Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (34 page)

Benedetta’s crying daughters came out of the house as we pulled up, tears streaming down their faces. Silently but swiftly, they ushered their mother into the house. Tino Fabrizio might be one sorry excuse for a human being, but he had somehow managed to produce three beautiful and caring daughters. It would be a long haul before their lives returned to any sense of normality, but I knew the four women would get through this together.

As we left Benedetta’s house in Nick’s car, a group text came in from Hana.
Kirchner’s on his way to Looking Good.

“Seriously?” I said. “That’s happening tonight, too?”

I’d thought the fire at the bistro was the Thursday-night event Tino had referenced in the conversation recorded on the spy device. Apparently Tino had more in store. Kirchner obviously hadn’t heard about Tino’s arrest …
yet.
He was proceeding with whatever devious plan they’d concocted before Tino had been nabbed.

Nick drove like a bat out of hell and pulled into the lot of a fast-food chicken place a block down from the optical shop. We sat and anxiously waited for the signal for all hands on deck. I’d been exhausted only moments before, but the thought of catching Kirchner in the act gave me a second wind.

Nick reached over and fingered one of my singed locks, a smile playing about his mouth. “Burning Embers seems to have been an appropriate color choice.”

I cut a pointed look his way. “Don’t even go there.”

Josh pushed the button to unroll his window. “It smells smoky in here.”

I scoffed. “Sheesh. Excuse me for stinking up the place.” It’s not like I’d wanted to smell like a campfire. The stench was drowning out my classic Chanel No. 5.

As Josh’s window went down, a neon-green Cyber-Shield vehicle passed by, the number six noted on the back window.

“There’s Kirchner now,” Nick said. “Hope he’s enjoying the drive because the next ride he takes will be with law enforcement.”

Two minutes later, Hana sent another text to our phones.
If you want a piece of this action, you better get over here.

Nick started the car and we drove to Looking Good, making our way slowly and with the lights off. We parked twenty yards away from the front door and climbed out of the car. Nick and Josh were armed with their Glocks, while I had my Cobra. Along with the others, we moved in, swiftly and silently, toward the shop’s front door, stopping in the dark shadows that flanked the entrance.

Kirchner stepped out of the door, failing to notice us as he turned back to lock it. We agents swarmed him, guns at the ready.

“Hands up!” Hana yelled as she bolted toward Kirchner. “Federal law enforcement!”

He turned, saw the horde descending on him, and tried to run back into the optical shop. Stupid, really. The back door was covered by a group of agents, too. There’d be no way for him to escape. And there was no one at the store to take hostage, either, so he’d have no leverage, no bargaining chip. A canister of tear gas is all it would take to put a quick end to any standoff. But I supposed it was his fight-or-flight instinct kicking in. He couldn’t fight such a large group of agents, and back through the door appeared to be the only place to flee to.

He wasn’t fast enough, though. Before he could pull the door back open, Hana, Will, and Eddie were on him, slamming him against the glass and grabbing his arms to immobilize him. In five seconds flat he was cuffed and on the ground, the joint IRS/FBI team standing over him. As he squirmed on the ground, I frisked him and pulled a manila clasp envelope out of his jacket.

Everyone gathered around as I stood, opened the clasp, and pulled the envelope open. Josh shined his cell phone into it. Inside was a stack of twenty-dollar bills secured by a red rubber band.

I removed the bills and counted them. “Five hundred dollars,” I announced when I’d finished.

Looked like the optician at Looking Good had decided to pay the protection fee, after all. He’d probably feared not only for his own life, but those of his wife and son. With any luck, now that Tino and his goons were in custody, the man would be willing to testify against the mobster.

I shoved the money back into the envelope and surveyed the group. “We did it! We took down Tino Fabrizio and his minions!”

The Operation Italian Takeout team exchanged smiles and high fives.
Slap! Slap! Slap!

“Good job, guys!” I held out a hand and exchanged fist bumps with the FBI agents.

Once we’d finished celebrating, I knelt down and looked Cole Kirchner in the eye. “We got your boss tonight, too. Did you know he planned to set a fire at his wife’s restaurant? With Benedetta, Dario, and me inside?”

He averted his eyes.
Yeah, he’d known.
That made taking him down all the more sweet.
Neener-neener.

*   *   *

Relief flooded through me. It was finally over.

Nick took me back to the restaurant to round up my car, and I drove my Elantra back to my town house. With Fabrizio and his thugs now in custody, I could return to my home and my cats and my normal life. Not that my life could really be called normal …

Given the late hour, I tried to sneak quietly back into my place. So as not to alarm Alicia, though, I turned on the hall light so she’d be able to see that it was me in the house if she happened to wake up and peek her head out of the guest room upstairs.

Anne scurried up and mewed, rising onto her hind legs like a meerkat, desperate for me to pick her up and give her the loving she’d missed while I’d been gone. I proceeded to do just that, cuddling her in my arms and scratching the back of her neck with my fingers. “Mommy’s home.” I gave her a kiss on the head. “And she sure did miss you.”

Anne responded by purring and rubbing her face against my shoulder.

Henry actually deigned to hop down from his perch atop the TV cabinet. While he wouldn’t go so far as to come over to me, it was clear he would be willing to tolerate it if I happened to venture over to him and offer him a stroke or two under his chin.

Carrying Anne in my arms, I went over to Henry and knelt down. I set Anne aside for a moment, and gave Henry the strokes he’d never admit to wanting.
What an ego, huh?

“Tara?” Alicia’s raspy voice came from the top of the stairs. She looked down the staircase at me, her face breaking into a sleepy smile.

“I’m back.” I put a hand on a chair to leverage myself to a stand. “We got Tino and his goons.” Eric Echols was really more of a geek than a goon, but no sense belaboring the point.

“Way to go!” Alicia said as she descended the steps. “We should celebrate with a glass of wine.”

A glass of wine sounded heavenly. I was still buzzing with adrenaline and would need something to calm me down if I had any chance of getting some sleep. We might have Tino Fabrizio behind bars, but we still had Adam Stratford to deal with in the morning. A woman’s work is never done.

Alicia and I went to the kitchen, where she poured us each a glass of moscato. As she held out the glass, she leaned toward me and sniffed. “Why do you smell like smoke?”

I accepted the glass from her. “Tino Fabrizio locked me and his wife and one of the chefs inside the restaurant and set the place on fire.”

Her mouth gaped. “Oh, my God!”

I shrugged. “All in a day’s work.”

She simply stared at me. “I will never understand what possesses you to do that job.”

“It beats preparing tax returns.”

Apparently, she begged to differ. “I’ll take a depreciation schedule over a mobster any day.”

I took a big glug of wine and eyed her. “Promise me that after you get married you won’t forget about me.”

“Forget about you?” She set her wine glass down and grabbed me by the shoulders. “How could I?” She shook her head as if the mere idea were preposterous. “I love Daniel, but I’ll still need you. He’s incapable of giving an opinion when I go shopping for clothes, and he refuses to go to high tea with me.”

“I hate high tea, too.”

“I know,” she said, smiling as she released me. “But you’re still willing to go with me because you know it makes me happy. That’s a true friend and that’s rare. If you think I’m going to give that up for some boy, you’re crazy.” She picked up her glass and raised it, as Benedetta had done the day I met her. “To true friends.”

I gently tapped my glass against hers.
Clink.
“Hear, hear!”

chapter forty-five

I
Need a Vacation

Just as Alicia had helped Nick with his undercover style as an art dealer, she got up early Friday morning to help me become my new alter ego, the octogenarian Melvina Cannoli.

“Cannoli?”
Alicia said as she sprinkled talcum powder into my hair to make it look gray. “Couldn’t you come up with something better than that?”

“It was short notice,” I said. “Besides, I was hungry.”

“Good thing you weren’t horny or you’d have ended up Melvina
Orgasm
.”

I shrugged. “I bet I would’ve been real popular in high school with a name like that.”

Once my hair was properly powdered, she applied my makeup, using an old bottle of foundation. The color hadn’t quite matched my skin tone and I’d stashed it in the back of a drawer, too lazy to throw it out. It had become thick and dry, the perfect consistency to spackle on my face to make me look older. She used a sharp black eyeliner to draw small lines around my eyes.

When my face was finished, we went to my closet to look for something for me to wear.

“Do you have anything that’s outdated?” she said, sliding hangers back and forth as she looked over my wardrobe.

“I don’t want to be one of those kind of old ladies,” I said. “Not all mature women dress like Lu.” Many of the women I’d seen at Whispering Pines were smartly dressed in clothes I recognized from the Chico’s catalogue. They could teach my boss a thing or two about fashion.

We eventually settled on a pair of black pants and a red blouse, over which I draped a scarf in a black and gray houndstooth pattern. I looked like a grandma that had it going on.

Nick swung by to pick me up, laughing when I opened the door. “What’s it say that even with gray hair I still want to bang you?”

It said a lot, actually. It said that, should Nick and I be lucky enough to live a long life together, he’d still find me attractive when the bloom was off my rose.

“You can bang me,” I told him, “and afterward I’ll pat you on the head, give you a nickel, and bake you some cookies.”

“Freaky.”

We drove over to the complex where Alicia and I had lived a few years ago, taking places in front of my former unit. Stratford wasn’t due until ten, but the residents of Whispering Pines would be arriving shortly.

The first ones on the scene were Harold, Jeb, and Isaiah, who arrived with two ladies in a nice Buick. I directed them to a visitor’s parking spot, waving my arms. “Over here, guys!”

Nick and I helped Isaiah into his wheelchair, and the gang joined us at the curb.

Lu and Carl were the next to arrive. Lu waited in the front seat while Carl walked around the car in his shiny white bucks to open the door for her. Such a sweet, old-fashioned gesture.

“I like your shoes!” Harold called to Carl, lifting his foot and wiggling it as if performing the hokeypokey. “See? I’ve got the same ones.”

Carl stopped to admire them. “You and I share the same good taste.”

Nick and I, on the other hand, shared a quiet chuckle.

Carl opened the door and helped Lu out of her seat. Her beehive stood proud atop her head, her extra-hold hairspray causing the pink mound to glisten in the morning sun.

Jeb, whose arm was linked through that of the woman who’d driven them over, gave Lu a wink and a nod. Looked like there were no hard feelings.
Good.
Life’s too short.

The sixteen of us chatted excitedly among ourselves until Harold noticed the Ozarks Express van pull into the parking lot. He pointed to the entrance. “There he is!”

As the group murmured excitedly, Nick stepped away so it wouldn’t look like he was with us.

The van pulled to a stop in front of us and out hopped Adam Stratford in his usual sunglasses and cowboy hat. He had a clipboard in his hand, a stack of preprinted receipt forms held in place under the clip. “Good morning, folks!” he called out in his spicy Cajun accent. “How’s everyone doing today?”

I stepped forward. “We’re just great.” I held out my hand. “I’m Melvina Cannoli, the one you spoke with on the phone.”

Stratford cocked his head, eyeing me closely. Could he tell that my face bore a quarter-inch coating of puttylike foundation?

He shook my hand, probably figuring my eyesight had gone so bad I didn’t realize how awful my makeup looked.

I held up my purse. “We’ve all got our cash and traveler’s checks.”

Adam dipped his head and his eyes flashed with greed. “Wonderful. You all will have such a nice time on this trip. The last group I took up to Hot Springs has already scheduled another vacation with me.”

Sure they did.

“You said we could take a look inside the van,” I reminded him. “I’d love to get in there and pick my seat.”

“Of course. You’re welcome to take a look inside.” He stepped over to the doors and opened them. “Climb on in, everybody. I think you’ll find the seating very comfortable.”

The group streamed toward the van. Though several of the people glanced his way, Stratford didn’t seem to recognize any of them. That told me he’d ripped off quite a few senior citizens, too many for him to remember. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he realized this morning’s look-see was a farce.

Jeb scraped his way toward the van. He’d removed the tennis balls from the feet of his walker. Removed the usual rubber tips, too. The ends were raw metal now. When he reached the door, he placed one of the tips on top of Stratford’s loafer and bore down with all his weight.

Stratford grimaced. “You’re on my foot, sir.”

Jeb made no move to lift his walker. When Stratford attempted to pull his foot out from under the walker, Harold rolled Isaiah’s wheelchair up onto Stratford’s other foot.