God, I hoped Hector wasn’t there. That would be awful.
I knew there was a chance I’d run into him as he worked for Nightingale now but I was hoping he was busy doing private eye stuff, gallivanting around town bringing down perps and taking photos of cheating husbands in the act and whatever else private eyes did.
Even though Hector worked for them, I chose Nightingale Investigations because they were the best. Better than the best. My father said Lee could move his operation to New York or Los Angeles and corner the market on investigations, security and bounty hunting, he was that good.
One of the things my father taught me was always but always get the best.
“He’s here all right,” Shirleen answered Ally’s question and even though I felt my heart beating faster, I allowed myself to lift my chin and look calmly and coolly at Shirleen.
She was pretty, middle-aged and hitting it well. She had beautiful mocha skin and the biggest afro I’d ever seen, but it suited her perfectly. She had magnificent eyes.
I knew she once was competition for my father in the drug scene but she’d pulled out and gone straight. I admired her for that. That must have taken a ton of courage and it said a lot about her.
Still, it didn’t stop me from staring her down. My cool blue eyes locked with her arctic tawny ones. We had a stare down and even though she was very scary, I won.
Then again, I always won. I was good at the stare down. I could hold a cool, calm, unaffected stare for hours. It was something else I had loads of practice with.
Once she looked away, I aimed my composed glance at Ally then at Indy. They had attitude (the good kind), I could see it and sense it. Regardless, they were also no match for me and both looked away before I did.
I knew I was not making friends and winning allegiances. That was the point.
These people would never want me to be their friend.
I looked down at my toe again and thought about Hector.
When I knew Hector, he’d been a man in my father’s army. My father liked him a great deal. My father told me Hector reminded him of… well, him. Smart. Sharp. Good instincts. Loyal. Skilled. Hungry, but in a good way, an ambitious way.
My father had a high opinion of himself.
Hector was one of very few men my father trusted and respected, totally.
It was a mistake.
What we didn’t know was that Hector was also an undercover DEA agent. In fact the undercover DEA agent that brought my father’s empire down.
What neither Hector nor my father knew was that I helped him.
The Feds took everything, my father’s house, his cars, his condo in Boca, his furniture. They froze his bank accounts. They even tried to get my trust fund but since it had been set up for me by my grandmother before my father was a Drug King, they couldn’t touch it.
I was glad they took all my father’s stuff, it was tacky and ostentatious. My father had been a nothing, a nobody and married a rich girl. He’d come up from nothing the hard way, the dirty way, the vile way and he’d proven himself to my mother’s family, to the world by becoming rich, powerful and very, very frightening. He’d driven my mother to leaving us that was how frightening he was. She left me behind. She left everything behind. Didn’t even take a suitcase.
She just disappeared. Poof. Gone.
And she never looked back. Not once.
I’d been eleven.
I didn’t dwell. I’d lost a lot by then, a lot of friends, a lot of servants I’d tried to make into friends (a mistake I learned early not to make again), my grandparents were all dead. Losing my mother was just another in a long string of loss. I was used to that too and it didn’t faze me. Or, I should say, it fazed me (truth be told, it destroyed me), I just never let it show.
Hector was something else.
I knew right away he wasn’t what he wanted us to think he was.
I’m not a super-sleuth or anything. It was just that, you spend enough time around bad people; you know them when you see them.
You also know the good ones too.
And there was something about him. Something about the way he held himself, the way he looked, the way he looked at me.
God, he was beautiful. Quite simply the most handsome man I’d ever clapped eyes on in my whole, entire life. This was saying something. My father surrounded himself with fit, athletic, good-looking men; his personal army was recruited specifically to reflect on him.
Hector had flatly refused the makeover my father usually demanded of the boys from the streets that he fashioned into gentlemen criminals. My father respected that too.
Hector was Mexican-American. He looked rough and was straight out tough. One look and you knew you did not mess with him. He had thick, black, wavy hair, black eyes, long legs, broad shoulders and a lean, amazing body. He knew who he was and what he wanted and he had a confidence that was unreal.
It was hard to describe but, put simply, he was magnetic.