Promises Pt. 05

"Gracias, Señor Peter."

"Gracias, Gabriela," I say, butchering the pronunciation, I'm sure. Kira gets up and gives the girl a big hug. My erection has subsided, so I start to get up too, but Kira surreptitiously waves me back down. Gabriela gives me a shy smile, then heads down the stairs and along the paved path that leads into the jungle, and probably to the dormitory.

"Sorry," Kira says, "Gabriela definitely enjoyed herself this afternoon, but embracing a naked man who's not her husband is almost certainly a bridge too far. She's a good woman and very faithful to her vows."

"I can certainly respect that."

"She also said that she and her husband rarely see each other naked unless they're making love, but then it's usually dark. She's going to work on getting him to loosen up a little."

"I think we've made some real progress today," I say, grinning.

We decide to chill for the rest of the afternoon, and both pull out our laptops, sitting down at the table. I work some more on the programming of the warehouse system while Kira goes to check for email messages from her lawyer.

A couple of minutes later, I hear her gasp. Despite the sun we've gotten over the last couple of days, her face is white. She closes her laptop.

"What's wrong?" I ask, suddenly very concerned.

"An email came in this afternoon from my sometime friend, Jennifer. She's Angelo's executive assistant. She says that this morning, Angelo called his Uncle Marco in Chicago."

"Okay?" I can tell that this upsets her, but I don't know why yet.

"I guess I'd better start at the beginning," she says, seeing my expression.

"Please do." Seems like we've been doing a lot of that since we met.

"Okay, Jennifer and I hired on at the law firm at about the same time, and we were friends while I worked there. She didn't become Angelo's assistant until just after he asked me out for the first time. When she got to know him, though, she warned me about what he was really like. Being a stubborn person, I didn't listen to her.

"I haven't seen or talked to her in years, but we still email regularly. I told her on Friday, before Angelo was due to go home, that I'd left him and that I was in hiding. She knows about his family, and his Uncle Marco, so she was really scared for me."

At first this makes no sense, but then I remember Kira's married name and finally make the connection. "Wait, you're not saying that your husband is a member of the Carlisi crime family, are you?"

"Well, Angelo's a graduate of Yale law school and I don't think he does any illegal work, but yeah, his family back in Chicago has got quite the history."

Oh shit. "So what's the deal with this 'Uncle Marco?'"

"He's the head of the family, the 'Godfather' if you will. Jennifer knows this, and it scared her. She figured she knew why Angelo would call him, so she listened in. Sure enough, he was asking for help regarding me."

"He wants his uncle Marco to track you down?"

"No, it's worse. One of the other attorneys was listening to the 'Get Naked with KIRA' drawing on the radio. He recognized my voice and told Angelo about it on Monday. Angelo called the radio station and got the name of the travel agency. Then he called Nora and said I was having some sort of delusional episode and was in severe danger when unsupervised. Nora spilled everything, Peter. Angelo even has our old room number!"

Oh shit. "That's not good, but if he already knows where you are, what did he want from his Godfather?" Though I'm already imagining what it might be.

"He wanted Marco to send some guys down here to 'take care of me' and to bring back his laptop before I 'find some stuff on it.' They're arriving tomorrow evening on a direct flight from Chicago."

"That laptop?" I ask, pointing to the one on the table.

She nods. "After my old one died, Angelo got me a desktop. Since I was doing all my writing at home anyway, it made sense at the time. I knew I'd want to keep working on my novel while I was at the motel, though, so I took his old laptop from where he had it stored in the closet. He uses a newer one now."

"So what do you think might be on it?"

"That's just it. I did try and snoop of course, but he's got all of his files in a protected partition. I tried the obvious passwords, but nothing worked."

My mind is racing. A possibility has occurred to me, an ugly one, but it fits the evidence. "This is going to sound really gross, Kira, but do you think there's any chance he could be a pedophile?"

Her eyes go wide. "Peter, that is gross!"

"Look, I'm sorry to have even brought it up, but certain things make me think we should consider it."

"Like what?"

"Like his size, it's possible that most women intimidate him."

"Oh, I don't know about that. He works with women who are a lot taller than he is all day long. I never noticed him being nervous around them."

"But that's in a professional setting, not a romantic or sexual one."

"So you're saying that he pursued me because I'm child-like?"

"I don't like it any better than you, but yes, I think it's possible. Perhaps he thought that with someone your size, he could get excited about being with a woman of legal age. Then, on your wedding night, he saw just how un-childlike you are when you're naked."

Kira's silent for a good while, considering that. "Yeah, I suppose that fits," she finally says. "He preferred that I dress very conservatively back when we were dating. Nothing that showed off my body at all, not that my pre-Kira self was into revealing clothing anyway. I chalked it up to him trying to keep his libido in check because he was waiting for our wedding night."

Then I see a revelation spreading across her face. "Oh shit, I just thought of something else."

"What?"

"Angelo does a lot of business trips. He's one of his firm's international law experts and he flies to Europe and Southeast Asia about equally. The thing that strikes me as strange now was that while he speaks German and Italian fluently and even has some family in Milan that he likes to visit, he seemed to really prefer Southeast Asia."

That certainly fits my supposition. "That's still a hotbed for the child sex trade," I say, somewhat unnecessarily, I'm sure. My skin is crawling at the thought.

Kira sighs. "He always seemed so excited when those trips came up. He was never like that about Europe." She looks at me, then down at the computer. "Do you think he's got, like, pictures of that kind of stuff in here?"

I nod. "And considering just how much he wants it back, there may even be records of exactly what he was doing overseas."

Kira shivers, but then seems to firm her resolve. "What do you think we should do about it?"

"Without seeing what's on there, we have only circumstantial evidence. I don't know how to break passwords or get into protected partitions, but I know people who do. When we get back, I can have one of them crack it for us." I think about it some more. "Or maybe we should take it to the authorities. It's probably better if they dig it out of there."

"I agree. If that's what he's been doing, I want him put away."

"Me too, but in the meantime, we need to figure out what to do about those guys your hubby is sending after you. I need to get you out of here and to someplace safe."

"Peter," Kira says, looking horrendously guilty, "I'm so sorry I got you involved in this. It's totally my fault."

"What? How is this in any way your fault?"

"Well, it was me that stepped out of the house that morning when I wasn't supposed to. It was me that talked you into taking me to Mexico. It was me that walked out on Angelo, and worst, it was me that stole this stupid laptop." There are tears running down her face.

I'm on my feet and over to Kira's side of the table in no time flat. I pick her up and hold her tight to my chest as she sobs. "Oh, Kira, how can you blame yourself for this? Look, nobody on this earth has the right to tell you that you can't leave the house. The trip to Mexico was as much yours as it was mine because you made winning it possible. You had a right to come. And leaving Angelo? He never deserved you in the first place. Men who molest children belong in hell anyway. As for the laptop, if he was so stupid as to discard it when it still had stuff on it that could make big trouble for him, then he's just plain stupid. Not one little bit of it is your fault. Not one little bit."

She sniffles. "I guess I know that, but I'm so scared for you. Uncle Marco has some very bad people working for him."

"We're never going to see them," I say. "If they're arriving tomorrow evening, we'll make sure we're on a plane out of here long before then. We'll be back at my place before they even realize you're not here anymore."

"But they have your name too. Won't they just come to your shop? The thought of those guys showing up there is horrible. I don't want you to be in any more danger."

"Look Kira, we'll both be safe there. First, my home address is a PO box because I don't want anyone to know I'm living in my shop illegally. Second, to protect against industrial espionage, my shop is owned through my LLC, then through a fake corporation registered in the Cayman Islands. If my high-tech competition hasn't found it, the Chicago mob won't either."

"But what if they ask around and find one of the women you took there?" I'm glad I can't see Kira's face for that one. I know she has a jealous bone.

"I don't know where they would even start. I have no associations listed anywhere for the places I go, or the people I know. Very few of the girls knew any of the other girls I dated, and I met all of them in clubs. I always pay cash when I go out, so Marco's guys won't even know I go to such places."

"But what if he does find out I'm staying with you and where you live. He's got a lot of, uh, resources."

"We'd be safe enough. I've got two motion activated security cameras at the corners of my building that watch all sides, so we'd be able to see if anyone was checking the place out. The walls of my shop are cinder block and galvanized steel, and the only windows are barred skylights up on the roof. The doors are heavy and they open outwards, so they can't be rammed open. Even the garage door is industrial grade steel. It would take ten minutes with a demolition saw to break in. By then the cops would be there. Failing that, I'm, uh, armed."

I bought my semi-auto shotgun after college because an acquaintance had introduced me to the sport of skeet shooting. I loved the challenge and actually got quite good at it. With it loaded with buckshot instead of the smaller pellets I used for clay pigeons, my Benelli would make a formidable home defense weapon.

"Well..."

"Look, this isn't like the old days where the mafia could make hits with impunity. They're watched closely now, and it would be stupid for them to even try something like that."

I can tell that she concurs with my reasoning, but still has concerns. "Peter, we just met a few days ago. I hate putting you through all this."

"It's worth it to me, if only to have someone to snuggle with at night."

She manages a giggle. "Yeah, I kinda like that too."

I log in and start searching plane flights for tomorrow. It turns out that all the seats to Minneapolis tonight and tomorrow are fully booked. I'm starting to worry until I realize that flying there is the last thing we want to do. In this interconnected age, Marco could find out what flight we were on in time to have more of his guys intercept us at the airport.

I do some more digging. There are no available seats on any flights leaving the island tonight or tomorrow morning. It seems like everyone's flying home at once. Finally, I find a flight to Sioux Falls, via Atlanta, that leaves at 3:50 tomorrow afternoon and has two first class seats right together, so I book them. From there we can rent a car (or more likely an SUV or minivan, since I don't fit into most cars) and make the four-hour drive to my shop. It looks like we've got a plan.

We're both hungry, but the thought of dressing to go out, or even cooking something in our own kitchen, is just too much. We order room service, which I shamelessly collect from the blue-clad woman while in the nude. After eating our fill, we collapse on the bed, with Kira wrapped in my arms.

End of Part Five

Next: Part Six -- Two's Company, but Three's...