Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (12 page)

“I’m just living my life here, Officer,” Mike said, his respectful tone strained. Keep it together, Mike, I thought to myself. Please.

“Yeah, your life—I know exactly what life that is. We’re not done, Frazetta. Not by a long shot.” He looked Mike over. “You pissed? Wanna take a shot, asshole? Come on. Hit me. Do it.”

Mike didn’t, and he kept his mouth shut.

“Leave him alone, Pembry,” I snapped from a few feet away. I was entirely willing to hit him.

Pembry rounded on me. His face was red, his eyes bulging. Annemarie was right about that cardiac event. Maybe it would happen right now. We’d wait a couple minutes to call an ambulance.

He didn’t drop dead, however. He took a step toward me. “Shut the fuck up, you fucking whore. This ain’t none of your business.”

Now, Michael did move. He took one step forward, fury making his eyes wide as his nostrils flared and he started to raise a hand.

I held mine up, though. “Mike, no!” I didn’t want him to ruin his life by getting sent back to jail. Pembry wasn’t worth that.

Pembry glanced back at Mike before he looked me over with those oily eyes. “Oh. Okay, I get it. Fucking the help, hey Frazetta? Guess you got a soft spot after all, huh.”

“If you even—” Mike started, and I saw a glimmer of anger in his eyes.

I knew Mike could handle Pembry for me, but I didn’t want him to risk his parole. Before he had a chance, I took a step toward Pembry. “You’re just pissed I wouldn’t touch that three inch baby-dick of yours with a ten foot pole, Pembry. And you know what? It’s not even the size; it’s the stench. And the work it would take to find it under all that fucking fat.”

“I can hold you—”

“You can fuck straight off is what you can do, Pembry, before I call your buddies in here and have to hauled off for harassment and intimidation. Not to mention soliciting me for sex in exchange for money.” I said the last part real loud, so everyone could hear.

Pembry boiled with anger, his whole body twitching and shaking with it. But he didn’t respond. Just turned, and left.

When he was gone, Mike grabbed me in a big bear hug, and I felt my heart flutter in a way I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. And for the first time in forever, I didn’t try to fight it. The rest of the gym patrons suddenly burst into applause, cheering and whistling while I laughed with relief, and when Mike pulled away I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him in front of everyone. I didn’t care. We were finally free of that asshole, and I wanted to celebrate.

Mike

“You need to take this a step further,” Jarome said to me the next day, an hour before I was supposed to check in with Annemarie. Ella was there as well, and agreed with him.

“Last thing I want is Pembry coming back around to bite me,” I told them. “Now he’s off my back, that’s enough for me.”

“Listen,” Jarome said. “In six weeks, there’s an open call for new contenders in the junior circuit. Having baggage like Pembry could screw it up for you. They don’t care if you’re an ex-con, but Pembry could pull strings and mess it up for you.”

“Between what he pulled today, and what he pulled with me,” Ella said, “there has to be some disciplinary action that can happen to shut him down. Make sure he doesn’t cause more problems.”

I thought about Tony’s promise to dig up Pembry’s skeletons. Everybody had ‘em. Tony would find Pembry’s. But… digging up blackmail material was the Family way, right? And that’s what I didn’t want sneaking into my life.

So, I finally agreed. “Alright. Alright; I’ll talk to Annemarie about it.”

“I’ll go with you,” Ella said.

I frowned, uncomfortable. Ella hadn’t met anyone in my life except who was at the gym. Introducing to Annemarie seemed somehow pretty close to taking her home to meet Ma. “I don’t know…”

She dug her heels in. I was starting to be able to tell when she did that. It was cute, like everything else about her. “She needs to know, and I’m a witness. Plus, Pembry’s an asshole and I’ll do whatever I need to if it means seeing him kicked off the force, honestly. He doesn’t deserve a badge.”

I mulled that over a second. Pembry with a badge meant oversight, even it was barely there. Pembry without a badge… there was no telling what he might do. Still, she had a point. “No guarantee they’ll kick him off,” I said.

“Well they can do something,” she said. “I don’t care what, as long as he knows he can’t just fuck with people like he does.”

“She’s not wrong,” Jarome said. “It’ll at least hurt his credibility if he becomes a problem later on.”

“Fine,” I said. “Alright. I’ll take you with me. I check in with her in a bit. You free?”

“I can reschedule a couple of sessions,” she said.

I hated putting her out like that, but she wouldn’t hear about it so, I let her do what she was gonna do anyway. At least if she was with me I felt like she was somehow safer. Pembry wasn’t the kinda guy that just let shit go. Now he knew that Ella and I were connected, I almost called Tony to take the job with the Don, just so I could get eyes on her. Say what you will about the Family, but they took care of their own like that.

Ella took care of her appointments, making calls and scribbling in the book up front while I watched her.

“Things are going well, I take it?” Jarome asked. He didn’t have to say what he meant.

I shrugged. “Yeah. I think so. For now, anyway.”

“You think there’s something that will put her off? Besides your record?” Jarome chuckled. “I think you might not know women so well.”

“I don’t,” I admitted honestly, “but… I don’t even have my own place yet. Respectable place, I mean—no offense—and if I make it into any circuit I’m gonna be busy all the time. Plus…” Well, Jarome didn’t know about the Family, and didn’t need to. “…there’s other stuff. I don’t wanna get too close and then have her run off, you know?”

Jarome sighed, and clapped me on the shoulder. “My wife threatened to divorce me, after my coma. People hear that, and think she must be awful. But, she was afraid that I would leave her and my daughter without a husband, without a father. And she was right. It wasn’t just me that had something to lose if I didn’t wake up the next time. They had as much or more riding on every fight. Not money, you know; not a win. Me. My family.”

“That’s why you quit, huh?”

“It’s why I retired,” he said. “I didn’t quit, I re-prioritized. Started this place.”

“I get it,” I said. “You’re a good man. A good husband.”

“I try to be. My point is,” he went on, “Marissa knows everything about me. All the good, all the bad. All the things I wish I could forget, and which I would never want anyone else to know. She only threatened to leave me, when it looked like I might leave her and Anya. Sometimes, women who love men like us are stronger than we think, and they know better than we do what parts of us are good and bad. It’s not always what we think they are. If you have feelings for Ella, you should let her in. She might surprise you.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

He chuckled. “Well then you’re wasting time anyway, my friend.”

“Fair point,” I said. “Maybe I will.”

Ella finished up, grabbed her jacket, and left with me while I thought Jarome’s advice over.

It took us just a little while to get to the Parole office by bus. Inside, we waited quietly, sitting in chairs next to one another. Ella reached over and took my hand, clasped it in hers, her fingers splayed out to slip between mine. Those small, delicate looking hands didn’t fool me, but for a moment it gave me this creeping worry that she was vulnerable, somehow. I wanted to keep her with me, in sight, so I could protect her. Yeah, I know—she could definitely handle herself. Still, I couldn’t help it. I’d do anything in my power to protect that girl. I knew it in my bones.

“Michael?” Annemarie said from the door as she shooed away another parolee.

Ella stood with me, and Annemarie looked her over. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Ella Robinson,” I said. “She was a… well like a witness to some stuff.”

“I’d like to file a formal complaint against Jason Pembry,” Ella said, her voice flinty and sharp. “Alongside Mike’s harassment complaint.”

Annemarie looked from one of us to the other with a look that said she was in no mood for extra paperwork, but she waved us both in.

“I can get the reports to the right people,” she said as we all sat, “but so we’re clear, I have no authority in that realm of police bureaucracy. My advocacy has some more weight for Michael, but for you all I can do is take your testimony and fax it to the right people.”

“Good enough,” Ella said.

Annemarie leaned her elbows on the desk. “We’ll forgo the piss test this time,” she said. “What happened yesterday?”

I told her my version, and Ella told her the same one with some extra details I hadn’t really noticed. As she told her story, she squeezed my hand a few times and got a little red around the cheeks.

It got worse when she told Annemarie about her own encounter with Pembry. It was the first I’d heard of it, and I had almost decided to give Tony the go ahead when Annemarie gave a long sigh and told us she was glad we brought all this up.

“This won’t be Pembry’s first disciplinary action,” Annemarie said. “I doubt it will go over well. I’m sorry you had to deal with that, Ms. Robinson. Fill this out here, I’ll fill in Pembry’s details.”

While Ella did that, I talked to Annemarie about the open call for contenders in the junior circuit.

“Six weeks?” She said, tapping her fingers on the desk. “Could be tough, Michael; I won’t lie. I’ll need to talk to the DA about loosening your parole restrictions, see if we can switch to a phone check-in. Since you’re off from a possession charge, they may not like giving up the drug tests.”

“You’d do that for me?” I asked.

Annemarie shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t think you’re in danger of backsliding. Not if you managed to deal with Pembry’s bullshit for this long. The best thing to deal with him, you know, is if you’d managed to get proof that he’d tried to plant drugs.”

I shrugged. “I know. We’ll work with what we’ve got.”

Ella signed her statement and passed it back to Annemarie, who signed and stamped it before she set it in the tray of her ancient fax machine.

After a moment, Ella sucked in a breath. “We do,” she said. “Oh my God, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. We do have footage of Pembry trying to plant evidence.”

“That’s a whole other ball game,” Annemarie said. “You sure about that?”

Ella nodded, a huge smile on her face. “Absolutely. Mike’s bag was in sight of the camera yesterday, and Pembry had his phone out after he dropped the baggie in. The camera only catches the front end of the bench.”

“I’d started putting my bag up toward the front so maybe he’d give up,” I said. “Shit, I didn’t even think about the camera.”

“I only know because…” Ella coughed. “Um, the camera faces the ring for, you know… insurance and stuff.”

It took me a minute, and my eyebrows crept up. Oh, yeah. Jarome had explained that, casually, when he suggested we maybe not train after hours anymore. Or, train at home, where there were no cameras.

“Jarome probably still has the footage,” Ella said.

“Get it to me,” Annemarie said, “and I can make sure the DA sees it. We won’t file this report with Internal Affairs; just go straight to the DA’s office and nip this whole problem in the bud. Maybe I can actually get some work done.” She rolled her eyes, and scribbled on a form before she passed it to me. “Sign this.”

After I did, the meeting was finished. Annemarie was nothing if not efficient.

“Mitchell!” She shouted from her desk. “Get in here, boy.”

A moody, troubled-teen looking kid outside hopped right up off his seat when Annemarie called him, and slunk sheepishly into her office.

“Wow,” Ella muttered. “She’s hardcore.”

“She is that,” I agreed. “What do you say we check the footage and then maybe go celebrate with dinner.”

Ella stopped me at the door, putting herself in front of me. She planted her hands on her hips and looked up at me, something serious on her mind. “Deal,” she said, “but I don’t feel like going out. Let’s go back to your place.”

I rubbed my head, and winced. “I don’t know… how about your place—”

“No,” she said. “We’ve been to my place. I want to see your place. And, I don’t want to just eat dinner. So we’re clear.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “yeah, we’re uh… we’re crystal clear. It’s just that…”

She sighed. “What? What could it possibly be?”

“I mean… I don’t exactly have my own place.”

Ella frowned, and then looked almost horrified, like it meant I was homeless.

“I mean I do, just, it’s kind of on loan… I live, ah… well I live over the gym.”

Ella blinked. “Okay? And?”

“That’s all. It’s just, you know, kinda small and doesn’t got a lot of anything in there…”

“Does it have a bed? Or even a floor?” She stepped closer to me. “Basically any horizontal surface or… something to brace myself on? A countertop, a wall…?”

Fuck, she looked like a hungry predator.

“Yeah, I got all that,” I said.

“Good.” Ella smiled. “Pizza?”

“Yeah. Pizza’s… fine.”

I wasn’t that hungry anyway. Not for food, at least.