Gina Takes Bangkok (The Femme Vendettas) (14 page)

She stopped trying to struggle into her clothes. “Yeah, Dad. I’d like that. I need to clear some stuff by Kannon and then I’ll come see you. Maybe, we’ll throw lines off the boat and catch a few.”

“Huh. Come home.”

Home. A yacht floating around the Bay of Thailand. Always shifting and drifting, anchored to a city that endlessly changed. Okay, Dr. Chaiboonma had a point about stability.

She wiggled her way into the clothing, kissed a comatose Pensri on the cheek and left to see what she could see.

Kannon was in the kitchen, his back to her as he made coffee. He was shirtless. The brightening dawn highlighted every muscle of his body, and in the light she could clearly see the elaborate tattoos that adorned him.

Across his powerful back was a strange chimera with an elephant’s head, tusks, and trunk, except with curving horns sprouting from its head, its legs ending in tiger claws. For all its weirdness, its expression seemed at once kind and defiant, and despite its mismatching parts the artist had somehow lent the creature a kind of nobility. It was one of the strangest tattoos she’d ever seen—and one of the most beautiful.

Kannon looked over his shoulder, his gaze roaming over her body a moment before snapping back to her face. She really liked his eyes on her, almost as much as she liked looking at him. “What’s the news?”

“You could hear me?”

He took two cups from the cupboard. “Yes. I can hear you even when you try to be quiet.”

Which meant that she’d come through loud and clear last night. If she knew how, she might’ve blushed. Instead she got busy with bringing him up to speed.

“No news from Ryota?” She moved to get a cup of coffee.

“No,” he said, turning to face her. “I’m going to relieve him now.” He stalked to the living room where he put on his dress shirt from yesterday, and noosed himself into his tie. Okay, somebody needed nic gum. She didn’t think it wise to bring that up right now. Instead she carried on. “Will you need me today?”

“Not unless someone shows up at the train market.”

“Okay, then. I told Dad I’d visit with him, so how about you call if there’s news?”

“You’re the boss.”

Kannon snagged his car keys and headed for the front door. Just like that. Fine. She was pouring herself coffee when he spoke. “You coming or not?”

“I thought we’d agreed to split up for the day.”

“How are you getting back to the boat?”

“I’ll take a water taxi to the docks and get Darae to pick me up from there.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Doesn’t make sense you going all the way to the docks and then back to the market in rush hour. Ryota’s already exhausted.”

He held the door open for her impatiently, seeming to think he’d explained himself thoroughly. Gina thought her head would explode. She took up her purse, tagged her phone and strolled after him. She’d call Darae on the way to have a boat at the docks to ferry her to
The Pussycat
.

The car was running by the time she reached it and this morning, now that the cat was out of the bag regarding Pensri, he used a remote to open the gate to the underground parking. He bullied his way into the traffic but then had no choice except to inch along at a snail’s pace. It was start and stop, start and stop, making only a few dozen feet of headway at a go.

A dog loped up alongside the car and began to follow them, standing up and sitting down as they stopped and started along the route. Gina looked to a nearby food stall.

“I’ll go get some noodles and meet you down the block.”

“We don’t have time for you to feed a dog.”

“I’m not. He’s reminding me that it’s breakfast time.” She got out, even as Kannon rolled ahead.

Gina got a box of noodles, dropped a wormy mess of them on the ground which the dog licked clean and, with a quick pat to its head, she caught up to Kannon.

She held up traffic for the two seconds it took to get into the car and immediately there was the blast of a horn. Kannon threw the car into park and exited, striding to the driver, some unfortunate ex-pat in a BMW.

“Oh shit, shit, shit,” Gina didn’t know whether to sink into her seat, follow Kannon or run for it. Instead she watched in the rearview mirror as Bangkok’s latest incident of road rage unfolded. The driver had clearly taken stock of the situation but there was nowhere to go, his car as boxed in as everyone else’s.

She cringed as Kannon pulled open the door to the driver’s car, seizing him by the front of his shirt and yanking him half out of the vehicle. The guy was desperately apologizing, and after shoving him back into the car, Kannon strode back to her, his face tight and angry.

Once he got back behind the wheel, Gina kept her head down and her mouth filled with noodles. Only as they crossed yet another bridge did she venture to comment. “For the record, as your boss, I don’t think you should be picking fights like that. We’ve kinda got enough trouble as it is.”

“Fire me, then.”

“Is that why you did it? To provoke me into firing you? I really don’t get you at all.”

He adjusted his mirrored sunglasses. “Unless I can get my boss back soon, I’m in trouble with the Yakuza again, and that’s to say nothing about how I’m going to keep paying for my daughter’s schooling or anything else. Except I can’t do anything but wait and wait for some nameless person to stumble into our trap. Or not. Only thing left for me to do is chauffeur you home because I’m supposed to be protecting you, too.”

“So you’re frustrated.”

He gripped the wheel as if aiming to bust it in two. “The situation I can handle. What irritates me is you and a stray dog making a noodle run the second I’m stuck in traffic. You don’t need to make my job harder.”

“So is that what you think you are? Bodyguard to a mafia princess?”

He rolled ahead, braked. Was silent.

“Look, Kannon. I’m not trying to put you into a spot. I’m not trying to complicate things. You don’t want sex with me. Fine. You don’t want me as your boss. Fine. You don’t want to walk away, either. Fine. Only thing I don’t know is what the hell you do want.”

He stared straight ahead. He rolled the car forward, stopped. A space opened up and he filled it again. She filled herself up on noodles and said nothing, because really there was nothing more to say.

“A date.”

It was a good thing she’d just swallowed, otherwise she would’ve choked. “A date? You want a date…with me?”

“Yes.”

She stared.

He blew out his breath and stripped off his glasses to look her in the eye. “I want to go on a nice, normal date with someone I don’t have to keep secrets from. With someone who knows what I do. With someone who’s attracted to me, and vice versa. That’s what I want from you.”

He wore the same defiant look as on the plane when he’d told her he was a killer. He was bracing for her refusal.

“To be honest, I’ve never really had a normal date either,” she admitted. “But I’ll give it a try.”

You needed to have studied Kannon for as intensely as she had to have seen the slight relaxation of his shoulders, the tight lines around his mouth loosen. “Thank you.”

A space opened. He closed it.

She passed him the rest of the noodles, which was more than half. He took up the chopsticks and drove with his knees while eating.

“So, to clarify, did we just agree to go out on a date?”

“No,” he explained through a mouthful. “All we’ve settled is that when I ask you out, you’ll agree.”

“And when will that be?”

“When I know, you’ll know.”

They’d cleared the bridge and Kannon swung onto a road that ran along the docks, managing to somehow pick up speed, hoover up noodles and still keep his shirt clean. The man was a superhero. At this rate, they’d be there before she’d cleared things up. “And are we on the traditional ‘no sex until the third date’ rule?”

“Yes.”

“And are we doing the dates in order, or are we going to change it up? Make the third date first, say?”

“First, second, third.”

She considered that. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner. We could do a big push and get it done in one day. A Thai-themed three-date scheme.”

Kannon swung up to the docks and sure enough, there was Darae and one of the girls waiting for her. He handed her the empty noodle box. “I’ll call. Now get out. I’ve got work to do.”

“No goodbye kiss?”

His lips twitched into a near smile. Yes! “Get out.”

Gina found her father ensconced in his luxurious lounge chair, his frail body wrapped in a vintage smoking jacket that still reeked of the fine Dominican cigars once considered his trademark. Balanced in the corner of his mouth was one of them, unlit.

“You look like Hugh Hefner in that getup,” Gina remarked, as she sat beside her father, taking his hand.

He pretended to blow smoke rings. “I don’t smoke anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the aroma. Besides, it helps me think.”

“About this situation with Alak?”

He reinserted the cigar. “I’m leaving that to you and Kannon and Darae. If the three of you can’t figure out how to free him, then I sure as hell won’t be able to. Maybe it’s cowardice on my part. Too hard to see how one man can destroy everything Alak and I spent most of your life building.”

“We’ll get it back, Daddy. Don’t worry.”

He patted her hand, as if telling her the same thing. “I only called you this morning because it seems you won’t spend any time with me unless I beg for it.”

“Dad, that’s not true!”

“Then why didn’t you come home last night?”

“I went to see Pensri.”

“You stayed the night with one of the girls?”

“She’s not a girl to me, she’s a friend.”

“Did either one of Alak’s men stay with you?”

“Yes, Kannon did.”

Vincenzo Zaffini worked the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “That must’ve been interesting.”

“It wasn’t. It was boring. What else do you want to talk about?”

“My last words.”

Gina felt a lump in her throat. “And who says that you aren’t going to beat this? With medicine being what it is today a lot of people manage to—”

“I stopped treatments a couple of weeks ago,” he interrupted. “They weren’t working, and I didn’t want to spend what little time I had left withering in some hospital. I’ve always made my own decisions, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to hand my life over to some doctor right in the home stretch.”

“I don’t think you should give up,” Gina insisted as gently as she could.

“We all die, Gina,” he said. “Only thing we control is how we live. And that’s why I’ve been considering my last words carefully. Only one chance to get those right.”

“Have you come to a decision?” she asked, trying to remain cheerful despite the morbidity of their conversation.

“When I was a boy,” he said, giving her hand a weak squeeze, “the family used to believe that when a person was about to die they gained a special understanding of death and the afterlife. That they could hear the whispers of angels or their ancestors.”

“Oh?”

“It’s all bullshit. Here I am on death’s door and I don’t understand anything more about what’s to come than I ever did. I haven’t the faintest notion of where I’m going, or even if I’m going anywhere at all.”

“I’m pretty sure they have a place in heaven for you,” she said. “Even if it’s in the smoking section.”

Vincenzo laughed dryly. “My daughter, the health nut. You’re going to feel awful stupid one day, lying in your death bed, dying of nothing. At least my cigars gave me closure.”

Gina rolled her eyes. “So sounds like those last words of yours aren’t going to be about an afterlife, huh?”

He shook his head. “No. By the time I know what I’m talking about it’ll be too late to say anything. Think I’m going to go with a poem.”

Gina sucked in her cheeks to keep from laughing. “A poem? You?”

Her father looked almost affronted. “What? You’ve never written one?”

“Roses are purple, violets are lime, I made up these colors so this poem would rhyme,” she reeled off.

“Yes, well, I’m hoping to compose something a little more meaningful. I’ve been reading a lot of Buddhist philosophy, and these Zen masters recite a poem with their last breath. To share some last bit of wisdom with their disciples.”

“You’ve got disciples?”

“Certainly not Darae,” he replied. “I don’t think she’s listened to a word I’ve said in all the time we’ve been married, so it’s not likely she’ll start now. Besides, I don’t want to spend my last moment stuck between wife and death.”

Gina groaned at the pun. “That’s terrible, Daddy.”

“I try. Seriously, I was intending the poem for you. One last little piece of advice before your old man goes to feed the worms.”

“That’s sick,” Gina laughed, trying not to cry at the same time. “But yeah, I’ll try to be there for your poetry recital.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

His face was so gaunt, so pale. She swallowed. “You better.”

“What then, Gina? What are your plans after we sort things out here in Bangkok?”

Gina wasn’t thinking much beyond her first date with Kannon. “Back to my job, I guess.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t hightail it there already. Being here rekindle old memories?”