Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Ciaran stepped out onto the street in front of DJ&R and took a deep breath of the crisp air. Darkness had fallen, but not all that long ago going by the faint orange glow deep in the canyon of skyscrapers to the west.
Spring was well on its way. He glanced at his watch and winced, feeling both the hour of the day and the strain on his back after sitting for most of it at the drafting table, hunched over a blueprint that OMD had insisted be drawn by hand.
It was his penance for the “family emergency” right before the New York College presentation, he was sure of it.
It wasn’t that big of a deal, since Catherine had been planning on running the presentation anyway, but it was his design, and he should have been there. So, all of the feedback from the demo had to be updated on the computer and then drawn out.
Ciaran didn’t mind the manual labor, just the time it took to do it. A few months ago, he would have looked forward to going home to a hot shower, a dram of something warm and peaty, and a relaxing, early night.
Now, he wondered what Jal was up to. Spending the evening and night wrapped up in her was exactly what both of them had needed lately.
Come to think of it, his phone had been uncommonly quiet all day.
He retrieved it from his backpack and frowned when he raised it up and the screen stayed dark.
Oh right, he’d turned it off going into that status meeting just before lunch.
Resisting the urge to clap a hand to his face, he pressed the power button and the screen came to life, soon followed by a chorus of notifications.
“Oh, fuck me,” he muttered as he read through them, his eyes growing wider with each message.
He had texts from Jal, that she and Lexi were heading to Elena’s family restaurant because…
Andy had tried to run Elena down? He bit out the most vicious curse in Gaelic that he knew.
A passing pedestrian gave him an odd look and a wide berth as he passed by.
Not only had Jal left him a string of texts, but so had Elena, asking him to come by the restaurant before he went home. Intrigued, he shot her a response and didn’t have to wait long before his phone was ringing.
“Hey, Ciaran,” she said over the clatter of pans and shouts of a busy kitchen.
“‘Hey, Ciaran’?” he parroted back to her. “Tell me what the bloody hell is going on?”
Elena sighed. “Short story is that Andy chased me down the alley behind the restaurant and nearly ran me over.”
“Christ, are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” She replied, and barked an order in Spanish that he caught only a few words of. Someone was doing something they shouldn’t do with chicken. That was all he could catch.
“I have something I want to talk to you about, though. Can you come by Lima tonight?”
He scratched his eyebrow. “Sure, I can swing by Jal’s and we can be there by eight.”
“No, just you.”
Just as he opened his mouth to question her, a loud rumbling of a revving engine pierced through the background hum of the city.
Thanks to the decent lightning on this part of Fifth Avenue, it wasn’t hard for him to zero in on a dark red car parked across the street.
The driver’s side window was up but the shadowy figure inside was almost too big for the small sedan, a sedan with substantial damage to the front fender.
“Em, Elena. Was he driving a maroon sedan?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because there is one with a completely rearranged fender parked outside my office.”
Her gasp came clearly though the phone. “Can you go back inside? How far is your car? Want me to call the cops?”
“My car is just at the next block in the car park.” He was already moving, his dress shoes slapping on the pavement. The headlights on the car flared to life before he’d made it five feet.
Ciaran picked up the pace. The car pulled out of the parking spot and rolled slowly to keep in line with him. Ciaran thought about turning around and going back inside but he’d be damned if he was going to let this piece of shit intimidate him.
As he approached the corner, the light on Fifth went red, and Ciaran dashed across the side street before the traffic could move. From his right came the roar of an engine and the screech of tires.
Headlights filled his peripheral vision as he dove for the far curb, making it just in time to avoid the crunch and groan of tortured metal as the maroon car caught the corner of the car parked closest to him before righting itself and peeling away, horn blaring.
Ciaran watched him drive out of sight and put his hands on his knees, only to find that one hand still clutched his cell phone, and Elena was shrieking his name out of it. He ignored the pedestrians around him, who were trying to figure out what happened and marched into the parking garage.
“I’m here.”
“Oh my god, what happened?”
“The bastard tried to run me down, too.” he replied, unlocking his car. “I’ll be right there.”
He left the parking garage and eased into the usual traffic.
At the next light, he turned left, then right, working his way west until he had passed out of Chelsea and into the Kitchen.
He searched the brightly lit signage over blocks of restaurants, bodegas, and shops until he located the restaurant and managed to find a parking spot only a block away.
He held the door open for a couple coming out and then stepped inside, his nose filling with the spices of Dominican cuisine.
The man who greeted him at the door had a stack of menus tucked under one arm and looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, with a bald head, and a goatee that was more salt than pepper.
There was something in his eyes that reminded Ciaran of Elena.
“Good evening, senor,” he said. “Picking up takeout?”
Ciaran shook his head. “I’m actually here to speak with Elena for a minute if I could. I’m a friend of Jal’s.”
The man studied his face for a moment. The bruises on his face had started to fade and Ciaran hoped that they weren’t all that visible in the atmospheric lighting over the tables. The man’s eyes seemed to fix on the split in his lip, forcing Ciaran to suppress the urge to prod it with his tongue.
After an interminable moment, he nodded and led the way to the back of the restaurant where a bar spanned much of the space. He jabbed a finger at an empty stool, and Ciaran sat faster than he would have had the command been yelled in his face.
Elena’s father went to the door to the kitchen and yelled something in Spanish inside. Ciaran’s knowledge of the language was rusty, but he remembered enough to recognize that the man said the word for daughter.
Elena came out of the kitchen a moment later, wiping her hands on a towel.
She was wearing a black chef’s coat with the restaurant logo on the breast pocket, her long hair bundled up under a cloth cap similar to what a nurse or a surgeon would wear.
Her face was flushed, the stormy expression in her eyes, one of which had a new, and painful looking, bruise under it, told him it wasn’t just from the heat of the kitchen.
“Ay papá, como esperas que lo hag—" The rapid-fire Spanish cut off when she saw him at the bar. “Oh, Ciaran! That was quick!”
“Well, I had that wee bit of motivation.”
Elena nodded, her expression an odd mix of concern and amusement as if she wasn’t sure which one she should be feeling more. She pushed open the door to the kitchen.
Ciaran slid off the stool and followed, only to be greeted by a wall of fragrant heat and steam that made his mouth water and his stomach growl.
Elena led him back to a small office, barely big enough for a desk, a chair, and a few filing cabinets.
He took the extra chair, and Elena perched her hip on the desk, her arms crossed.
Though her back was stiff, there was something in her eyes that told him those arms were trying to hold her together.
“That looks bad,” he said, pointing to her cheek.
“I’m not going to lie and say it doesn’t throb like a bitch.” She dabbed at her face gingerly and hissed when she hit a particularly tender spot.
“Please tell me what happened,” Ciaran asked, and was surprised at the tremor and desperation in his voice.
Elena’s eyes went hard, and then, she launched into the story, and she didn’t hold back.
From Andy waiting for her outside the coffee shop to her last-ditch leap through Lima’s back door before he could run her down, presumably for keeping Jal from him.
His whole body vibrated with anger by the time she finished.
Or maybe that was just his hands, which were shaking hard enough, he had to clutch the arms of the chair to stop them. So, maybe it wasn’t just anger.
He had to unclench his teeth to speak. “And then, he must have made his way over to midtown and parked outside my office.” He surmised. “How could he possibly know where we would all be?”
“Well, I’m a creature of habit,” Elena said dropping into the desk chair.
It creaked and threatened to tip over, but she slapped a hand on the desk and righted herself with a self-deprecating roll of her eyes.
“But you? I have a feeling that it’s the same reason why he got let back out on the streets in the first place rather than having his parole revoked.
That pendejo always seemed to have the right connections. ”
“What kind of connections?”
“Could be mafia, could be someone through his business connections, I don’t know.” Elena shrugged. “They couldn’t prevent him from going to prison completely, but the cabrón got off easy for what he did, that’s for sure.”
Ciaran ground his teeth. Why was it always those that most deserved it that got off easy? He cut that thought off before he could ponder the close calls in his own life. Elena’s tapping foot kept him in the present.
“Jal is at home right now, if you’re wondering, and so far, it seems like he hasn’t managed to find out where that is.” At the cock of his head, she added, “Lexi is with her.”
“Oh good, that’s probably the safest place for her. Andy doesn’t know where she lives now.”
Elena heaved a sigh and crossed her legs, propping her chin on one hand.
“Running into him at Washington Square was part prediction, part bad luck. It’s always been one of her favorite places to pick pockets, and he just ‘happened by’ at the right moment.
” She waved two fingers of each hand in a helpless gesture at what was ultimately manufactured coincidence.
Ciaran rubbed his thumb across the split in his lip, his eyes unfocused as the memories of grappling with a man who reminded him of the human equivalent of the rock monster in Jal’s favorite movie.
“Doesn’t feel lucky.” He said, with a wry chuckle.
The fist that had split his lip certainly hadn’t felt that way.
A thought crossed his mind and he looked up at her.
“So, Elena, I have to ask, why didn’t you want me to bring Jal with me? ”
Elena met his eyes without hesitation. “I lied to the police earlier when they took the report.”
That startled a laugh out of him. “Well, that’s no’ exactly what I expected you to say. What did you lie about?”
“I told them that I didn’t know where he lived.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Well, that part is true. He came in here a few weeks ago and mentioned that he was living near the place he and Jal had shared in the Bronx, but he didn’t give an address.”
“So?”
“What I didn’t tell the cops was that he also said that he’s working at an auto body shop in Hunts Point, DiBattista Motors, I think he said.”
“But why not tell Jal?” he asked, though he had a pretty good idea why. It didn’t sit right keeping anything from her, especially something like this, but the man had put her through enough already.
“I think you already know why.” Elena responded. “I’ve known that girl since she was seventeen, way before she met Andy. After all that he did…” She shook her head. “The depression, the nightmares, all of that is because of him.”
Ciaran’s knee started to bounce. “Jal said he had been working for an investment firm before—”
Elena nodded, following his train of thought when his voice failed. “He did, before he got in too deep with the wrong people and went over to the dark side. He got desperate and Jal paid for it.”
Unable to stay seated any longer, Ciaran leapt to his feet and muttered a thanks as he lurched for the door.
Elena sprang from the chair to stop him with a hand wrapped around his arm. “What are you going to do?”
“I just want to talk,” Ciaran said, though he couldn’t help one hand curling into a fist. “See if I can find a way to keep him away from Jal.”
Elena didn’t miss a thing as she looked him up and down, likely sizing him up against the man who easily had the advantage of fifty pounds of solid prison muscle. She, ultimately, just nodded her head and smiled. “Well, let me know if you need backup. I owe him a few punches myself.”
Ciaran chuckled, expecting nothing less, and some of the frustration he felt melted away. He would have been disappointed if she hadn’t offered to help pummel the bastard. “Will do.”
He opened the office door and a humid wave of spice, and garlic, and citrus flooded in. His stomach growled again.
“Here, I’ll let you out this way,” she offered and headed for the back door. Make that no door at all. He took a step into the alley where a metal door that looked like it had seen better days, even before it had been hit by a car, was propped.
He glanced back at Elena, who shook her head with a sad smile. “It’s kind of like losing an old friend.”
Ciaran gave her a reassuring smile. “You know what, I think I’ll order some dinner before I go.”