small private jet were parked at the end of the room by the huge hangar doors. Several aisles of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves lined both sides of the space and stocked old, rusted shipping containers. The voices I had heard belonged to five men stationed around the room, each holding semiautomatic weapons, their arms folded in front of them. Suddenly the door to the plane opened, and the stairs lowered. Two men walked down the stairs and made their way toward a large metal table with a briefcase on top and two chairs set up in front of me. As the two men got closer, I saw that I knew on
e of them.

“John?” I said, looking into the face of Marcus’s
new agent.

“Mrs. King, it’s always a pleasure to see you,” John said in the same pleasant tone he would use as if we were meeting in a conference room instead of a warehouse in the middle of nowhere. “Of course I wish it were under better circumstances.” He unbuttoned the jacket of his navy-blue suit and took a seat behind the table next to the other man, whom I didn’t
recognize.

I took his age to be about sixty. He was tall and trim, and he wore an expensive gray suit, crisp white shirt, and a red silk tie. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed back. His face was a deep tan as if he spent a lot of time in the sun; he had dark black eyes and thin lips pressed into a tense line. He leaned over to John and said something i
n Spanish.

“Ah, yes, let us get started,” John said as he turned to one of the men. “Can you please ask Mr. King to join us?” The man jogged over to a door leading to an office and went inside. He walked Marcus into the room flanked by Bruce. As Marcus got closer, he looked over at me and tried to reach for me, but Bruce jabbed him sharply in the ribs with the butt of his gun and motioned for him to continue to
the table.

Seeing that my husband was still alive and hadn’t been killed by these animals, I exhaled for a moment, but the aching pit in my stomach tightened. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out for him, certain that would only make our situat
ion worse.

“Welcome, Mr. King,” John said as Marcus was led to the table, his hands still restrained by the plastic handcuffs in fro
nt of him.

“What the fuck is going on, John?” Marcus growled as he shook off Bruce and the other man holding him. “What are you doing with my wife? Whatever you want, you can get it from me and le
t her go!”

The man seated next to John leaned over again to whisper something i
n his ear.

“Well, it’s not quite that simple, you see. Because right now your wife could be wanted for murder, so it’s probably not a good idea for her to leave
just yet.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Marcus barked, looking back and forth between me
and John.

“Well, it seems that your wife, in a fit of jealous fury, shot and killed your former mistress this
evening.”

Marcus whipped his head around to look at me. I dropped my head down, unable to meet his searc
hing gaze.

“Oh, wait, there’s more. You see, it also appears that she shot Kareem as well, thinking it was you. But don’t you worry, he survived his
injuries.”

“Vanessa, what is he talking about?” Marcus asked, desperate for
my answer.

I looked up and explained that Alex had given me his phone, and I had seen some text messages saying that he and Laila were planning to meet at
the hotel.

“But Vanessa, I have my phone. What are you talking about?” Marcu
s pleaded.

“But I saw the messages
,” I said.

“No, actually Mrs. King, you didn’t see Marcus’s phone,” John said, interrupting. “What you saw was a duplicate phone that we loaded some messages onto so you would think your husband was meeting his form
er lover.”

“You son of a bitch!” Marcus tried to lunge at John, but the two men held
on to him.

“Why, John?” I screamed at him as I strained against the ropes, almost toppling over
the chair.

“Leverage, of course,” John said. “Now we’re the only ones that know that you were in that hotel room and pulled the trigger. And right now the only fingerprints that the police are going to find on the gun that you dropped at the scene will have Kareem’s prints on them, so unless we say otherwise, he’ll take the wrap for the murder you c
ommitted.”

“But what do you want? You’re already my agent,” Marcus spat o
ut at him.

“It’s not what I want that matters,” John said as he turned to the man seated next to him. “At this point all that matters is what Mr. Quadron and Diablo Ne
gro want.”

Both Marcus and I stiffened at the mention of Diablo Negro. All of a sudden it felt like I had ice water running through my veins. We had both heard of the infamous drug cartel, but I couldn’t fathom what they would want with us. Marcus never even used drugs in college, let alone now. My head was
spinning.

Suddenly, the man, who up until now had spoken only Spanish to John, began to speak in English. His voice had a heavy Mexican accent as he started to explain why we were all here. He said Diablo Negro had first become involved with Kareem ten years ago when he and Marcus played together in college. Apparently, Kareem had in fact been involved with the cartel’s gambling business and agreed to shave points off games in exchange for money. But when their team went to the play-offs and he was supposed to throw the game, Kareem didn’t, and Diablo lost a lot of money. Ten million dollars to be exact. Well, after that night, some of their associates paid him a visit to explain the error of his ways, but Kareem ran out of his dorm room. When their colleagues tried to catch up with him, they struck Kareem with their car, ending his career. But while Kareem had paid for a portion of his crime, that still didn’t address the problem of the lost $10 million, to which 50 percent interest was added
each week.

“And when you announced that Kareem was going to be your agent, he told us he’d found a way to pay us back,” said Mr. Quadron with a sliver of a smile across his cold,
hard face.

“So Kareem used the money from my first contract to pay back the ten million dollars plus interest?” Mar
cus asked.

“Well, by then the ten million had turned into fifty million, so it just kept growing, and Kareem, seeing no other way, sold us half your
contract.”

“What do you mean he sold you half my
contract?”

“What I mean, Mr. King, is that for every dollar you earned since you started in the NBA, from your salary as a player to endorsements and business ventures, we’ve recei
ved half.”

My mind was reeling to hear that Kareem had gotten us in bed with these monsters and given half of Marcus’s earnings over the years to these blo
odsuckers.

“But he must have paid you off at some point,” Marcus said. “So why was he still pa
ying you?”

“Certainly he repaid the original loss and interest, but once he gave us fifty percent of your earnings, we couldn’t imagine walking away from that kind of money. So we told him we’d like to continue our arr
angement.”

“Then what happened?” Marcus asked. I could tell he was afraid of t
he answer.

“Well, that’s when you signed your one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar contract with the Gladiators, so Kareem decided he wanted out, but we paid his little girlfriend a visit that seemed to convince him that it was in his best interest
to stay.”

“What gi
rlfriend?”

“The little dancer, Kalinda, I think her name was. Such a pretty girl. It was a shame to see her pretty face and body carved up
that way.”

I shivered in my chair, again remembering the newspaper descriptions of what had been done to that poor girl’s body. Like Nia had said, the stalker who ran the license plate on the car and thought he had seen Marcus had it all wrong. The girl’s murder had been a message
to Kareem.

The man resumed his story and said that once Kareem was back in line, another snag in their lucrative arrangement arose when we got to New York and rumors started circulating that I wanted to find a new agent f
or Marcus.

“So meeting you was no accident, John,” I said, looking at the agent that had introduced himself to me at an NBA charity event in Phoenix that I hosted about a month before we moved to New York. I’d thought it was such good fortune that the Knight Sports Management Group had signed on at the last minute to be the title sponsor of our event. John had attended the event and chatted me up throughout the evening, planting the seeds
of change.

“Nothing is ever an accident,” John said, smiling. “And so when you got to New York and reached out to me, we knew we had a backup plan in place in case Marcus did decide to fir
e Kareem.”

“But why would you need that? Kareem, aside from stealing my money to pay you guys, was loyal,” Marcus asked, still unclear as to how we ende
d up here.

“Well, Kareem was getting messy. After the unfortunate demise of his girlfriend, he became reckless, and we knew we could no longer count on him to handle our business interests effectively. And that’s where Laila
came in.”

“Laila?” Marcus hissed. “She was working for you g
uys, too?”

“Not as directly as Kareem, but through her friend, Darryl, with whom we had a significant cocaine business in LA, we were able to get her to work her charms on you as well. The plan was for you to leave your wife for her, and then our interests would be protected, and we wouldn’t need Karee
m at all.”

Ever since Kareem and Laila had come into our lives, they had both caused us nothing but heartache and pain, manipulating and twisting emotions for their own gain and destroying our family in the process. They both deserved to bur
n in hell.

John said that to get Kareem back in line, they had sent one of their men to our home to
get to me.

“You sent someone to attack my wife!” Marcus broke free from the men and lunged across the small table to grab John by h
is lapels.

“No, Marcus!” I screamed as Tyson pulled Marcus away from John. The other man struck him with the butt of his gun in the side of his ribs. The sight of Marcus doubled over in excruciating pain was too much for me, but when his head came up, his face was more determined than ever, his eyes flashed with hot anger, and his nostrils flared as he
breathed.

My mind flashed back to the attack in the parking garage. It hadn’t been random at all. Diablo had sent that man t
o kill me.

“To answer your question,” John said while smoothing the lapels of his jacket, “Carlo was interrupted and didn’t finish the job. A mistake that cost him dearly. After that, there was too much media attention, so we decided that the best way to protect our investment was a more direct approach, so I reached out to your wife again and started the process of showing you Kareem’s deception so you would
fire him.

“It was kind of you not to press charges against him for stealing your money, but now you’ll have to decide if he goes to jail for the murder of Laila and Kalinda or if Vanessa will. We’ve set Kareem up to take the fall with his prints on the gun, the same gun that was used to kill Kalinda. All you have to do is continue our little arrangement of fifty percent of your income coming directly to us. Otherwise, your wife goes to jail for two murders and an attempt on Kareem’s life, and we’ll have to end your career in a similar manner as
Kareem’s.”

Mr. Quadron raised his hand and motioned to one of the armed guards stationed on the other side of the room. The man removed a large rusted pipe from behind his back and lumbered ove
r to John.

“Breaking kneecaps is such a cliché but certainly effective when you’re dealing with a professional athlete, wouldn’t you say?” John chortled as he opened the briefcase on the table and pulled out a sheaf of documents and a pen. “So what will it be, Mr. King? A continuation of our previous financial arrangement, or do you want your wife to go to jail and your career to be ended? The choice
is yours.”

CHAPTER 36

Nia

W
ithin minutes of our arrival outside the warehouse in Rahway, Lee, a burly mean-looking guy with coal-black eyes, and six other men dressed in black fatigues tucked into black combat boots, bulletproof vests, and high-tech earpieces had arrived in a reinforced SUV that looked like it could take out a brick wall. They surveyed the exterior of the warehouse, and Lee sent one of the men he called Bishop to assess points of entry and find the best way to approach without being detected by Dia
blo Negro.

When Bishop returned, he laid out the setup inside. He said he counted ten armed men inside the main area of the warehouse and that there were likely at least two other men on the plane inside. My blood ran cold when he said that Vanessa was tied to a chair and that Marcus’s hands were cuffed and he was being held by two men. There were also two men seated at a table. He assumed they were in charge of the situation. He showed Terrence a photo of the two men that he took with his infrared telepho
to camera.

“That’s Pablo Quadron, head of Diablo Negro, on the right, but I’m not sure who the other guy is with him,” Terrence
confirmed.

Within twenty minutes Terrence and Lee came up with a plan to have three men scale the exterior wall and go into the building through the air shaft. Three of the other men would cover the back entrance and wait for their leader
’s signal.

Terrence changed out of his suit jacket and tie and took a vest from Lee’s outstret
ched hand.

“What are you doing?” I cried as I grabbed his arm and pulled him around behind his car, my eyes wide with fear because I already knew the answer. The thought of him going into that warehouse and facing Diablo Negro made me flash back to the nightmare of seeing him lying in that hospital bed fighting for his life. I couldn’t go th
ere again.

“Nia, I have to go. Lee and I will take the guy at the front, and we’ll get Marcus and Vanessa. These guys are the best. Trust me. I used to work with them. Everything is going to be OK.” He took his jacket and put it around my shoulders, then pulled me close to his body. He pulled my chin up so that I would look him i
n the eye.

“Nothing is going to happen to me, Nia. I promise.” He leaned his head down and kissed me on my trembling mouth. I kissed him back hard, my arms wrapping around his waist tightly as I tried to hold him with me a little whi
le longer.

“You better come back to me,” I whispered
hoarsely.

He hugged me and then walked back over to Lee and the team to review the plan one last time and load the semiautomatic that Lee tossed to him from the back of the SUV. Within seconds they all disappeared into the overgr
own brush.

I wrapped Terrence’s jacket tighter around my shaking body as I closed my eyes and prayed silently. I inhaled the scent of his jacket. The cologne scent was gone. It just smelled
like him.