Stone Cold Read online

  Stone Cold

  Kristi Belcamino

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Foreword

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  Prologue

  Mexico City

  It was the first time he’d made a public appearance in years, and the people of Mexico could hardly believe it. They lined the street in a thick mass barely held back from the passing funeral procession by Mexico City police standing in a human chain.

  The black limousine crawled along behind the hearse, hampered by heavily armed SWAT team members on foot, surrounding the vehicles and creating a wall of protection four men deep.

  Fights broke out as the vehicles passed. Those who viewed El Jefe Grande as a benevolent saint went head to head with those who considered him a stone-cold killer— asesino a piedra fría.

  On the rooftops lining the main thoroughfare, sharpshooters from three different police departments were spread out, searching for anyone who might intend harm to the occupants of the limousine.

  Inside the vehicle, behind dark-tinted, bulletproof windows, Nico Ortiz Morales, aka El Jefe, looked out at the people and felt numb.

  He didn’t flinch when a man with a gun broke through the police line at one corner and made it all the way over to the window before a SWAT member shot him dead, flecks of brain and blood spatter landing on the window.

  At that moment, he wondered if his heart had died along with his wife.

  He’d loved her more than anything else in his world.

  And yet that love had not saved her.

  She’d killed herself anyway. Her beautiful body found splayed out like a virgin in their wedding bed. He couldn’t help but imagine her in front of her vanity, carefully applying her makeup while he was on business in the dark reaches of the jungle. While he was building his drug empire, she was pulling on her silky wedding gown that still fit after fifteen years and penning the note that would shatter the remains of his broken heart.

  While he was speaking to coca farmers in Columbia about cocaine, she was pouring herself a glass of their most expensive wine from their estate’s cellar. She ordered the house staff not to disturb her, and then she proceeded to empty the prescription bottle into her mouth. She had not even finished the glass of wine before she lay dead on their bed, clutching the wedding ring she’d removed from her finger.

  He’d returned home to find her body. It was later, after the coroner had come and taken her away, that he had found the note on the nightstand. She’d always been a romantic and had sealed it with red wax.

  He’d ripped it open carelessly. It had taken him two attempts to comprehend what he was reading.

  She could no longer live with the guilt of betrayal. She’d betrayed him not once, but twice.

  Most recently, she’d betrayed him by embarking on a year-long affair with a young Parisian fashion designer she’d been secretly financing. The young man had killed himself when she’d broken off the relationship earlier in the week.

  The second confession was by far the worst betrayal.

  She’d lied about the death of his daughter.

  In the end, it was why he’d ordered her burial in a plot in Mexico City away from his own family plot.

  And yet, still he’d mourn her publicly and attend her spectacular funeral mass at the largest Catholic church in Mexico City. It would be a service befitting the wife of someone of his status. The public would expect no less.

  But once he’d honored her with a funeral mass worthy of her position as his wife, he would never allow himself to grieve for her again.

  She’d tainted his love and grief by the second confession. The one she’d seemed to add in at the last minute as if it were a postscript.

  And fool woman that she was, she hadn’t even realized that the second confession would be the one that brought him to his knees. He could have lived with her affair. After all, she’d once forgiven him for the same transgression.

  But the second secret—the one she’d kept from him for the past two years—had been the ultimate betrayal.

  It was unforgivable.

  His daughter—his own flesh and blood—was not dead as she’d told him two years ago.

  The child was alive.

  And living in San Francisco.

  Her name was Rosalie.

  1

  Rosalie shuffled the playing cards, expertly executing a one-handed shuffle that would make any Vegas dealer proud. She then dealt the cards with precision, each card lying perfectly on top of the one thrown before it.

  Dante waited until all of his cards were before him on the black oak table before he scooped them up and gave me a look, raising his eyebrow.

  “What?” I said.

  “You guys play poker a lot?”

  “Maybe. Got a problem with that?”

  “I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a nine-year-old to be a card shark, that’s all.”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old man,” I said. “Besides, it’s card sharp.”

  “Sharp?”

  “Sharp.”

  “It’s not shark?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “That’s dumb.” He rolled his eyes.

  Rosalie laughed. It was wonderful to see her so lighthearted.

  This was a far cry from the kid who’d crawled into the back of my Jeep two years ago with ICE agents chasing after her.

  She’d seen loved ones raped and murdered, witnessing worse violence than most hard-core gang members serving in San Quentin.

  “After this game, can we show Dante our card trick?” she asked, not taking her gaze off the cards she held splayed in her hand.

  “Most definitely,” I said.

  My friend, Danny, the best hacker in San Francisco, had taught her a crazy cool card trick. She loved showing it off.

  Later, after Rosalie had taken all our quarters at poker and shown Dante her card trick, I’d sent her to bed with Django, the Pitbull-mix dog who used to be mine.

  Once I heard both Rosalie and the dog snoring in her bedroom, Dante and I headed to the rooftop of the loft.

  It was summer in San Francisco—which meant, of course, that it was freezing—so I lit both heat lamps, and we wrapped ourselves in thick blankets as we sprawled in the lounge chairs under my grape arbo
r.

  In the distance, to the east, I could see the glow of the Bay Bridge beyond the downtown skyscrapers dotted with white lights.

  The sky to the west looked turbulent, a roiling gray and black mass.

  “Storm’s coming in,” Dante said, looking the same way.

  “Glad you’re staying over.”

  Dante lived in Calistoga but was down in the city for a board meeting for my company, Ethel’s Place.

  Ethel’s Place, named after my friend who was murdered, helped homeless people who wanted to get back into society. We built multi-use buildings that offered apartments upstairs and retail shops on the street level where the residents could work and train for up to a year—getting them off the streets, employing them, and giving them skills to set out on their own later on.

  After getting the business up and running, I was basically a figurehead on the board but still tried to attend quarterly meetings.

  I knew Dante always felt torn leaving his restaurants, but I was selfish and wanted his company, so I begged him to come down for the meeting early and stay the night.

  We’d taken Rosalie to dinner at some hip, up-and-coming restaurant Dante had wanted to do recon on. “Not bad,” had been his verdict after we’d shelled out three hundred bucks for three tiny meals of unidentifiable foods. I’d had to drive through Mickey D’s after so Rosalie would actually have some food in her before bed.

  Huddled under blankets on my roof, I reached over to a small, jeweled box I’d hidden in the palm plant and extracted a small joint. I puffed on it a few times and passed it to Dante.

  “Rosalie’s a great kid,” he said.

  I beamed in the dark. “I know, right?”

  “Does she ever talk about James?”

  “Sure,” I said. “She goes over there sometimes.”

  “She does?”

  “Yeah. Well, every Thursday. Why do you act so surprised?”

  James was my ex-boyfriend. When Rosalie had first come into my life, I’d been with James, and for a while, we’d been a family.

  Until he dumped me.

  I grabbed the joint from Dante and inhaled. Only after I exhaled did I speak.

  “He just had a kid.”

  It was the first time I’d said the words out loud, and it hurt less than I’d thought it would.

  “Really?” Dante said.

  When James had been shot and paralyzed by his own colleagues on the San Francisco Police Department, the doctors had questioned whether he’d ever be able to have children or even walk again. He’d undergone some experimental stem cell treatment overseas after we’d broken up, and, though he still used a wheelchair, he was regaining feeling and limited use of his legs. While his manhood had still been, uh, very, very functional after the accident, his baby-making ability had been in doubt. Until now, I guess.

  “Good for him.”

  “Yeah.” I was quiet.

  “You okay with all that?”

  “I guess.” I stubbed out the joint.

  “Gia?”

  “I still love him. I want him to be happy. That’s what real grown up love is, right?”

  Dante gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah.”

  “Well, it sucks.”

  We both burst out laughing.

  One fateful night a few years back, we’d both lost everything to murderers. Dante lost his husband of only a few hours, Matt. I’d lost my boyfriend, Bobby.

  Now, we both sat in silence. We’d been best friends for so long that it didn’t take words for me to know we were both remembering that horrific night.

  “I guess I’m destined to be alone forever,” I said.

  Dante surprised me by jumping up and slipping under the blanket with me on my chaise lounge. He laid his head on my shoulder and whispered. “Silly, Gia. You have me. You’ll never be alone. Not as long as I walk this earth.”

  Leaning down, I kissed his brow.

  He was right.

  I was the luckiest girl in the world.

  “Do you think Rosalie will grow up and take care of us when we’re old?” I said.

  “Uh, yeah. Duh,” he said. “We’re going to be two doddering old fools drinking our whiskey sours, and she’s going to be our boss, scolding us not to drink and smoke weed. And we’ll just cackle with laughter.”

  I got caught up in the fantasy.

  “Can we live on the beach?”

  “Yes!”

  “And Rosalie will have kids, so in a way we’ll be like grandparents, right?”

  “Of course!” Dante said. “We’ll be the coolest grandparents ever. We’ll tell them stories about how naughty we were when we were their age!”

  “Oh, we better not!” I said.

  “Oh, we will!”

  I closed my eyes, imagining a life many years down the road when I was a gray-haired grandma in a rocking chair at a beach house watching children play in the waves in front of me and sipping my cocktail as the sun set.

  My reverie was interrupted by a loud alarm on my phone.

  Somebody was at the front door downstairs. I jumped up in surprise.

  Nobody should have been able to get that far inside my building without other alarms going off.

  I quickly grabbed the phone and clicked to the camera outside my steel front door. It was an older woman whom I didn’t recognize. How in the hell had she gotten into the building?

  I was up and down the stairs with Dante at my heels.

  Once down in the loft, I reached up into my closet and extracted my Glock from the gun safe before I ordered Dante into Rosalie’s bedroom. “Go in and lock that door until I call for you.”

  He didn’t argue.

  2

  It had all unfurled according to his plans.

  It was nearly over.

  Patience and persistence had gotten him this far.

  It would serve him to the end.

  And then he would be free.

  Only a few more pieces of the puzzle and everything would fall into place.

  His loyalty, his tenacity, his superior intelligence, would all be recognized and rewarded.

  Soon.

  For now, though, it was business as usual.

  3

  Nico Morales bowed his head as he placed a single pink rose on his wife’s gold coffin, pausing as the flashbulbs from the approved paparazzi captured the moment for perpetuity.

  He lifted his head, flashing black eyes meeting those of the two photographers who stopped and nodded, handing their cameras to two of his men. The men peered at the images through the viewfinder. They would delete any that showed Nico’s face clearly.

  The two photographers were the only people who had been allowed to point a camera toward Nico for the past decade. One worked for the BBC, the other for the Associated Press. Both had proven they could be trusted to photograph the graveside events in the way that Nico had dictated.

  The only other people attending the burial were Nico’s attorney and confidant, Anthony Perez, and his late wife’s elderly mother who was escorted by his sister-in-law. She glared at him the entire mass.

  After placing the rose on the casket, Nico turned and headed toward the limousine.

  If anybody noticed his eyes were bone dry, no comment was made.

  As soon as Nico was back inside his heavily guarded compound in the hills miles above Mexico City, he changed out of his suit into some worn jeans and a soft black button down shirt. He lit a Mayan Sicars cigar and poured some Michter’s bourbon into a crystal tumbler. He tugged on the cigar for a few seconds and then, while he exhaled, swirled the amber liquid around before taking a deep gulp.

  The fiery alcohol slipping down his throat temporarily shook off the sense of numbness that had pervaded him since he’d found his wife’s body and the note.

  He pushed a button and summoned Anthony.

  The older man, still in his Brioni suit from the funeral mass, appeared moments later, his reading glasses propped up on the thinning gray hair on top of his head.
/>   Nico gestured for him to sit down in the light brown leather chair that matched the one Nico was in. He poured the attorney some of the bourbon and handed him a cigar. Neither man spoke.

  Only after Anthony had sipped some bourbon and smoked some of the cigar did Nico hand him Sylvia’s suicide note. The older man read silently for a few minutes and then folded the note back in half.

  “She is lucky she killed herself,” he said. “If I would’ve learned of this before her death, she would have begged me for death by fire.”

  Nico frowned. The comment was harsh. Even though she’d broken his heart with her suicide and the news in the note, he couldn’t deny that he’d loved her.

  “She was my wife.”

  “During the autopsy they found an IUD,” Anthony said, keeping his eyes on the tip of the cigar as he examined the ember there.

  Nico winced as if in pain.

  Anthony was possibly the only person who knew that the couple had tried fruitlessly for more than a decade to conceive. It had always been Nico’s greatest wish to be a father.

  When it became clear that they would not conceive, Nico confessed to Sylvia that he already did have a daughter. Her name was Rosalie. She had been conceived years ago when he had first been married to Sylvia. He’d gone back to visit family in Guatemala and had an affair with a local woman. After he’d learned the woman had borne a baby out of their union, Nico had sent his soldiers to get the baby, but they had failed. A group of villagers had armed themselves, and a shoot-out had occurred. The mother of his child was killed in the crossfire. It was a terrible tragedy and the worst possible outcome.