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He drops my hands and looks down as if he’s too ashamed to meet my gaze. “Because I was a homeless drug addict before Darren. Working for him turned my life around.”
“Wait! Does Darren know all this?”
“Well, he’s part of the Jing San, too.”
“The what?”
“Jing San. A multinational triad.”
The room is spinning all around me. My poor brain can only handle so much. Felipe’s wrong. Darren a part of organized crime? That sounds ridiculous.
And yet…I’ve always felt like Darren had an edge, a shadow to his personality that never came into focus for me. I thought it was the BDSM. But it wasn’t that after all. I think about his trip to Hong Kong for a so-called business opportunity.
I narrow my eyes at Felipe. “When you say that Darren is part of this triad, are you saying that he’s also involved in the illegal stuff? Like the same thing JD does?”
“I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure. As a bartender at The Lotus, I hear a lot of stuff. Way too much. But Darren plays it pretty close to the vest. He’s not as active as his cousin, from what I can tell. Maybe he didn’t want to end up with the same fate as his father.”
I snap to attention. Darren rarely talks about his father. “What happened to his father?”
“His father was head of the counterfeiting division. One of his former associates ratted him out in a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Darren’s father went to jail while Darren was still at UCLA. There was some kind of fight in the prison. Darren’s father was stabbed and died.”
How did I not know this?
“You can Google it, if you don’t believe me,” Felipe says.
I believe him. I kick myself for not doing an Internet search on Darren earlier because I’m old-fashioned. I don’t like getting to know people via the Internet. But in this case, knowing Darren’s past would’ve opened my eyes. I might not have allowed myself to get entangled with him, to fall in love with him.
I feel sick to my stomach.
“I should’ve told you to stay away from Darren and JD and The Lotus. I honestly didn’t think that you’d be with Darren this long, and I didn’t know that we’d become friends.”
Friends? Do I even know the person in front of me?
A noise outside, the sound of someone walking past the door, makes Felipe jump to his feet. He starts pacing again. “I know this is a lot to process, but you can’tstick around here. You’re a target.”
I know that’s what he had said earlier, but this part is just now starting to sick in. It was pure luck that I wasn’t at Darren’s place. JD wouldn’t have known that I would go there to retrieve my notes and end up falling asleep. If it weren’t for that…
“My guess is that whatever Amy knows, JD’s worried she might have told you,” Felipe continues. “My advice is to get the hell out of here as soon as you can before they track you down.”
“But if what you’re telling me is all true, I can’t not go to the police.” I think about JD. Is he really someone capable of murder? I shake my head. “JD wants me dead? I can’t—it’s so hard to imagine that he’s someone who could do this.”
“It’s not the first time. Darren and JD dropped Manny—”
My eyes bulge. “They did what?”
“I don’t know if you ever met Manny. He was kind of a stocky guy, wears black Armani suits.”
I remember the guy. He was always eager to talk to Darren,
“JD wanted the word on the street to be that no one messes with him and Darren.”
I feel like I’m falling off the edge of a cliff, and I desperately need something to save me from the abyss below, but there’s nothing and no one that I can cling to.
“Darren had this guy killed?” I ask in a whisper.
“For the shooting.”
“But Sergeant Trawley said it was some random gang member.”
