Narrow Escape Read online

  His dream would never come true. Certainly not with this woman, and now, not with any woman.

  Arissa looked around at the foyer, at the brightly hand-painted Spanish tile of the floor that contrasted with the antique Victorian hall table holding a lamp with a ruffled shade.

  “I’ve never been here before, although Mark told me about your parents’ house,” she said. “Are they home?”

  “They left about twenty minutes ago to have dinner with some friends. I just came home from work.”

  Her eyes found his again. “What are you doing now?”

  Now that you can’t be a narcotics detective anymore. He blinked and looked away, clearing his head of the condemning voice. “I’m head of security at Glencove Towers.” Ironically, the job at the high-end condo building paid more than the LAPD.

  The surprise flashed across her brown eyes before she smiled. “That’s great. I...I worried about you.”

  Then she looked away, and he inwardly flinched. She’d said those exact words to him three years ago.

  “This is Charity.” She stroked the head of the quiet child clinging to her leg. “This is...” She swallowed. “This is Mark’s daughter.”

  The news both surprised and relieved him. He clenched his jaw. He had no right to be relieved. “His daughter? But he never told me anything about a...er, girlfriend.” If Mark had been about to be a father, wouldn’t that have been something he’d have told his partner? Unless Mark hadn’t known?

  “His girlfriend was Jemma Capuno,” Arissa said carefully, gauging his reaction.

  “Johnny Capuno’s family?” Was Mark’s girlfriend connected to a captain in a Filipino drug gang?

  “Johnny’s sister,” Arissa said.

  “What happened to Jemma?”

  “Do you remember...” Arissa suddenly colored and looked down at Charity. She bit her lip, then took a quick breath and raised her head. “The day you were shot, there was a young girl in the chop shop. A young pregnant girl.”

  The memory slammed into him like a freight train. Yes, he remembered everything. The gunshots deafening in the enclosed concrete walls, the bullets ricocheting off metal with low screeches. He remembered the young Filipino girl crouched in a corner, her hands over her swollen belly. Her dress had had blue flowers. She’d been very young and very scared. He hadn’t known what happened to her after his leg had been shattered by a bullet.

  In response to the memory, his aching thigh twinged. “Come into the living room.” He had to sit before his knee started shaking with fatigue.

  “I’m sorry,” Arissa said. “I shouldn’t have kept you standing.”

  “I’m fine now.” The words came out harsher than he intended them to. He was as fine as he could ever expect to be with a shattered femur, after almost a dozen surgeries and months of physical therapy.

  One of his mother’s cats, a fat white-and-dark-gray lady, strolled into the living room. Charity smiled and took a few steps away from Arissa’s leg to kneel down in front of the animal.

  “No, Charity—” she started to say.

  “It’s okay. Arwen likes kids,” Nathan assured her.

  Arissa sat on the faded couch, which had been flattened over the years thanks to dog piles of Nathan and his brothers. He sank into his dad’s recliner, and his leg bone stopped aching and began to throb instead. “What about the girl at the firefight?” He didn’t stutter over the word like he would have a year ago.

  “That was Jemma. I didn’t know this at the time, but she was rushed to the hospital and had Charity that night. She died a few hours later from complications.”

  Nathan pressed his lips together. “She was hurt?”

  “Scared. Stressed. And she saw her boyfriend die in front of her eyes.”

  He couldn’t look at her. He stood abruptly, ignoring the protest of his leg, and went to close the curtains over the bowfront window. When he had snuck into that garage, he had thought there were only drug dealers and gang members inside. He hadn’t known that a young pregnant woman would be there, would be specifically watching Mark, Nathan’s partner. She would have seen what Nathan saw—a young Filipino narcotics detective, handing a police case file to one of the drug gang captains.

  Selling out his department for an envelope of cash. Mark had been an LAPD mole.

  TWO

  “What happened to Charity after her parents died?” He spoke quietly so that Charity, distracted by the cat on the other side of the room, wouldn’t hear, but Nathan’s voice seemed abrupt as he turned from the window to face her again. His green-gray eyes were distant.

  Those eyes had once glowed as they looked at her. Now she might as well have disappeared into the floral print on the faded couch she sat on.

  “Jemma’s parents, the Capunos, took care of Charity until about a year ago. They died in a car pileup on the 101.”

  A grimace flashed across his mobile mouth at the references to the L.A. freeways. They had once joked about Arissa’s terrible sense of direction that often got her lost. He’d smiled at her, and his eyes had turned to pewter silver, and she had wondered if he felt that magnetic tug between them....

  She thrust away the memory and continued, “Jemma’s parents apparently never told anyone Charity was Mark’s child. When Johnny, Jemma’s brother, got custody of her, he found out when he saw Charity’s birth certificate. He showed up at my parents’ grocery store one day with Charity and said he wouldn’t take care of a cop’s brat. Then he left Charity there.”

  Nathan seemed to grow taller, broader, as he stared at her in disbelief. “He just left her? A little girl?”

  “Johnny is—”

  “I know what he is.” A muscle in Nathan’s jaw tightened. “I don’t have to like his methods.”

  Johnny’s ruthlessness was what had made him rise to become one of the manoys, a Captain in the Laki Sa Layaw gang. “It’s better this way,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted my niece being raised by a family belonging to the LSL gang, would you?”

  His anger at Johnny seemed to fade. “You’re right. So your parents took her in?”

  Arissa nodded. “I had a paternity test done. She really is Mark’s daughter. I just finished the paperwork to become Charity’s legal guardian.”

  “Why not your parents?”

  “Dad still isn’t comfortable with English and legal documents.”

  Nathan’s brow knit. “His English is fine. I mean, he’s a citizen and he’s been in the U.S. for, what? Two-thirds of his life?”

  “Dad’s very proud. He doesn’t like doing things imperfectly. His English isn’t as good as mine, and he didn’t want to make a mistake while going through all the documents.”

  “So you’re Charity’s legal guardian. But you’re still working for that international airline?”

  She nodded. “I’m usually gone for two or three days, and then I have four days off. We have a neighbor who watches Charity with her own kids when my parents have to be at the store.”

  Nathan shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Mark’s daughter.”

  It was a lot to spring on him. He hadn’t seen her for over three years—since she’d visited Nathan at the hospital and he’d accused Mark of selling LAPD files and being the reason Nathan was injured.

  She swallowed. His words had been so ugly, and he’d been so bitter. But really, what had she expected? All the men she had romantic feelings for had bailed on her whenever her personal life became difficult: her boyfriend dumped her when her mom got cancer, Nathan walked away when Internal Affairs was investigating her brother after his death and the Christian boy she’d been getting close to at church had dramatically backpedaled when Charity entered her life.

  She knew better than to count on a man. She wouldn’t have come to Nathan for help if she hadn’t been desperate
. Now she could only hope he would help her, if just for Charity’s sake, being Mark’s old partner.

  “I’m sorry I had to drop in like this,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to turn to, and since they mentioned Mark’s name...”

  “Who?”

  She was making a muddle out of all this. Start at the beginning, Arissa. “This morning, two Filipino men k-kidnapped me and Charity.”

  Nathan’s face paled, and he stopped pacing to drop back down in the recliner. “This morning?”

  “I was out with Charity—we were going to get her some new shoes. We had just turned the corner from my parents’ grocery store, walking toward my car, when a van pulled up and men jumped out at me. I think they hit me on the back of the head. I woke up in a house still in L.A., not far from my parents’ grocery store. I managed to get us out, but before I did, I heard them mention Mark’s name. Something about, ‘if Mark hadn’t died.’”

  “It could be any person named Mark—”

  “They mentioned it right after saying something about me,” Arissa said. “What other Mark could they be talking about?”

  “But...” Nathan combed his fingers through his fine, straight brown hair. It was longer than he used to keep it, and it made his eyes seem more shadowed. “Arissa, Mark’s been gone for over three years. Why would anyone kidnap you now?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. They were speaking Tagalog, not some other Filipino dialect, so I’m thinking they could be from the same area where Mark and I grew up, the same area as my parents’ grocery store.”

  “How did you get away from them?”

  She told him. “Then I found my friend Malaya. She has an extra car that used to belong to her aunt, so I asked if I could borrow it. I wasn’t sure if the men would come after my parents, so I went home, told them to close up the store, and gave them somewhere to hide.”

  “Where?”

  “I...” This was awkward to mention, especially when they’d had so many arguments about this in the past. “I became a Christian a little over a year ago.”

  She expected surprise from him, but instead his eyes seemed to grow darker, his mouth tighter. He said nothing, so she continued, “My discipler at church, Mrs. Fuchikami, lives in Pasadena. I knew she’d be willing to help me, so I called her and told her what happened, and asked if she would let my parents stay with her for a little while.”

  His eyebrows rose. “She said yes?”

  “She’s very generous.” It was a lame way to describe the woman who had been like another mother to her, leading her in a Bible study, showing her and explaining to her the love of Jesus. She would have thought Nathan would be happy for her, but instead he seemed grim. Had what happened to him affected his faith, too? “After I took them to Mrs. Fuchikami’s house, I drove here with Charity.” It had been a relatively smooth eight hours of driving, but she’d been tense the entire way, desperately trying to be cheerful for Charity’s sake, but scared to the core.

  Nathan was shaking his head. “You should have gone to the police, Arissa.”

  “What could they have done? We both know that area—the gangs rule those streets. If this is related to the drug gang that killed Mark, what hope do I have that the police can protect us? And my parents?”

  Pain flashed across Nathan’s face, and he abruptly stood again. This time he went to lean against the quaint fireplace mantel. “What in the world did Mark do, Arissa?”

  Her jaw clenched. “He didn’t do anything.” Three years ago, the Internal Affairs investigation had turned up nothing and his name had been cleared of Nathan’s accusation.

  Nathan turned to look at her, his eyes burning. “Arissa, I saw him in that chop shop.”

  “Isn’t there a chance you misunderstood what you saw?”

  “No,” he ground out.

  “I saw the police report. There wasn’t any proof—”

  “There also wasn’t a good explanation for why he was even there.”

  He was right. And Mark had been a narcotics detective, so he had no business entering a building smack-dab in the middle of LSL territory. “It might have had nothing to do with the police. Maybe that’s why his girlfriend was there.”

  Nathan stilled, like a statue of cold marble. She’d finally pricked his anger.

  She’d mulled over that day and that police report dozens of times, but until a few months ago, she hadn’t known about Charity’s mother, a sister to one of the gang leaders. Before, she hadn’t wanted to believe Nathan’s accusation about Mark just because of her loyalty to her brother, but now she was convinced there was another explanation for why Mark had been there.

  She waited to feel the anger at what he’d done in reporting Mark’s actions in the chop shop to Internal Affairs, in causing so much stress for her family as IA made such horrible insinuations and investigated her brother. She waited to feel the triumph that he’d been wrong, that Internal Affairs had cleared Mark’s name.

  But all she felt was the old longing, a familiar bittersweet stirring in her chest. Nathan had once meant so much to her, had caused such a rush of excitement every time she happened to see him, which seemed more often than mere chance. She remembered the anxiety and hope as she wondered if he felt the same way about her. Seeing him now brought back old memories of happier times rather than the hurt and betrayal she’d felt in the months after Mark’s death.

  Nathan’s face hardened again, and he gave a short shake of his head. “I can’t talk about this, Arissa.” He shifted his weight, and a wince of pain flashed across his face.

  She swallowed, remembering that day in the hospital, what he’d shouted to her about his shattered leg. About how he would never walk again because of Mark. The words still cut.

  She took a deep breath and straightened her spine. Seeing him again had caught her up in too many memories. What was past should stay there. She hoped Nathan would help her, but she couldn’t fool herself into thinking their relationship would ever be anything remotely like it had once been.

  And what had it been? Just good friends.

  No, an insidious voice said inside of her. You saw the way he looked at you. Spoke to you. Touched you. You were becoming deeper than friends, even if he hadn’t definitely said anything to you, even if he hadn’t yet kissed you.

  Her cheeks warmed, and she turned her attention to where Charity chatted to Arwen the cat, who was sprawled across the little girl’s lap and purring very loudly as Charity stroked the soft fur. Charity was her priority now, not any misty “maybes” from the past.

  “Aside from your parents and your friend, does anyone else know you’re here in Sonoma?” Nathan asked.

  She shook her head. “They don’t know where we are. I tried to be careful.”

  He sighed. “So you were kidnapped this morning, but you don’t know who did it except that they mentioned the name Mark. You’re not giving me a lot to go on, Arissa.”

  “You still think I should go to the police with this wealth of information?”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “Do you have your cell phone?”

  “No, I dumped it. I told my parents to dump theirs, too. I know it’s easy to have those traced these days, even if you’re not in law enforcement.”

  The look he gave her seemed bitter. “Did Mark teach you that?”

  His tone got her back up. “No, actually, my neighbor’s youngest boy wanted to teach me how to boost cars, and he’s the one who told me.”

  He frowned at her. “Why would a flight attendant need to know how to steal a car?” he demanded.

  “I’ll tell you if you’ll stop treating me like a criminal,” she fired back.

  He looked away. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “I don’t know what to do next, how to keep us both safe.” She glanced at Charity and noticed that the humidity
had turned her silken hair into a nest of loose flyaway curls. Maybe this had been a mistake. She wasn’t sure Nathan would help her, even if he could. She had thought that since Internal Affairs hadn’t found any proof against Mark, Nathan’s attitude would have changed, but apparently not.

  Nathan rubbed his forehead with his palm, a gesture she remembered from when he was thinking through a problem.

  “First we need to cover your tracks,” he finally said. “We can think about your other options tomorrow when I’m not so tired.”

  He was going to help them. Arissa fought an absurd urge to cry.

  “You and Charity can stay in the guest bedroom.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Where did you park your friend’s car?”

  “On the street about two houses down.”

  “Let’s drive it into the garage behind the house.” He headed toward the front door. “That way it’ll be out on the street for as little time as possible. No one can happen to remember seeing it or recall a partial license plate.”

  Nathan was ever the cop.

  She left Charity dozing with the cat and followed him outside. As they approached Malaya’s car, they suddenly saw a faint bluish light flash from the backseat.

  Nathan grabbed her, and his nearness sent a whiff of musk and lime curling around her. Her heart sped up. It must be from the unexpected light from the car.

  He approached the car so quietly that all she heard was the crickets from the neighbor’s bushes. He peered inside, and another blue light flashed, illuminating the perplexed look on his face.

  Then suddenly he was scrabbling at the rear door handle, but it was locked.

  She handed him the car keys. “What is it?”

  He opened the door, diving into the backseat, and emerged with a cell phone, which had just received a text message: M where R U?

  Oh, no. “That’s Malaya’s.”