Page 40 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover
“She was eighteen, Mick!”
“I don’t give a fuck! I was jumping on my daddy for jumping on my mother before I was ten. I had the weight of an entire syndicate on my shoulders by the time I was eighteen, what the fuck I care about her age? She knew what she was getting into.”
Nikki frowned. If he was this angry now, she thought, what was he going to be when he heard the rest of the story? “Yes, I knew,” she said, taking full ownership. “I knew.”
“Keep talking,” Mick said.
“Juda worked for Emilio, but he was just caught up like I was.”
“Is that what they call irresponsibility now?” Mick asked. “Caught up?”
“Pop you’re not being fair,” said Teddy.
“My wife could have been killed last night,” Mick responded furiously, nearly jumping out of his chair, “and you expect me to befair?” He looked at Nikki. “Keep talking,” he said to her with anger still simmering in his voice.
Nikki wanted to die where she sat. Had Roz been even injured, it would have been over for Nikki and probably Teddy too. She swallowed hard, and continued telling how she had that close call in Thailand, but made it back to Miami in one piece. She told about what happened in the airport and how she decided to take the luggage filled with drugs and toss it in the bottom of the trash barrel in the restroom area.
“You tossed drugs that you knew belonged to some Columbian cartel in the trash?” Mick asked incredulously.
“Didn’t you hear her, Pop? There were drug-sniffing dogs waiting at every exit. She had to get rid of it.”
“What else could I do?” she asked.
“You could have waited until those dogs had left. Wait it out in that bathroom. Why didn’t your ass do that?”
“I told you I panicked, sir. I panicked.”
Mick could feel her pain, and he was sorry. But he couldn’t let his feet off of the gas. He had to be certain she wasn’t bringing the bad habits of her youth into her present situation. “Your naïve ass should have never been involved in any of it,” he said.
She nodded. “I found that out real quick.”
“Go on.”
“When I got to the car and told Emilio what I’d done, he slapped the shit out of me and was furious with me.”
Teddy could see Mick’s jaw tightened. He wished, like Teddy wished when he heard it, that he could have been there for Nikki.
“He ordered me to go back inside and get that luggage. He said no dog could sniff those drugs out because of the components they had in that suitcase. So I went back inside. But when he slapped me, it was like he slapped some sense into me because I woke up then. And I marched back into that airport, went straight up to the desk, and bought me a ticket to the next flight heading out. One was already boarding and I grabbed the ticket and took off.”
“Good for you,” Roz said. “Where did you go?”
“Where that plane was going. I went to Arizona. I stayed there for a minute waiting tables, doing some bartending. And then I moved on to California.”
“That’s when we met you when you were bartending at that Beverly Hills hotel,” said Roz.
Nikki nodded. “Eventually, yes ma’am.”
“Did Emilio retrieve his product?” Mick asked.
“No sir. He sent another female into that bathroom to get it, but she handed it off to her brother or somebody else. At least that’s what I heard.”
“And that’s it?” asked Roz. “At least you got out of there alive.”
“I did,” said Nikki. But then a horribly sad look appeared in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Roz asked her.
Tears began to appear in her beautiful, golden-brown amber eyes. “Emilio took off towho knows wherebut those cartel boys wasn’t going to chase him down. They went to his mother’s house and killed all of his younger siblings, who were all minors.”
