CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Roz woke up that same morning to find Mick seated in a chair near their bed staring at her.
First she smiled because he was suited up in all black: trousers, turtleneck, gloves.
Then she became alarmed because he was suited up.
He didn’t have on the long white, tricked-out coat that usually accompanied his all-black get up, but she knew that was a given.
When he was ready to leave the house, he would have it on.
But she knew coming at Mick with worrying and anxiousness never moved him. She had to be cautious. “How do you feel?”
“Like I got shot six times.”
“You don’t have to do anything right now, Mick. The doctors already said you’ve got to take it slow. You’re the only person that declared you healed.”
“I am healed. That’s not an issue.”
“Then why did you bring up the fact that you’d been shot?”
Mick hesitated. “I thought I was joking.”
Roz looked at him and shook her head. Then she couldn’t help but smile. “That would be a joke to you,” she said, and Mick smiled too.
But Roz’s look turned serious again because she seriously needed to know. “What is your game plan?”
“To find the fuckers that did this to me, and tried to do it to you and Duke and Nikki, and stomp them through the earth.”
It was a typical Mick response. But Mick was no longer typical Mick. He had had a serious health scare. He couldn’t act as if it never happened. Because it did. She saw it with her own two eyes.
She sat up in bed, with the covers dropping around her waist. She was naked and her breasts were revealed, but she had forgotten the state of her body and didn’t notice.
But Mick noticed. He immediately went hard.
Not that he hadn’t had her since the shooting.
He’d had her several times as early as a couple weeks after that shooting.
That part of him never stopped working. But it surprised him how easily she was still able, after all these years, to turn him on and to do so far more intensely than anybody else ever could.
“It’s been a whole month,” Roz said as she lifted her legs toward her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, “and nobody’s made any moves yet. Maybe they realized they failed and gave up.”
“You don’t pull off a stunt like the one they orchestrated in that hick town and then give up because we got away.”
“So what do you think is happening?”
“They’re on Plan B. Which is where I want them to be. They’ll have to show their hands eventually.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I’m going to cut off every hand that had a hand in their scheme. Somebody’s going to lead me to their doorstep.”
Roz was pleased that Mick was telling her what he was thinking, but it was alarming too. He seemed so matter-of-fact.
“Do you have any idea who might be behind it all?”
He shook his head. “No. But I know who to look at.”
“Who?”
Mick was intentionally being open with Roz, which wasn’t usually his style.
But that ambush and all that time he had to think and rehab fundamentally changed him.
He remembered looking up into her eyes when he was certain he was dying.
He was scared. He was so scared. But Roz comforted him.
She told him he was going to pull through.
She told him he didn’t have to pull through, because she knew he was tired, but she wanted him to pull through.
That kept him going. She was his anchor.
She was his safe place. The least he could do was keep her in the loop.
Even if it uncovered uncomfortable truths for him.
“I’m starting with Cleo Burgess,” he said.
“Cleo? You mean that Cleopatra woman that called you the day of the ambush?”
When Mick nodded, Roz’s heart swelled with emotion. “Who is she to you, Mick?”
“Nobody,” he began saying. But he realized he was falling right back into his familiar pattern again. And that would not do.
“She and Ted were classmates back in the day. That’s how long ago it was when I met her. I didn’t know she even knew Teddy when I recruited her to entertain some of the men I sold arms to.”
“Entertain them?” asked Roz. “As in prostitution?”
“Of the highest order, but yes,” said Mick. “I’m not proud of it, but she was the one who approached me. She needed cash so I gave her a job. So yes, I turned her out. She became one of my top whores.”
Roz was confused. “Are you telling me you used to be a pimp too?”
Mick was offended. “Not a pimp, no. I just had a group of girls who, if they wanted to make some excellent cash, could do so through me. I didn’t get a cut, or any shit like that.”
But Roz still hated to hear it. “You can dress that dirt up any way you want to, Mick, but your ass was a pimp.”
Mick’s temper flared when she called him that dreadful name again. “And I told you that’s not what I was. I got nothing from those girls. They were paid. They were free to come and go as they pleased. I got nothing out of it.”
But Roz wasn’t buying it. “You got nothing out of it except for satisfying the base needs of all those heads of despot governments you made millions from by selling guns and ammo to them.”
Mick wasn’t going to argue with her about something that happened so long ago and that had so little consequence to his business at that time.
“So what happened to her?” Roz asked.
“She met this guy named Ricardo DeSouza and fell in love with him. She claimed, in between him kicking her ass, that he didn’t want her prostituting anymore so she got out of it. I tried to get her out of it years earlier, mind you, but only after she met him did she get out.”
“But you said he kicked her ass. Did he beat her?” Roz asked.
“Many times, yes.”
“And let me guess: You beat on him?”
“I sent guys to do it. But she kept running back to him so I told her to hell with her. She want that abuse, let her have it.” He paused. “Then about two years ago, she came to me for money. Which wasn’t unusual.”
“She was still with that guy?”
Mick nodded. “Oh yes. But on this particular day, she was ambushed, shot, or so I thought, and taken away. Teddy and I couldn’t help her because we were under attack too.”
Then he exhaled. “She resurfaced the same day you were arrested. She was very much alive and claimed Ricardo had kidnapped her and trafficked her during those two years until she escaped. But for her to show up the same day of that ambush is odd in and of itself.
“It’s odd, yes, but why start with her?”
“Something you told me after my surgery,” Mick said.
Roz looked at him. “Something I told you? What did I tell you?”
“You said when you were arrested that those cops used a tranquilizer gun on you.”
“They did. When they even mentioned something like that was when I knew it was an abduction and not an arrest. What police force go around with tranquilizer guns?”
“The day Cleo was abducted,” Mick said, “her boyfriend used a tranquilizer gun on her.”
Roz immediately saw the connection. “Now that is definitely odd.”
“That’s why I’m starting with her.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Ever since she resurfaced and after I went down, Teddy’s had her under guard at one of my properties.”
“What about that town? Has anybody checked them out?”
“Thanks to you and Duke, we wiped out their entire police department plus some extra hands they had on duty that day. Who was left in the scheme already fled. There’s nobody there but the regular, innocent townspeople who didn’t know what was happening and why it happened and are still trying to recoup from what did happen. ”
“Frankie told Teddy that Tommy Gabrini believes that police department was chosen because of what the name of the town means.”
Mick nodded. “Tommy told me about that too.”
“That Fangen name means to catch or to capture. That can’t be a coincidence, Mick.”
“I’m sure it’s not. And I’m certain they would have come to Philly in a fake cop car and pulled you or Duke or Jackie or Teddy or Nikki or Marco over then and transported you to that town. To lure me there. Whoever’s behind it used that town’s name to make a statement.”
“But what statement? That they caught Mick Sinatra?”
“They tried to, yes,” Mick responded. Then he stood up. And he stared at Roz. At still the most attractive woman in the world to him. And amazingly, he was still hard.
He went over to her beside, placed his flattened hands on either side of her small body, and leaned down and kissed her on her lips. At first gently, but then, as her taste consumed him, he kissed her passionately.
Then they stopped kissing, but he remained within a half-inch of her face. “The next time you want to go to that Essence Festival or anywhere else out of town,” he said, “I’m taking you.”
Roz stared at him. “You mean that?”
A concentrated look came over his face. “I almost lost you because of something that I’ve done to somebody. I almost lost our baby because of my hellish past.” Then he nodded. “I mean it. I never meant anything more in my life.”
Then he kissed her again. But this time, it was filled with so much passion that he stopped, removed his turtleneck, unbuckled, unzipped, and pulled down his trousers and briefs, removed the covers around her waist, and then got in bed on top of her.
He kissed her long and lovingly, moved down her body and continued to do her there, and then moved up and entered her.
And as Roz wrapped her arms and legs around him, they made long, slow, sweet love. And they were kissing, then looking at each other, and kissing again the entire time.
Roz always were in tears when Mick made love to her.
She knew he assumed it was tears of joy, but that wasn’t always the case.
For Roz, being with Mick was always so emotional!
It was like she loved him so much and he was so much more than enough for her that she wondered why she couldn’t be enough for him.
But what she didn’t understand was that Mick understood her tears completely. That was why he kept looking at her in between his long kisses. No woman on earth could handle all of him the way Roz could. Who wouldn’t be crying dealing with the likes of him?
Every woman he’d ever been with confessed their love for him to this day.
But they loved his dick or his money. Usually both.
But Roz was the only woman, he believed, who truly loved all of him.
The good, the bad, and the ugly. She’d seen it all.
She could handle it all. That was why she cried every time he made love to her. He was a lot.
But she was wrong if she thought she wasn’t enough for him. She was more than enough for him. He hadn’t been perfect, and he knew he dealt with certain women like Bella Caine in certain ways because of their complicated histories. But at the end of the day, it was Roz he wanted. He meant that.
And just thinking about Roz again caused him to cum before she came. Which he never liked to do. But he did it.
She came shortly after he did, and it was still momentous. They held onto each other as if they were all each other had as they moaned and groaned and let it all out in a squeezing, arching, exhilarating full release.
Then Mick rolled off of Roz and just laid there. Roz, too, was coming back down to earth. Until she saw Mick sit up on the side of the bed, as if to reclaim his bearings, and he got up, grabbed his briefs and pants, and pulled up, zipped up, and buckled up.
“Mick?” Roz asked him as she turned on her side and watched him.
Mick looked at her as he dressed.
“Why are you so certain it has to be somebody from your past?”
He studied her. That wasn’t a hard conclusion to reach. “I have enemies,” he said as if it went without saying. “If I don’t stop them now, to send a message, I never will stop them.”
That wasn’t Roz’s real question. She knew it was an obvious assumption too. She decided to ask her real question. “You’re going to your office now or what?”
“I’m on a leave of absence at Sinatra Industries. They know not to expect me any time soon.”
“So where are you headed? You’re going to see Cleopatra now?” That was her real question.
Mick knew it too. He knew Roz like he knew the back of his hand. “Yes.”
Roz decided to test his I’m a new man declaration, because she’d heard that declaration before. “Can I go with you?” she asked him.
Mick didn’t expect her to ask him that. And normally his answer would be a hard no. But if he never changed, when was he ever going to change? “Yes,” he answered her.
“But I thought you meant what you said about . . .” Roz looked at him. “You said yes?”
“I said yes,” Mick responded.
Roz hopped her naked body out of that bed so fast it almost gave Mick whiplash.
“I’ll take a quick shower,” she said as she began hurrying for the bathroom. “Give me twenty minutes. That’s all I need!” She closed the bathroom door behind her.
Mick smiled. It didn’t take much to make Roz happy. “Take your time,” he said to her. But he purposely said it too low for her to hear him. He loved her, but she was notorious for always running late.