Protection for Hire (2 page)

H
eaven must smell like homemade ramen noodle soup. Tessa stood in the doorway of the Japanese restaurant and breathed deep, closing her eyes and picking out Jerry’s signature spices in his ramen broth. She was drooling and she didn’t care.

Well, it had been seven loooooooooooong years. Considering she’d eaten Jerry’s ramen once a week up until then, she ought to be excused an excessive Pavlovian reaction. Since she’d gotten out of prison, she’d moved into Mom’s house and began looking for a job, so she hadn’t had time to come here to get her fix.

“Can I help you?”

The young, perky voice interrupted her olfactory cloud of ecstasy and made Tessa open her eyes.

The restaurant hostess, a young woman with long, glossy black hair, stood in front of the wooden hostess podium just inside the restaurant’s glass doors. She had a plastic smile and her eyes were just a little wary of the crazy lady smelling the restaurant. Tessa realized she knew her — Karissa Hoshiwara, one of Jerry’s granddaughters. Of course she wouldn’t remember Tessa, she’d only been a high school freshman when it all happened.

“I’m a friend of Jerry’s. Is it okay if I go in back to see him?” The politeness sounded stiff on Tessa’s tongue, but after so many years, she didn’t really have the right to barge into Jerry’s overheated kingdom unannounced.

“Oh.” Karissa’s smile lost its edge, as if being her grandfather’s friend explained all sorts of you-ought-to-be-in-therapy behavior. “Sure, go ahead.”

As Tessa turned to head back to the kitchen, Karissa suddenly asked, “Do I know you?”

Tessa turned to meet curious eyes. Innocent.
My eyes were never that innocent.

No, she had to remember that she was a new creation in Christ! With copious exclamation points! She had to act like it! “Yeah, actually, your mom is friends with my mom.”

“Oh.” Karissa’s brow wrinkled faintly, marring the perfect skin of a young twenty-something. “What’s your name?”

“Tessa Lancaster.” She couldn’t help the tension in the back of her neck, waiting for the reaction.

Karissa’s dark eyes blinked. Then widened. And then she smiled. “Oh! You’re
that
Tessa.”

She’d provoked a lot of reactions in her life, but never one like this. “Excuse me?”

“I saw your picture from that old newspaper clipping.”

So did everyone. Still didn’t explain the one-step-below-rock-star glow in the girl’s eyes. Tessa wasn’t sure what to say, so she smiled weakly. She probably looked like a sick pig.

“Evangeline showed me the clipping,” Karissa added.

“Evangeline?” The name made Tessa’s smile widen. “How do you know her?”

“I, uh … I met her at Wings.” Karissa’s cheeks were faintly pink.

“You went to Wings?” Karissa didn’t look old enough to be married, let alone at a domestic violence shelter.

“I used to live with my boyfriend,” Karissa confessed. “He started getting rough with me, and we lived nearby the shelter, so I went there one night. Evangeline was volunteering that night. The shelter asked me about my family, and when Evangeline found out my Grandpa Jerry worked for the Otas’ restaurant, she told me about you.”

“She was my cellmate for three years,” Tessa said.

“Oh. I liked her. But I haven’t seen her in a few months.”

“You moved out of your boyfriend’s apartment, right?” Tessa hated that she sounded like a mother but she’d seen too many horrible stories at Wings.

Karissa nodded. “I’m living with a girlfriend in an apartment near San Francisco J-town.”

“You drive from San Francisco to San Jose every day to work?”

“Oh, no. I’m only here today to help Grandpa Jerry out. He’s short-staffed today.”

“That’s nice of you, to give up your Saturday to help him out.”

Her eyes flickered away. “I didn’t have anything else planned.”

Tessa recognized that look, and the meaning behind Karissa’s words. Many of the women at Wings had lost touch with their friends during their abusive relationships, but in trying to regain their normal lives, they battled loneliness and the struggle of making new friends. She wondered if Karissa was the same way.

“Lots of the women staying at Wings could use someone to chat with,” Tessa said. “Uh … if you came to church at Wings with me and Evangeline one Sunday, you could meet them, maybe … be a friendly face.” And maybe Karissa wouldn’t be as lonely herself. Evangeline had helped Tessa find the church
at Wings soon after being released, but this was the first chance she’d had to invite someone else.

Karissa looked uncertain.

“You don’t have to,” Tessa said. “But in case you wanted to. You could see Evangeline again.”

“I … I think I’d like that.” She looked like she even meant it.

“Call me and I’ll pick you up. This is my mom’s home phone number,” she added with a pained sigh. No job, no cell phone. Mom’s cell phone was on one of Tessa’s aunts’ plans and Tessa didn’t want to utilize yakuza cell phone minutes.

A harsh voice gave a short bark of laughter. “Still living with your mom, Tessa?”

Rita, one of the waitresses, approached them with two steaming bowls of ramen. Rita had always been jealous because Tessa’s close relationship with her uncle caused her to receive a kind of respect not typically given to women in the world of the yakuza. In contrast, Rita, the sister of one of the older yakuza members, had only received this waitressing job at Jerry’s restaurant. “It’s been what, four or five months? Still haven’t moved out yet?” Rita managed to say the innocuous line with a sneer in her voice.

Tessa reached out to oh-so-accidentally knock those bowls into Rita’s …

No. Tessa drew her hand back, blinking to clear her head. She had to control her temper better. She wasn’t that person anymore.

“Get back to work, Karissa,” Rita hissed, with a significant glance over Tessa’s shoulder. A couple had entered the restaurant while Karissa chatted with Tessa, they now stood waiting patiently just inside the glass doors. Tessa hadn’t even noticed.

Karissa gave her a small smile and turned to greet the newcomers. Rita wove through the tables to deliver her ramen bowls.

As Tessa headed through the main dining area toward the kitchen at the back, passing patrons in teakwood chairs, her heart started tap dancing. She’d met a new friend. Invited her to church. And in a few minutes, Jerry would crush her in a ginger-scented embrace, then sit her down with a bowl of ramen the size of a wok, stuffed with vegetables and his homemade noodles.

“Coming through!” Rita’s voice sounded almost at her shoulder.

Tessa jerked in surprise, and her elbow connected with something hard. Then the sound of a shattering clay bowl sliced through the buzz of restaurant patrons, and she felt a lash of pain against her ankles.

“Yow!” She grabbed her stinging leg and tried not to hop on her other one as she spied steaming liquid streaming through the grout in the floor tiles. Knowing her luck, she’d twist her knee and do a double back flip landing square on her behind. She side-stepped the river of noodles.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Rita hissed.

“I’m sorry.”

“You did that on purpose.”

Tessa’s temper snapped. “What is your problem? I have better things to do than waste calories making your life miserable.”

Tessa’s raised voice sounded abnormally loud in the small restaurant.

Rita’s face paled. It was the same fearful look Tessa had seen when fellow prisoners found out who she was and what she had done for her uncle. Rita’s reaction made Tessa realize her reputation as a bully hadn’t changed, even though she wasn’t working for her uncle anymore.

And that thought made her anger die away. Because she
had
changed. She wasn’t a bully anymore. And she needed to act like it.

“Let me help you clean up,” she said.

The normal restaurant noises rose again, although some patrons gave her sidelong looks. Tessa found a mop in the broom closet near the restrooms at the back of the dining area and started cleaning up the spilled ramen broth. Rita bent to pick up the clay bowl pieces, head down, but casting occasional glances her way — filled with fear.

It hurt.

“Got a new job so soon, Tessa?”

The taunting voice shot adrenaline down Tessa’s spine and she snapped to attention. She whirled around to face her cousin Fred, Uncle Teruo’s son, striding through the restaurant like he owned it.

She had expected Fred to at least be obligated to come see her or talk to her in the three months she’d been out, yet this was the first he’d shown his face to her, and it looked like it was entirely by accident.

Fred had always hated her for being stronger, faster, and smarter than him. Then one night she discovered him panicked because he’d murdered his girlfriend. Because she knew her uncle would want her to, she’d taken the bloody knife and shouldered the blame for Fred’s crime.

Now her cousin owed her, but rather than gratitude, it made his hatred slice even deeper than before. That hatred glared out of his eyes as he stalked toward her.

Fred had always unfairly lashed out at her with his nasty temper, but Tessa had never let him get away with it. She wasn’t about to let him get away with it now.

She’d never been so grateful for her Caucasian father’s tall
genes as she straightened and stared down at Fred’s beady eyes. He stopped a few feet from her, probably because he’d have to crick his neck to glare at her and that would just be embarrassing for him.

“Dealing with garbage suits you.” Fred’s lip curled.

“Don’t worry. I’m not after your day job.” Tessa smiled.

Her comment went over his head. “I don’t clean up messes.”

“No, I clean yours up for you.”

His neck reddened.

To think she’d gone to prison for this moldy tomato.

No, she hadn’t gone to prison for him. She’d gone to prison for his father.

She flashed him a smile. “Fred, do you have a point to make, for once in your life, or are you just here contaminating the air?”

She caught a few gasps from the quiet restaurant that had stopped to witness their tense conversation. She realized that because of what she’d done for him, she could freely insult this rat dropping whereas others could not.

“You can’t speak to me that way,” he spat at her.

“I just did, you squashed slug.” And Fred knew that if he touched her, she’d use his head to clean up the spilled ramen instead of the mop in her hand.

He sputtered. Fred didn’t have many brain cells devoted to quick comebacks. “You ex-convict.”

“What’s wrong, Freddy-weddy? If you’re going to insult the ex-convict, you better be prepared to take what you dish out.”

“Tessa, leave him alone.”

A commanding voice filled the restaurant even though he hadn’t raised his voice above its normal growl.

Rita and the other waiter scurried away, and patrons suddenly
turned back to their meals, although the volume was barely half what it had been before. Subtly, the air became denser, as if blanketed by an invisible fog.

Not a fog. The presence of the man walking into his restaurant — one of several he owned — was more charged than a mere fog.

“Uncle Teruo.” Tessa stood her ground as he approached her, aware of Fred scuttling out of his father’s way like a cockroach. She dropped her eyes and bowed at the waist in a sign of respect.

He paused, acknowledging her greeting, then suddenly his large square palms were cupping her face, rough against her skin but tender in their touch, raising her gaze to meet his. His eyes, half-shadowed by eyelids puffy with age and responsibility, gleamed with the familiar tenderness that was like water to her parched soul. He shook her face gently, playfully, then drew her to him in a brief embrace. “How are you, Tessa?”

“I’m fine, Uncle,” she spoke into his suit jacket, breathing the familiar scent of his favorite brand of cigar. He had hugged her like this the day she’d been released, and the smell brought back that feeling of being free, of being home. Her fingers curled briefly on his back, then he straightened and stepped away.

“Have you eaten yet?” he asked her.

Now those were the words she wanted to hear. “Nope.” There was that drool again, right on cue.

He turned her by the shoulders and pushed her ahead of him toward the kitchen, where Jerry was still blissfully unaware of the almost-fight between the niece and son of the San Francisco yakuza boss.

Tessa had thought Uncle Teruo’s arrival was something along the lines of a rescue from a fate worse than death, but now she wasn’t so sure. She felt a bit like she’d jumped from a wok into hibachi coals.

She’d gotten her hug from Jerry — today, more garlic-scented than ginger-scented — and her massive bowl of ramen, which was thankfully very garlic-scented.

Eating in Jerry’s office with Uncle Teruo sitting across the desk from her … not such a happy place.

Normally she loved talking with Uncle Teruo. Except not when he asked things like, “How are you feeling?”

Read: Up for anything more strenuous? Like something that involves beating the stuffing out of somebody?

“I’m doing fantastic now that I have this.” She indicated her bowl, peering through the steam at the floating bean sprouts. She wanted to say grace, but somehow saying grace in front of her sociopathic cellmates had been easier than saying grace in front of her Buddhist, gangster uncle.