We were actually staying in a safe house that I kept at the residences at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Battery Park. By the time I’d parked the car in the garage and led Sonya into the private elevator, I could see the stress on her face. It had been a long and difficult day as we made moves to throw X off our trail. I could see that she was in serious need of some stress relief, which was why I’d had room service deliver food and champagne.
“I’ve never stayed anyplace this nice,” Sonya said as we sat down to eat. She was staring out the window at the Statue of Liberty across the water.
“Yeah, it’s beautiful. Just like you,” I said, reaching for her hand.
We ate in silence for a while, lost in our own thoughts about the ordeal we were enduring. I, for one, felt confident that X and his men were still scratching their heads, wondering when we were coming out of our hotel room. Even if they’d figured out that we were gone, there was no way for them to pick up our trail again. I’d had the cab driver drop us off in front of a small bodega, and we didn’t get into my car until long after he was gone. If anything, they might guess that we were hiding in one of the apartments above the store.
“I’m just glad we got away from X and his men,” I said, but Sonya still looked uncertain.
“Babe, don’t worry,” I told her. “There’s no way anyone could know where we are right now.”
“What about your family? Don’t they know you’d come here?”
I shook my head. “Even they don’t know about this place. When I bought it, I didn’t tell anyone.”
She looked surprised. “You own this place?”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I might not spend lavishly like Paris or Rio, but once in a while I like to buy nice things.”
“Okay, but, I mean, why would you buy a fancy place like this and then not live in it? And why would you keep it a secret?”
“For a situation like this,” I explained. “I didn’t buy this place to live in it. My brother Orlando came up with the idea years ago, that each one of us needed a safe place we could go to if things ever got dangerous, and this place was perfect for me. No one would ever come looking for a simple guy like me in this kind of luxury. ”
She nodded like it all made sense to her now. “So, this is basically a hideout?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that. And since not even my family knows where it is, you can relax and consider yourself completely safe tonight.”
I saw some of the tension leave her shoulders. “Feel a little better now?” I asked, and she nodded. “Good. Now, about what you said earlier . . .”
“What did I say?” she asked.
“You said if I got you out of the hotel safely you’d have a little something for me tonight,” I said, raising my eyebrows suggestively.
A sultry grin emerged on her face as she reached for the buttons on her blouse. “Let’s get busy christening this secret hideaway.”
Paris
18
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor. Good thing that Samuel had pushed the button before we took care of him, or else we would have had to search every floor to find Junior. Even so, I still had no clue which room on the seventh floor was his, so I did the only thing I could think of: I started putting the key card into doors to see if one would open. Sasha stayed in the elevator, holding the door open so it wouldn’t travel back down to the lobby. The last thing we needed was for an elevator full of dead bodies to arrive down there. I moved as fast as I could, knowing that she could only hold it for so long before someone started to wonder why it was stuck on this floor.