The bodyguard saw it first. Speeding through the parking lot. But when he expected the big Ram pickup truck to stop at the curb, it jumped the curb and began speeding straight for the diner. Straight for where Sal and Kamill were sitting in the diner!
“Boss!” the bodyguard yelled and jumped over and grabbed Sal.
Sal, not knowing what was about to happen but trusting his guard, grabbed Kamill all the way across the table and out of the way just as that truck crashed through the window of that diner with a ferocious glass shattering, and knocked over the table and everything else in its path.
Sal and his bodyguard, along with Kamill, all fell backwards, and it was Sal who got up first just as the driver of that truck, now parked in the diner, jumped out and began running away.
“Stay with her!” Sal ordered his guard, remembering that the attempt was most likely directed at Kamill, and he ran after the driver.
The driver flew out of the back door of the diner as if he knew exactly where he was going, and Sal chased him as fast as he could run.
Dogs were barking out back as the man jumped fence after fence and kept on running. Sal wasn’t as agile as the younger man, but nobody had more dogged determination than Sal. Somebody nearly wiped him off the face of the earth, where he wouldn’t see his wife or child ever again, wasn’t about to get away from him. He jumped fence after fence too.
He saw where the man was heading. There was a car parked across the street in an alley. Sal knew, if the man got in that car, he might get away forever. Or Sal would have to shoot to kill him first. He didn’t want either outcome. He needed answers. He needed that man alive. Sal started humping he was running so fast.
But it wasn’t fast enough. The man ran across the street just as a semi was speeding down that same street, and Sal was certain he cleared it and was jumping into the getaway car. But the driver didn’t clear that truck. That truck cleared him. It knocked him clean across the street and into a pile of sidewalk trash.
Sal, stunned, ran across the street too. But there was no doubt. The man had been smashed. The man was dead.
Sal leaned down, his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. And he was pissed that he would get no answers.
The truck driver, who had hit on brakes and jumped out of his truck, ran to the man he assumed was a victim. And he was already pleading is case. “It wasn’t my fault,” he was saying as if Sal was going to be the arbiter of his guilt or innocence. “He ran in front of me!”
But Sal wasn’t even listening. He stood upright. And then his bodyguard and Kamill ran over too.
“You okay, Boss?” his bodyguard asked.
Sal could only manage a nod.
“You know him?” the bodyguard asked.
Sal didn’t know him, but he wondered if Kamill did. “Do you?” he asked Kamill.
But Kamill was shaking her head. “No. Never seen him before.”
“That’s not the guy?” Sal asked.
She continued to shake her head. “No. That ain’t him.”
Sal exhaled. Great. They could hear the sirens in the distance as a small crowd began to gather.
“Safe house her,” Sal said to his bodyguard.
The bodyguard was shocked. “Her?”
“And my family?” Kamill asked. “I have two kids, Sal.”
Sal looked at Kamill. In her line of work and she would have kids? What was she thinking? But then again, he realized, he was in his line of work and had a son himself. What the fuck was he thinking? “And her kids, too,” he ordered his guard. “Now get her out of here!”
The guard was shocked. But he knew Sal too well. “Yes, sir,” he said and grab at Kamill.
But Kamill was hugging Sal. “Thank you,” she said in tears. “Thank you!”
When she stopped embracing him, Sal could see the humanity in her eyes. She wasn’t just some meth head who didn’t give a shit. She was a meth head who knew her life had spiraled out of control. And she was ashamed.
Sal, who always had a heart for people on the downside of life, gave her a hug of his own, and then ordered her to go with his man.
CHAPTER FIVE
She was winning. They never liked when she was winning. His wife had been an attorney a long time. She wasn’t new to the game and they knew that too. They always came up with some kind of bullshit whenever she was winning.
Sal sat all the way in the back of the courtroom, watching her deliver one of the best closing arguments he’d ever seen her deliver, and he was nodding his head with pride as she walked back toward the defense table. That was his woman: Gemma Jones-Gabrini. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her as she stepped proudly in her tailored skirt suit with her above-the-knee-skirt highlighting her dark, shapely legs and slender, shapely body. Her hair was in a stylish pixie cut that gave her an elegant, sophisticated look. But it was her high cheekbones and huge eyes, and that slamming body he couldn’t stop staring at that made her appear, not only serious, but seriously sexy to Sal. So sexy that a part of him wished they weren’t in a courtroom, but back home in bed.
They’d come a long way, he thought as he watched her. When they first met, he couldn’t decide if she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, or the ugliest. He kept going back and forth and couldn’t seem to make up his mind. But now, years later, it seemed crazy to him that he would have ever thought such nonsense. Because that same woman he once had mixed feelings about, and whose racist ideology at that time wanted to dismiss her as too black to be beautiful, was now his world.
But Sal braced himself because he knew how those racist prosecutors treated Gemma down at that courthouse. They always tried to taint her victories. They always tried to make it seem as if she was somehow gaming the system whenever she was kicking their asses at trial. The bullshit, he knew, was coming.
“Your Honor, may we approach?”
That was the first sign. The prosecution wanted a sidebar with the judge. Gemma smiled. Like he said: she wasn’t new to the game. She had expected some nonsense too. When she glanced back at Sal, he shook his head. They both knew the bull was on its way.
When Gemma and Dillon Randolph, the lead prosecutor, made their way up to the judge’s tall bench, Dillon leaned toward the judge. “Your Honor,” he said, “the State requests to be heard outside the presence of the jury.”
That was sign number two. Gemma saw that coming too. That was why, when the judge granted the prosecution request and dismissed the jury for the day, Gemma gave Sal another knowing look as she made her way back to the defense table. She and Sal had that kind of simpatico relationship. He was the only human being on earth who got her. He always seemed to know exactly what she was thinking.
But Sal, not known as a calm individual anyway, was already getting angry.
“I’ll hear the State,” the judge said after the jury was out of the courtroom, “and then the Defense will have an opportunity to respond.”
But Gemma’s client, Vegas performer Michael Moret, a man accused of a botched murder-for-hire scheme against his ex-wife, was worried. “Why is he sending the jurors home already?” he asked Gemma. “What’s that prosecutor up to?”
“We’re about to find out,” Gemma responded. Her guess, at that point, would be as good as his.