“I started to panic a little. Vincent came by, that’s her oldest, that’s the guy you never want to see in a bad mood. He flipped the sign over to Closed, and I was so certain he was going to bash my brains in or something. I can do well in fight, believe me, but that’s someone you never want to cross.”
This Vincent was starting to remind me of my Javier. That wasn’t good. Funny how we had both been wrapped up with bad people at the same times in our lives.
“He asked me about my sales and I told him the truth. I couldn’t afford to lie. He owned this building for crying out loud. But, instead of cutting off my finger, he just smiled and shrugged. Like it was no problem. Then he brought out his briefcase, opened it up, and showed me the shitload of money inside. He told me that it was the real reason this business existed, and as long as I held onto the money for him and made slow deposits into my bank account, their bank account, the business would keep going. It didn’t matter how many people wanted tattoos. All that mattered was that, to the outside, it looked like Sins and Needles was making a lot of dough.”
“Money laundering,” I stated the obvious. “Of course, of course this is just a front.”
He glared at me. “I could have done well somewhere else. I could have done really well. I’m not the problem. The town is the problem.”
“I think you’re at least part of the problem,” I dared to say. “You’ve been cleaning money for a few years now, haven’t you?”
He sighed sharply and took an angry gulp of coffee. “I couldn’t say no.”
“You can always say no.”
“Do you always say no?”
“Not lately.”
“Anyway,” he said, the impatience in his voice rising. “So every week or two a new deposit comes in. I deposit the cash. It looks like I’m making money. Then they take out the cash and they leave me my allowance. I don’t have a say in it but it’s enough to get by on. Then they say they’re giving so much to Sophia and Ben.”
“And you don’t believe them…”
“No. As I said, their love of family is only for appearance’s sake. I doubt Sophia is getting very much, if any.”
“Don’t you think she’d let you know if you were stiffing her?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. She doesn’t answer my calls or my emails. All I can do is send letters in the mail to Ben. I just hope he’s getting it. Anyway, I don’t know what would happen if I asked. She might tell her brothers and they’d get pretty insulted if they knew.”
“Right.”
“And so that’s that. I want out.”
I almost laughed at his bluntness. “Camden. You can’t just get out from something like this. Money laundering is a very serious crime. What are the Madanos into? Drugs? Guns? Prostitution?”
“Does it matter?” he asked wearily.
“Sort of. You have to know where the money is coming from. You have to know the type of people you are dealing with, because like it or not, you’re in business with them.”
“I know the type.”
“But you don’t know their type. You’re the bank. They’re the boss. Who’s their client? What’s their product? Who’s buying what? It all matters.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
I shook my head in thin amusement and finished the rest of my coffee. “Let’s just assume it’s drugs then. I’ve had enough experience with that angle. So then tell me what your plan was before I came along. Or were you always just sort of waiting for me?”
His gaze was sharp. “I wasn’t waiting for you. I saw you in the coffee shop that day and then everything snapped into place, just as everything snapped into place when you saw me.”
“There’s been a lot of fucking between us over the last few days,” I mused bitterly.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m the one fucking you, that’s why you’re sitting here with me, ready to do anything I tell you to.”
“And what we did in the backyard and the floor and the bedroom?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Oh, you never even had a chance to fuck me back.”
I was going to retort something extremely childish like, “oh yeah, that’s because you only gave me five minutes” but the truth was I had nothing to stand on. The sex, believe it or not, had actually meant something to me. I didn’t sleep with him to get access—I would have gotten that anyway—I slept with him because I was starting to like him. Because I wanted to. Because he was one of the sexiest men I’d ever come across. And it was a shame he still was. It was a shame that none of it meant anything. It was a shame that, despite the rather dire situation I was in, I was smarting like some stupid girl who thought she had something more than a one-night stand.
Get your head out of your vagina, I told myself and sat up in the chair a little straighter. I smiled at him, trying to get to the root of the matter.
“All right, so then you saw me and you knew I was going to do something stupid and try to screw you over, right?” I asked.