The Family Business 3 (The Family Business #3)(29)

“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.

“Hurry up!” Sasha hissed, as if I didn’t understand how serious this was. I flipped her the bird at the same time I slid the key into a lock and the light turned green.

“Junior! It’s me, Paris,” I called into the room before entering so that my brother wouldn’t greet me with a gun in his hand. We Duncans had been known to shoot first and ask questions later—or at least some of us had. As I stepped into the room, however, I realized that there had been no reason for me to announce myself. The room was empty except for a couple of suitcases.

“Dammit!” I stuck my head out of the room and called down the hall to Sasha. “Yo, push all the buttons to the top floor and then get down here.”

When she got into the room, I gave her instructions. “I need you to go find the surveillance room and destroy the video of what just happened in that elevator—along with the one of us entering the elevator and the lobby.” I didn’t need to explain to her how bad things would be for our whole family if we were identified. It wasn’t like we were in L.A. or Miami, where nobody knew us. This was New York. We lived here.

“You better pray to God that there is a man guarding those tapes. I’ll meet you at the car.” She took off, leaving me in the hotel room alone.

I opened the first suitcase to discover that it was completely empty, devoid of clothes, so it was no surprise when I found the second one held only a pair of Junior’s jeans and a sweatshirt. A woman’s outfit that must have been Sonya’s was draped over a chair. I turned around and spotted two cell phones on the bed. Things were going from bad to worse. Ditching cell phones was the first thing someone did when they were getting ready to go off the grid.

With no valuable information to be found, it was time for me to get the hell out of there. By now someone could have spotted the bodies, and it wouldn’t be long before I was hearing sirens. Grabbing the phones on my way out, I headed for the stairwell. Less than three minutes later, I was in the car, feeling jittery as I waited for Sasha.

She slid into the car a few minutes later. “Mission accomplished,” she said proudly, always ready to brag about her skill for getting whatever she wanted out of a man. “But our handiwork has been discovered. Five-O should be here any minute.”

Just as I drove away from the parking lot, two NYPD cruisers arrived in front of the hotel.

“Any clue where Junior and Sonya are?” Sasha asked as we headed down Ditmars to the entrance of the Van Wyck Expressway.

“No f*cking idea. Probably in the wind.” I showed her their phones. “They left these behind.”

She shook her head. “Damn. This is bad, cuz.”

“No shit.”

I picked up my phone and dialed Orlando’s number. “Hey, O, it’s me. Tell Daddy that it looks like Junior and ol’ girl have gone ghost for good.”