Protection for Hire Read online

  No, his thoughts shouldn’t be going there. He forced a smile as he approached them both, but Elizabeth only offered a half-hearted hello, then sighed and stared at her glass again.

  “Did you want a refill?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why the long face?”

  Tessa giggled, a sound he would never have expected to hear from a woman who’d had such a fearsome reputation on the streets of San Francisco. “She’s keeping a promise to God,” Tessa said.

  “It was made under extreme duress,” Elizabeth said tartly. “I think it shouldn’t count.”

  “Extreme duress? What happened?” Charles asked as he sat down.

  “I was almost killed because my bodyguard thinks her aging car belongs in the Indy 500.”

  “Hey, Gramps did the job and we lost the tail,” Tessa said.

  “Gramps?” Charles asked.

  “My 1981 Corolla. I call him Grandpa because he’s old and crotchety.”

  “He’s even older than you,” Elizabeth told her, “and after the way you abused him, can you blame him for protesting?”

  “What exactly happened?” Charles asked.

  “It involved squealing tires and the most awful burned rubber smell and my life flashing in front of my eyes,” Elizabeth said.

  “I made a U-turn in front of a wave of traffic to try to lose the tail,” Tessa clarified. “And it worked, because I am magnificent and my car has unseen depths of character.”

  “And what was the promise?” Charles asked.

  Tessa giggled again and Elizabeth groaned. “I promised God I’d give up Dr. Pepper if he got us through alive.”

  “Good Lord Almighty, I wouldn’t make that promise even if Aunt Coco were threatening to move in with me.” Charles glanced at the glass. “What were you drinking?”

  “Coke. And it’s not the same thing. I’m so depressed.”

  “She’s had four of them,” Tessa said.

  “Four? How long have you been here?”

  “About ninety minutes.”

  At that moment, the waitress came to ask Charles if he’d like anything to drink, and with a wicked glance at Elizabeth, he ordered a Dr. Pepper.

  Elizabeth glared at him. “You’re evil.”

  “I assume I’m paying for lunch, so it’s my prerogative.”

  Tessa burst into laughter. It made her eyes turn into glittering amber stars, and he watched the long column of her throat as she tossed her head back.

  Her laugh brought Elizabeth out of the doldrums a little, and she sipped noisily at the last drops of her Coke.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m legally required to have you sign a document promising to pay me back.” He slid it across the table at Elizabeth with a pen. “Why did you arrive so early?” he asked as she signed it.

  “I wanted to make sure we got here before Heath might,” Tessa said. “I didn’t want him to see us entering the restaurant.”

  “Do you really think he’d find out?” Her paranoia was getting a bit out of control.

  Tessa shrugged. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  “You’re taking a lot of precautions.” He slipped the signed document back in his briefcase.

  “I have a …” Tessa hesitated, and the uncertainty in her face made her seem years younger.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  “No, tell us,” Elizabeth urged.

  “I just …” Tessa rubbed the condensation on the side of her glass of soda. “I think what Elizabeth said at our last meeting was right. I have a feeling in my gut that Heath doesn’t just want his wife and child back.”

  Elizabeth tensed, and while Charles was leaning toward agreeing with Tessa, he didn’t want Elizabeth to become too alarmed and emotional, so he said, “I’m sure it’s nothing sinister. He’s probably just persistent. Men who work for private equity firms are driven and focused. They have to be for their jobs.”

  Elizabeth’s lips firmed. “Now, don’t go trying to sugar coat things for me. What convinced you?” she asked Tessa.

  “I mean, he had us tailed. Twice. And the second time, with three cars. That’s a level of professionalism you don’t see very often. He has hired some very high class guys to find you, and that just doesn’t seem like the actions of a man who only wants his wife and son back. He wasn’t into anything shady, was he?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know anything about his job, just that he made a lot of money. I barely know what a private equity firm is.”

  “It basically means he invests people’s money for them,” Charles said. “With some firms, it involves millions of dollars from very wealthy, private investors.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Is it legal?”

  “There are some firms perfectly above board, and some who work in the shadows.”

  “Just like any company,” Tessa said.

  She probably knew a lot of illegal businesses herself. He kept forgetting that when he saw her like this, like one of Elizabeth’s friends.

  Tessa asked him, “Have you contacted Heath yet?”

  “No, I’m getting the paperwork together. I’ll do it this week though.”

  The waitress interrupted them with Charles’s Dr. Pepper and a refill of Elizabeth’s Coke. Elizabeth ordered a crab and lobster salad and Charles ordered his favorite, the buffalo burger, anticipating the cannoli for dessert.

  Tessa only had half a turkey sandwich and a small salad.

  “Not hungry?” Charles asked.

  Tessa shrugged. “I’m on the job. I don’t eat heavily just in case.”

  Charles caught Elizabeth looking at his Dr. Pepper like she’d just run the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley. He made a point of taking a slurp and she glowered at him.

  “So tell me about those two tails,” Charles said.

  She told him about the gray Nissan — with interjections from Elizabeth about Tessa’s maniacal driving — and then about being accosted outside of Wings.

  “I had picked up a friend, Karissa, for church, and we parked a couple blocks away —”

  “Church?” The word burst out of him before he could stop himself.

  The look she gave him was inscrutable. Not calm, but not emotional either. Waiting, wary, but at the same time proud. “Yes,” she said. “Church.” She enunciated the word, almost like a challenge.

  “You … you go to church now?”

  “I became a Christian three years ago,” she said evenly.

  A Christian? A Christian yakuza? Was this the reason for the changes he’d seen in her the last time they’d met? Was it really possible?

  Was her faith real?

  Was this woman, this murderer, now his sister in Christ?

  His world tilted for a moment, then righted itself. No, it couldn’t be. He’d seen this before — men who came to Christ in moments of stress, only to go back to living their old lives with their old morals a few years or even months later. And half his old youth group from his church in Louisiana had gotten into some sort of trouble — teenage pregnancy, drugs, jail. Tessa might be the same, reverting back to her old ways or getting herself in deeper trouble.

  Or maybe this was a real change, the kind only Jesus could bring about.

  Tessa Lancaster, a Christian? He couldn’t wrap his head around it. He cleared his throat. “So, um, you were going to the church that meets at Wings?”

  She told about Heath getting a little physical, and then about being tailed as they drove away from Wings.

  “I made sure they didn’t follow us,” Tessa said. “You should probably watch yourself too. I don’t want something to happen to you because I didn’t warn you, even though I only have suspicions and no proof.”

  Again, his world tilted — Tessa Lancaster being concerned for him? Well, he was her client’s lawyer, and she wouldn’t get paid unless he did his job. “You’re at a safe place now?” Charles asked.

 
Tessa nodded. “She’s at my mom’s house in San Jose.”

  Ayumi Lancaster? He had a hard time believing she was happy about that. “That’s, uh … going well?”

  He caught a flash of a grimace on Tessa’s face, but Elizabeth said, “Oh, Tessa’s mama is the nicest person. She loves Southern cooking, can you believe it? And she taught us to make paper cranes the other day.”

  “I laid a few false trails in San Francisco for Elizabeth,” Tessa said. “If Heath is searching for her, he’ll think she’s going to Canada.”

  Despite what he knew about her, he had to admire her abilities and sense of responsibility. He couldn’t entirely trust she wasn’t still working for her uncle, but she was doing a thorough job protecting Elizabeth … who was again staring at his Dr. Pepper. With a sigh, he shoved his glass toward her and she started sucking it down.

  The waitress brought their food and Elizabeth asked about his family.

  “Mama’s living with me in San Francisco now,” he said.

  Elizabeth swallowed her bite of salad. “When I talked to her a week or so ago, she was still in Louisiana.”

  “She moved, um … rather suddenly.”

  Elizabeth tilted her head as she thought. “She told me she was living with …” Her eyebrows rose. “Oh. Coco Britton. That explains it.”

  “You know my Aunt Coco?”

  “Not personally, but my mama talked about her a few times. A very few times.” To Tessa she said, “She’s like your sister, Alicia, but on menopause.”

  “Oh.” Tessa nodded sagely.

  Tessa’s sister? It seemed strange to think of her having a regular family with dysfunctional relationships. For some reason, he had assumed all her family were involved with the yakuza and working together like an efficient family business. Maybe he should have paid more attention to The Sopranos.

  “My mama had a sister like your Aunt Coco,” Elizabeth said. “My Aunt Pearl. She’d try to dictate to every one of us kids which carpets we could walk on — and that was in other people’s houses.”

  Tessa laughed. “My aunts are much more meek. But all of us cousins tend to be a bit more wild.”

  That was an understatement. Charles gave a soft snort.

  Tessa skewered him with her gaze. He returned it, a slab of granite. She wasn’t about to intimidate him like she did other people for her uncle.

  Then she spoke slowly, “How do you know about my cousins?”

  And he realized his mistake. Most of her cousins, like Ichiro, peppered numerous police reports but had been kept out of the media, especially considering the lack of evidence against them. Only someone who saw those police reports would know exactly how wild her cousins were.

  Elizabeth glanced from one to the other, confused by the tension between them. “What’s going on?”

  “At first I thought you’d just followed the media coverage of my trial,” Tessa said, her voice cold and even. “But if you know about my cousins, that means you know things about me that you wouldn’t have been able to find out unless you’d unsealed court documents.”

  Elizabeth now looked at him with chin raised, requiring an answer.

  “You don’t remember me,” Charles said reluctantly.

  “From what?”

  “Your trial.”

  There was only a subtle shift in her features — blood leeching from her lips, a single pulse at her throat.

  “Charles, you were at her trial?” Elizabeth demanded. “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “Since you didn’t remember me, I thought it was best.”

  “You weren’t one of the prosecutors,” Tessa said.

  “I was just out of law school and serving as the judge’s law clerk.”

  “Law clerk?” Elizabeth’s brow wrinkled.

  “I did research for the judge, helped him understand the facts of the case.”

  “That’s how you know about me — you researched me for the judge,” Tessa said. “You researched … everything about the case.” It wasn’t a question.

  Unspoken — maybe for Elizabeth’s sake — was, “Including my mob boss uncle.” Charles found the condensation ring on the table fascinating.

  “It’s probably best we not talk about my trial,” Tessa said.

  “But Charles is a defense lawyer now,” Elizabeth said. “He’s on your side, right?”

  “Is he?” Tessa asked, giving him a steady gaze, her eyebrows raised.

  “Charles, you should have been upfront about being at Tessa’s trial from the beginning,” Elizabeth said.

  Him? What about the ex-yakuza, ex-convict she had hired?

  Then again, Tessa had been upfront — about her past, her current situation, her conversion to Christianity. She hadn’t hidden who she had been.

  He just wasn’t entirely sure who she was now.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke directly to Tessa. “I guess I was just embarrassed at meeting you. I’d been at your trial when it hadn’t been open to the public, so I know things about you and your family most people don’t.”

  She nodded, a short jerk of her chin, but she didn’t look at him, instead staring at her hands folded on the table in front of her.

  He didn’t blame her. She had a powerful uncle and he was a lawyer. How could she know Charles had no interest in using her to get incriminating evidence against Teruo Ota?

  She couldn’t. And he couldn’t honestly say he wouldn’t take any information he happened to hear straight to a federal prosecutor.

  Charles reached in his pocket and withdrew the envelope of cash, and then slid it across the table deliberately to Tessa, not Elizabeth. “Before I forget.” And that’s all he said. Nothing about making sure she took care of Elizabeth. He actually wasn’t sure if he trusted her, but in some strange way, he trusted her warrior’s code and knew she wouldn’t let Elizabeth down. He didn’t understand it himself.

  Tessa eyed the money, then looked up at Charles, her dark eyes unreadable. But he thought he saw a flash of green in their depths.

  Elizabeth cooed and picked up the envelope. She winked at Charles. “Pardon me while I step out to Union Square …”

  “You need a babysitter, not a bodyguard,” he teased her.

  And the rest of the meal went smoothly; the tension dissipated, at least on the surface. He convinced them both to try the cannoli for dessert, and Elizabeth declared she’d found a new love.

  Tessa didn’t smile at him again.

  Chapter 12

  This is all your fault!” was the first thing Alicia said when Tessa picked up the phone.

  The accusation was like a glass of lemonade thrown in her face — startling and stinging. “What’s my fault?” she demanded.

  Tessa’s voice made Elizabeth look up from where she was playing with Daniel on the living room floor.

  “Everything!” The crack of hysteria in her voice clued Tessa in to the fact that Alicia was even more high-strung than normal.

  When she listened closely, she could hear Paisley sobbing in the background. Tightness gathered just under her breastbone. “What happened?” Her tone was still tense but she tried to soften it by speaking low and slowly.

  Alicia didn’t answer, which always drove Tessa stark raving nuts. She listened to the symphony of Paisley crying and Alicia wailing for a full two minutes while Elizabeth alternated between playing Slasher-the-valiant-pink-dragon with Daniel and shooting Tessa what-in-the-world-is-going-on looks. Tessa gave her I-don’t-know looks back.

  Suddenly in the background she heard an aggravated voice shout, “What you do, lady? Aiee, poor didi …”

  Alicia raised her voice to shriek, “What did I do? This is a hazard! You should be sued!”

  The slam of a car door, then the sounds of two voices arguing over each other with fighting words like, “You hit my didi” and “Your stupid monstrosity” and “You in big trouble” and “You don’t know what trouble is, mister.”

  Finally she heard Paisley say, “Mom, give me the phone
…. Hello? Aunt Tessa?” She sounded small, but her voice didn’t wobble.

  “Paisley, what happened? Are you two all right?”

  “We’re …” She took a deep breath, and her voice was steadier as she continued, “We’re fine. Mom got into a car accident.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “No, we’re fine. Mom hit a …” She gulped.

  An 18-wheeler? A tractor? A dump truck?

  “… a Fat Burger Boy.”

  Tessa rattled a finger in her ear. “What did you say?”

  “You know, those big Plexiglas boys in front of the Fat Burger restaurant, the ones wearing a sombrero and a kimono and wooden shoes.”

  Oh, that’s right.

  Elizabeth tugged at Tessa’s sleeve, and Tessa mouthed, “Auto accident,” and gave her a thumbs-up to show they were okay. Elizabeth nodded and sighed in relief.

  The argument in the background had ended, and Tessa could hear Alicia’s heaving sobs that sounded more frustrated than traumatized, punctuated by an occasional, “It’s all her fault!” She also heard what sounded like a solid kick to a piece of Plexiglas, followed by an “Ow!”

  Tessa relaxed a little. Alicia must be okay if she was attacking shattered Fat Boys. “How’s the car?” she asked Paisley.

  “The front bumper looks like it’s frowning, but other than that I think the Fat Boy got the last fry in the Happy Meal.”

  “I don’t think he’s happy with you mentioning his competition.”

  “He can’t be happy anymore about anything,” Paisley said dryly. “His entire head is gone.”

  “Did your mom call her auto insurance adjustor?”

  “No, she called you first.”

  “Check in her wallet for her insurance card.”

  She could hear all the gigantic brass buckles clanking as Paisley rummaged through Alicia’s purse — Alicia had a neurotic thing for buckles.

  “I got it.”

  “Call the number on it and let them know what happened. You’re probably also going to have to get the car towed. Does she have AAA?”