Hard Charger: Jake & Sophia: A Hot Contemporary Romance (12 page)

“You mean...you’re not angry?”  Jake gave Alex a confused look.  “You’ve been warning me to stay away from her ever since I came home.”

Sophia’s eyes narrowed.  She shot an annoyed look at her brother.

“Yeah, I’ve been warning you to stay away from her, for
your
sake,” Alex replied.  “My little sister has big claws
and
a boyfriend.”

Jake frowned.  “I want to meet this boyfriend.”

“So do we all.”  Alex snorted.

“You’ve never met Steve?” Jake asked, his eyes widening.

“We
want
to meet him,” Alex replied.  “But Sof won’t bring him around.  We must embarrass her.”

“Listen, Alex, you need to butt out of my business,” Sophia demanded. “Who are you, my mother?”

“I’m just looking out for a brother,” Alex quipped.  “And we also need to head home.  Are you ready?”

“If you weren’t my ride, Alex, I’d tell you to kiss my ass,” Sophia replied, two spots of color burning in her cheeks.

“Well, I
am
your ride, so let’s go.”  Alex nodded toward Jake.  “Catch you later.”

“Remember, Jake,” Sophia said, as she turned to leave.  “We have a deal.”

He nodded tersely in reply.

She smiled at him with lips bruised from his kisses, and disappeared out the door with Alex.  Jake stared at the door thoughtfully for a moment or so, and then racked their cue sticks.  His step lighter than it had been for days, he grabbed a fresh beer and headed in Luke’s direction.  What the
hell
, he wondered, was going on with Sophia’s boyfriend?  Did she even
have
a boyfriend?

He smiled.

Maybe not.

Chapter Eleven

Almost a week after
Ray Morris’s funeral, Sophia grabbed her coat out of the Mermaid Inn’s employee closet, slipped it on over her waitressing uniform, and went outside to her little VW Beetle.  The thing had seen better days but it drove just fine, if slowly; and possessed a manual transmission that required some finesse to shift.  She turned the car away from the Mermaid and made a left onto Queen Street, and another left onto Jersey Avenue.  From there, she crossed the railroad tracks and headed north, toward Asbury Park.  She had an appointment with a certain Dr. Arun Patel.

She could have taken small, oceanfront roads to Dr. Patel’s office.  But she preferred the highway, even though it added ten minutes onto her travel time, because it gave her a chance to put the Beetle through its paces.  She brought the Beetle down to first gear as she turned right onto the main highway’s merge lane, then used the merge lane to gun the engine and go up through the gears one by one, coaxing the most speed out of each gear as she could, before she joined sparse traffic on Route 18. 

By the time she hit the highway, she had the Beetle humming along at 70 MPH and easily outdistanced a guy in a pickup truck who had sped up so he wouldn’t get stuck behind her.  Not happy that she’d beaten him in their impromptu race, the pickup beeped at her.  She flipped him off and settled into the ride along the highway.  Her smartphone had connected with the car’s Bluetooth, so she found some Led Zeppelin on her phone and moments later,
When the Levee Breaks
was blasting through the car’s speakers.

As far as music went, she was an old-fashioned girl.  She preferred Led Zep, Aerosmith, the Beastie Boys, and other bands that her parents had listened to—and had even admitted to smoking pot to, once upon a time.  But she turned the music down once she turned off the highway and began driving east down Asbury Avenue, toward the ocean.  She didn’t want to attract attention. 

There were some beautiful, two-story beach mansions along Ocean Avenue north of town, and of course the boardwalk offered lowbrow entertainment and food guaranteed to put a few inches on your hips, but the area west of the railroad tracks was seedy and even a little bit dangerous.  She turned off Asbury Avenue before she reached the tracks and made sure the Beetle’s doors were locked.

Dr. Patel’s office was a blockish-looking cement building painted aqua blue, and it sat right on the corner of two streets.  A vacant lot stood next to it, and further down, a parking lot and convenience store that offered gas, various types of snack foods, soda, cigarettes and cigars.  She parked in the lot and checked her purse, to make sure the little voice recorder she carried in it was on, and the microphone positioned in such a way that it would capture all sounds.  Then, her purse hanging over her shoulder, she made her way into Dr. Patel’s office.

The waiting room contained chipped wooden chairs atop a cracked linoleum floor.   Magazines several months—even years—old lay scattered atop an end table.  Several destitute-looking men and women were sitting around waiting for their turns.  A few hard-core junkies were bouncing their legs or shifting around on their chairs with coked-out nervousness.  At one end of the room, a sliding glass window permitted a view of the receptionist, who was cracking gum between her teeth and talking on a phone.  She walked up to the glass window and signed the register, listing her name as
Sue Smith
.

“Would you please let Dr. Patel know that Sue Smith is here,” she said. 

The receptionist, her eyes bloodshot perhaps from too much partying the night before, shrugged and pressed a few buttons on the phone.  “Dr. Patel, Sue Smith is here.”  She waited a moment, listened, then gestured toward the door that Sophia knew led to Dr. Patel’s office. “Go on in.”

Earning annoyed looks from those in the waiting room who’d arrived long before her, she strode to the door and walked in.  Dr. Patel was sitting in front of her at his Formica desk, scribbling on a prescription pad.  He was an older Indian man with thinning black hair, which he wore parted on the side, à la Donald Trump.  He looked and nodded.  “Just a moment, I’m writing them up now.”

She nodded and sat down in the chair opposite his desk.   She always felt like she needed to shower for hours after she’d left this place.   She imagined germs were everywhere, their virulence amplified by a pervasive moral corruption.  “Two oxys, two adderalls, a focalin and three Xanax, right?”

He sighed.  “That’s what Mr. Winsome told me.”

“Good.”

He handed the little square papers to her.  “I’ll tell the boss that you’ve picked up the prescriptions.”

“Fine.”  She knew that this was Patel’s way of saying she was being watched, and if she ‘lost’ any of the prescriptions or didn’t provide the correct number of pills for sale, Mr. Winsome would know about it.  “I’ll see you in a month or so.”

“Good day.”  The doctor shuffled some papers around on his desk, then got up and opened a door to an interior corridor.  He walked into the corridor and shut the door behind him, leaving her sitting there.

She stood up, left his office, walked through the swelling crowd in the waiting room, and then went outside to her VW.  She slipped behind the steering wheel, then turned off the voice recorder in her purse.

Visits to several pharmacies up and down the coast were next on her list.  Today, she’d have all of the prescriptions filled, and tomorrow, she’d give the pills to Koschei’s street teams, to deal as they saw fit.  Her job was the easiest—and safest—in the chain.  She neither wrote out the prescriptions nor sold pills to junkies--she just had to get the scripts filled.  She started her car, swung out into traffic and began the drive to the first pharmacy, one of many that the
Bratva
secretly controlled.

As she was driving, she pulled out her other phone, the one specifically for calls to Steve.  She made sure the special phone had connected to her car’s cellular system via Bluetooth, and then gave Steve a call. 

He answered after almost the first ring.

“It’s me,” she said to the car’s speaker system.

“Did you pick them up?”  Steve’s voice was all business.

“Yeah, I got them.”

“Patel give you any trouble?”

“Other than to warn me that they were all watching me?”  She swallowed and looked compulsively in the rear-view window for a tail.  No one rode behind her.  “No, no trouble.”

“Did you record him?”

“Yes, of course.  Just like I always do.”

“Good. Go fill the prescriptions.”

She heard the satisfaction in his voice and gripped the steering wheel a little harder.  “I’m getting tired of this, Steve.”

“I know you are.”  His rich, melodious voice sounded sympathetic.

“These drugs I’m filling prescriptions for...who’s buying them at the end of the chain?” she said, her voice rising.  “What if it’s a kid?  A teen?”

“It can’t be helped.  If we want to win the war, we have to accept the collateral damage.”

She frowned. “I didn’t realize what I was signing up for when I came on board.”

“At least you aren’t working for peanuts.  Thank God there’s a bonus involved, right?  A tax-free one.”

“I’m going fucking nuts, lying to everyone.  Lying to my mother, lying to Dr. Patel, lying to Alex.  Lying to Jake, even.  They all think you’re my
boyfriend
,” she said bitterly.  Alex says you’re smart and steady and
good
for me. 
Christ.
”

“I’m sorry, Sophia.  I truly am.”

One of these days I’m going to get caught,” she ranted.  “What if Koschei catches me?  What then?”  She realized she’d driven the VW up to eighty miles per hour and eased back on the gas.

“Keep your act together,” he urged.  “It’s just a little while longer.  We need your intel.”

Feeling beaten, she nodded to no one.  She knew that she was in too deeply to get out by herself.  She had to cooperate.  “What’s my exit strategy?”

“We take Koschei down, dismantle his organization.  You stay in Rockport Grove, go back to college, do what you want.  Basically you just go on living your life.  No one will know you worked for the FBI.  We’ll protect you.  I promise.”

She reached over to touch her purse.  When she felt the hard outlines of her Glock, some of her panic receded.  “What are you doing to take Koschei?  Don’t you have enough on him already?  Racketeering, prostitution, drug dealing...what else do you need?”

“We’re building a case.  It takes time.  You know that.”

“I know.  But I don’t know how much more time we have.  Things are getting hot in town.  People are
dying
,” she reminded him.  “People I know and love.”

“You want to help the people you love?  Then hang tight for me.  Keep your eyes and ears opened.  I want you to keep listening for any chatter about a shipment coming in from the Ukraine.  It’s a big one.”

“What’s the shipment?”

“Heroin.”

She groaned. 

“It might be big enough to take Koschei and half of Brighton Beach down,” Steve added. “We’re
so
close.”

She slumped against the seat.  “Okay.”

“Thank you, Sophia.”

She heard the final tone in his voice and knew he was ready to hang up.  “Steve?” she quickly said.

“Yes?”

“I asked you a while back if I could tell Jake Gallent about his father, and you never gave me a
yes
or
no
.  I want to tell him, Steve.  He deserves to know.”

The sound of a sigh came from her cellphone.  “You know the difficulties that come with revealing that information to Kurt Gallent’s son.”

“I know, but—”

“I’ll think about it,” he allowed.  “Of course, it would be a lot easier if he agreed to work with us.”

“When are you going to bring him in?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.  We’ll have to see how things develop.”

“All right.  But if he comes in, and agrees to work with you, then I
insist
that you tell him.”

“We’ll talk about it then,” he said, and hung up, leaving her staring at her cellphone.

Sophia arrived home a
few hours later, after filling all of the prescriptions Dr. Patel had given her.  She lived by herself in a small rental on the ground floor of the Shorehouse Apartments complex, but one quick look at the line of cars parked outside the building revealed that she wouldn’t be spending the evening alone.  Her mom’s car, a dark blue Forrester, was parked at the curb.

A wave of weariness went through her.  She closed her eyes briefly and tried for patience.

Her mom Katherine, or Kat for short, had a key to Sophia’s apartment and made use of it far too often.  Kat’s husband—also Sophia and Alex’s father--had died young in an ‘accident’ that no one really believed was accidental, and ever since the day they buried him in the ground, Kat had gone overboard in her need to make sure their father’s death didn’t leave Alex and Sophia with crippling emotional problems.

She grabbed her bag of prescription drugs and exited her VW.  As she walked to her apartment’s front door, she heard the refrigerator door opening and closing.  She stepped inside and, sure enough, her mom stood in the little galley kitchen, putting groceries and supplies away.

“Hi sweetie,” Kat said brightly, as soon as Sophia walked into the foyer.  “I made spaghetti and meatballs last night, and thought you might like some leftovers.  I also picked up a few things from Shop-Rite for you.  Hope you don’t mind.”

“Thanks, mom.”  Sophia smiled, glad her mom really cared about her, even if she went too far sometimes. 

“It’s after dinner time,” Kat pointed out. “Want me to heat something up?”

“Sounds good.  Be right back.”  Sophia walked into her bedroom and dropped her purse and the paper bag on her bed.  She’d put the gun and the prescription drugs away later, once her mom had left.

When she returned, her mom had already put spaghetti on to boil, and had a pot of sauce bubbling away on the stove.  Exhausted from the day, and slightly sickened by the part she’d been playing for the FBI, she plopped down on a chair next to the kitchen table and sighed.

Kat glanced in her direction, and her brow furrowed.  “So, how was your day?”

Sophia shrugged.  “Fine. The usual.”

“You seem tired.”

“I am.”

“If you need to cut back on your hours at the Mermaid,” her mom said, “just let me kn—”

“The hours are fine,” Sophia replied, more sharply than she’d intended.  She felt tired and wasn’t really in the mood for conversation.

Kat hesitated and prepared to say something, then frowned and stirred the spaghetti sauce.

Sophia put her chin in her hand and watched.  With that dark hair and smooth skin, she thought that Kat looked more like an older sister rather than her mother.  She remembered how her mom had surfed when she and Alex were younger, and had taken her Jeep on the beach, in search of the best waves.  That had all happened a long time ago—before Kat had bought the Mermaid Inn and given up the last of her free time.  Sometimes she wished that Kat would take some time to have fun, rather than to constantly work, work, work.