The car smelled of new leather—like the pristine tack room of a horse breeder’s estate; like a life that took luxury for granted. Janeal ran her fingertips over the surface of the backseat. She wondered what color it was, and if her father had sat here at some time.
“I think it’s a stupid idea to take her back,” the blonde had muttered to Sanso as she tied the cloth behind Janeal’s head. “You don’t know what she’ll do.”
“She’ll save her father, Callista.”
Callista yanked the blindfold into a tight knot that snagged Janeal’s hair hard enough to make her exclaim.
“Don’t punish me for your argument with him,” Janeal snapped. “I don’t have to go with you.”
Sanso silenced her with a gentle hand on the small of her back and steered her away from Callista. That scent of cloves was stronger than her threat to stay put.
Even so, Janeal chose not to speak again until they reached their destination.
Her silence might have been her undoing, though, because Sanso and Callista seemed content enough to live with it, which gave her far more time than she needed to contemplate how much danger she might have put herself in. By the time the car stopped and doors started opening, she felt uncertain of everything.
Callista helped her out of the car. Janeal allowed herself to be led and shuffled across a paved area. She heard the sound of a door opening, then the woman pulled her into an enclosed space.
“Stop here,” Callista said, then stripped the blindfold off without untying it, taking pleasure, Janeal believed, in ripping that tiny strand of caught hair out of her scalp.
They stood in a dark hallway. Behind Callista, a red Exit sign glowed over a metal door with a crash bar. Ahead, linoleum lined the floor and led to another door. Sanso was passing through it.
Callista, fair-skinned and maybe in her forties, dressed as if she wished she were still in her teens. In the marginally better light of the hall, Janeal recognized her as a woman who had visited her booth during the carnival and bought several helpings of sármi throughout the weekend. Once she had stopped to chat. Janeal tried but could not remember what they talked about.
“I know you from the festival.”
“I go to a lot of festivals.”
Callista turned her back on Janeal and walked toward the opposite door. Janeal followed.
Passing through the next door, Janeal found herself in a dim room that smelled of fish and cigarettes. It might have been an office, except there was no desk. Full bookcases lined three of the four walls, leaving gaps only for the door she had entered and a door on the opposite side of the room. Above the shelves, close to the ceiling, three small windows in two of the walls allowed moonlight in.
In the center of the floor, a green velvet sectional in the shape of a C surrounded a coffee table and took up much of the space. A flat-screen TV dominated the fourth wall of the room. Three reading lamps placed at intervals behind the sofa cast off yellow light in the shape of cones.
In one corner, a candlelit café table held a plate full of food. Sanso was sitting at it.
“Hungry?” he asked Janeal.
She shook her head.
“Sit, then, and give me a minute.”
Janeal sat gingerly at the mouth of the C. Callista left the room.
Sanso did not speak as he ate—fish and rice, she guessed from the aroma— in large mouthfuls, chasing each bite with a gulp of wine. His silverware clattered against his plate, but even that was not loud enough to cover the sound of Janeal’s own breathing, which she found distracting and somehow more unnerving than not knowing where she was or precisely why she was here. That he would put off telling her only caused her irritation to mix like a bad science experiment with the other emotions in her belly.
She studied his wide mouth as he ate and willed her body to be quiet enough to hear him chew.
Had her father missed her yet? Probably not. She frequently walked two hours or more with Robert and Katie at this time of night. Considering her outburst today, the two might not miss her until tomorrow morning.
The sound of his chair scraping against the floor brought Janeal’s mind back into the room.
Sanso wiped his mouth, picked up his wine, and rounded the sofa. Excitement charged Janeal’s blood again. She wondered for a moment if the thrill would burst its container and morph from controlled fear into the most horrifying kind of danger. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the door Callista had exited and wished she would return.
As if prompted, the door opened and the woman walked in holding a glass. She leaned across the sofa and set the glass full of amber liquid on the coffee table in front of Janeal, then walked to the corner and took the seat Sanso had vacated. Janeal picked up the glass and sniffed. Apple juice. As if she were two years old! She set it down again.
“See,” Sanso said, approaching one of the bookcases, “the reason I questioned your father’s love for you is because he loves money too. Perhaps more than you.”
Finding all words inadequate, Janeal glared at him.
“There is no question that he loves the money more than he loves me,” he said. “We’ve done business in the past, good business that you would not have been privy to. But I think Jason no longer appreciates my business. Someone else has paid him better.”
The insight sounded a dissonant chord in Janeal’s brain. “You led me to believe that you and my father are . . .”
“What? Friends? That term is not quite accurate.” Sanso picked up a framed photograph off one of the shelves and turned toward Janeal.
“Friendly competition, then?” Janeal tried.
Sanso chuckled. “No, not friendly. Not friendly at all. It’s his life or mine now, and I have him in my crosshairs.”
Janeal looked down at the floor, both needing him to explain and not wanting him to. She had misunderstood the man. Terribly, terribly misunderstood him.
He sat opposite her on the C-shaped sofa. Their feet nearly touched each other’s.
She was shaking. She picked up Sanso’s glass of wine, sitting there by that disgusting juice, and splashed the contents of it across his crisp white shirt. She gasped and stood, stunned by the idiocy of her reflexes. What had she done?
She tried to recover. “My father has no enemies.”
“Oh, but he does, and I am among his worst.” Sanso, unfazed, reached up to take her hand and pulled her back down onto the sofa opposite him.
Janeal’s stomach soured. Sanso did not even appear to be angry with her, which she would have preferred to this . . . this eerie paternal calm. She grabbed the glass of juice and took a long drink. She hated apple juice, the sticky too-too sweetness of it. She wished Callista had brought strong coffee. Or, better, that she had swallowed that wine instead of tossing it away.
“This is a sick joke,” she said, regretting her lame choice of words.
“I never joke, Janeal Mikkado. But don’t be afraid of me. You’re not in any danger.” He motioned around the room. “Do you see any weapons? Any threat to your well-being? Has anyone intimidated you?”
Janeal shook her head without taking her eyes off him.
“This is because you’re safe here,” he said. “Safe with me.” He smiled enough to make his mustache lopsided, which, rather than make her feel safe, gave her the impression he would as quickly run a knife through her. He extended the framed picture under her nose.
Four men slung their arms around each other’s shoulders like brothers. From the left: Sanso, her father, and two of the kumpanía’s elders, one of whom had died unexpectedly last summer. Food poisoning, they thought. Jason wore an earring Janeal had given him for his birthday only two years ago.
Sanso leaned forward and lifted her chin with his knuckles. “Look at me so I can be sure you understand, girl.”
She kept her eyes averted. You don’t have ahold of me, BOY.
He extended his fingers and pinched her jaw until she winced. “Look.”
She met his eyes, trembling.
“Your father has accepted one million dollars from the DEA to set me up for a sting operation that will go down Tuesday morning. One million dollars now has become the value of your father’s life. And you have until Monday midnight to bring me this ransom.”
One day.
“My father doesn’t have that kind of money,” she whispered. Not in cash, anyway. The Gypsies had plenty of assets, invested in the community and shared as its members had need. But cash was not their preferred exchange. If he had such a sum, he would have told her. He would have alerted her. Like he did the time he held those uncut stones for two weeks on behalf of the rom baro in—
“He does have it, and you are going to find it. And then you are going to tell me where it is, and I will come retrieve it. Because if you don’t, your father will die, and likely you will die, and I don’t care how many more in your precious little kumpanía die with you.” He spat the name of their group.
One million dollars. One million dollars. Shocking herself, Janeal realized that her first thought was not for her father’s safety, but for what she could do with one million dollars if she found it before Sanso did.
“You’re lying to me,” she challenged. “My father has never done business with dealers. There is no money.”
He released her jaw. Sanso was already sitting down. “A romantic notion for the only surviving child to have of her precious father. It won’t be too much longer before you learn the truth of the human condition, Janeal.”
If her father had that kind of money, he would run with it, relocate the family, take them to a new place where neither the DEA nor this Sanso would ever find them. Wouldn’t he? The kumpanía as a whole barely broke a hundred thousand each summer, all of them working together. Would her father have so much money hidden somewhere, stashed away without telling anyone, not even her? He told her everything.
She dropped her eyes and stared at the picture until Sanso removed it and placed it on the coffee table. “I think I would know if there were drugs in the kumpanía.”
“There aren’t. Your kumpanía is only a way station. You’re a bunch of traffickers, you Gypsies. Plenty you never see goes on in those festival booths while you’re cooking your cabbage rolls. Why do you think the DEA went to Jason for help? It’s death by my hand or imprisonment by theirs. That’s the stew he cooked himself up in.”
“If my father had so much money, he wouldn’t hang around here with it.”
“He is waiting for the other half, which he will get when he betrays me like the Judas that he is.”
Two million dollars. What she and her father could do . . .
“Wouldn’t it be less hassle for you to hold me for ransom?”
Sanso clucked his tongue and shook his head.
“And bring the DEA and a dozen other agencies right to my front door? No, I’m a patient man, and I believe that in due time you will agree that giving up the money is in your best interest, and the simplest thing for everyone.”
Moonlight caught Sanso’s eyes, reflecting off them like a midnight pond. Janeal’s breathing quickened the way it did when Robert looked at her too long.
Her involuntary comparison between the man she loved and this, this . . . stunningly beautiful criminal intrigued some far corner of her brain.
“I have seen your restlessness among your own people,” Sanso whispered. The word restlessness came out like a serpent’s temptation. “There are shackles holding you to them that I can break.” He moved off his seat and turned to sit next to her. Without touching her, he spoke into her ear, his breath ruffling the strands of her hair. “It’s not beneath me to share generously with a beautiful young woman. I can show you the world you want to see.”
Janeal’s palms broke out in a chilly sweat. “You’re revolting.” But she couldn’t muster the will to mean it. In this moment, when someone’s life rather than hers was in danger, she found him fascinating, and she sensed in his relaxed posture that he knew this. She stole a glance at Callista, who sat in the corner. The blonde’s expression was smug—apparently she was pleased with the course the conversation was taking. Janeal leaned away from Sanso to take another drink of juice, and to think. Four seconds were all she needed.
“A million dollars must be pocket change to someone like you,” she said, holding on to her glass. “Hardly worth this kind of a headache.” There was some detail in this fact that she must pay attention to, if she could define it.
“In simple dollars it is. But I’m a man of principle. My reasons for demanding this money have less to do with its actual value than its . . . symbolic value.”
Symbolic?
Sanso withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and started dabbing at the wine on his shirt.
“The money belongs to me. The DEA stole this money from me last year in partnership with a traitor like your father,” he continued, “and I intend to reclaim it. It’s rightfully mine, and I don’t tolerate thieves who intrude on my sweat equity. One can place no price on a man’s reputation.”
“You can’t place a price on my father’s life.”
“But I have. It’s very simple: You give me a million dollars. I’ll give you your father’s life.”
Janeal did not believe a word of it—not that the money was his, not that he would spare her father’s life for it, not that the true stakes weren’t far, far higher than what Sanso represented to her. For the first time that evening, true fear struck her at the center of her heart, stabbing fear that her father might not trust her, that he might not tell her everything, that he might not include her in the whole truth of his life.
Janeal stood, trying to break something that she could only describe as a gravitational pull toward this horrible man who dealt in lives and lies so casually. She walked within the circumference of the sofa to the opposite side of the coffee table.
“I’ll find the money, and we’ll leave this place so fast you won’t find us.”
Sanso wrapped his fist around the wadded kerchief and examined his fingernails. “I have passports in every country in North and South America, plus several others. I am not a person you want following you.”
Janeal felt dizzy. She allowed her shoulders to sink back into a cushion. This would be okay. She had to look resigned.
There had to be a way to foil this man, if only she could think it through. Think it through with her father, who would explain everything. Together with what she knew now, they could find a way to keep the money and protect each other.
“I don’t believe there is any money,” she repeated, not sure why she continued to sing the same note.
“You also believe that I might be right, which is enough to compel you to look. And when you find it, you’ll take it, hide it, and call me to tell me where it is. I’ll give you a number before you go. Like I said, I am trustworthy.”
“It’ll be hard to find something that doesn’t exist.”
“I promise you a tenth of what doesn’t exist that you’ll test me on this. And then you will change your mind.”
Janeal was not quite sure what he meant. A tenth of the money? Her mind was fuzzy. Change her mind? “About what?” she said aloud. She felt Sanso’s palm heavy on the top of her head, playing with the strands of her hair. He had moved?
“About me, child. I think you will come with me before this is over.”
“I want to be able to . . .” What was the word? “What if I need to . . .” She put her hand over her eyes. “You want me to call you?”
“Yes, child, you will be able to call me.”
Janeal fell asleep against her will.