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Niko veered in a slightly different route than the one we’d taken to get on the path. I only realized when I saw the gang’s storage building coming into view up ahead.
My stomach clenched.
An SUV had parked on the shoulder a couple of blocks closer to us. A frazzled looking woman got out, retrieved a toddler from the backseat, and lay her down beneath the open hatch.
Emergency diaper change, I guessed.
Rafael and I clearly hadn’t outright destroyed the gang’s entire fleet of vehicles, because at the same moment, a red truck peeled out of the lot, its tires screeching against the asphalt. As it sped toward the SUV, a guy leaned out the passenger side window.
“Stupid whore!” he shouted at the woman. “Get the hell outta here before wemakeyou.”
The young woman, clearly shaken, snatched up her son as the truck roared by. She clutched him against her and then hustled to return him to his seat as if terrified.
My chest had totally constricted, all the joy I’d been holding on to vanished. When I glanced at Niko, a cloud of worry had settled over his face.
My first effort hadn’t been enough. The goons were still racing around being menaces, and they were threatening Niko’s sense of peace as well as everything else.
I couldn’t let them ruin even more.
ELEVEN
Rafael
Poura dollop of olive oil in the pan.
Toss in the pepper, onion, and garlic.
Follow with the tomato puree and wine.
And let it simmer.
I inhaled, breathing in one of my favorite childhood scents, my mouth watering at my own handiwork.
This was it, the dish that was going to blow Lou out of the water. If I couldn’t fix her broken taste buds with enchilada de camarones, then I didn’t know what would do it.
“That actually smells really awesome, Rafael,” she called from the living room.
“What do you mean, ‘actually’?” I asked, stirring the marinated shrimps in. “Por supuesto! As a Latina woman, you should be drowning in drool already just from the aroma alone.”
“Drowning in drool?” She flashed me a teasing smirk from over the back of the sofa where she was sitting flipping through TV channels. “Well, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t need the water wings yet. It does smell awesome, but what matters is how it tastes.”
“It tastes amazing. If you weren’t so busy shoving pierogies and cabbage rolls in your mouth, you’d have discovered that by now.”
She leaned her arm over the sofa back to better face me with a flash of her silver rings, the cheeky grin that I’d come to adore years ago lighting up her dark brown eyes as well. “Hey, now. You’rereallymissing out by passing on the golumpki. My nanny could make some that would knock your socks off.”
I shook my head, breathing out a heavy, mock sigh.
It was hard to get all that invested in the argument when we’d been having variations on it ever since I’d found out she preferred Polish food over anything close to the cuisine of her heritage. So what if she was three generations removed from the ancestors who’d arrived from Mexico? She had no idea what she was missing out on.
But on the other hand, I couldn’t really blame her if she associated comfort more with the Polish nanny who’d raised her through most of her early childhood rather than that mother of hers. The Deadly Rose was about as maternal as a machine gun.
I’d resigned myself to her odd food preferences, and these days our well-rehearsed banter wasn’t much more than an inside joke. But that didn’t mean I was going to stop demonstrating the fantastic flavors she’d been missing out on. The Cuban recipes I’d grown up with might not be the exact same as what her great grandparents might have made, but they were a hell of a lot closer than her usual comfort food.
I glanced at the shrimps. Perfect.
“Well, hold on to your socks.” I grabbed the ladle. “Because I’m about to rock your world.”
Lou stuck both bare feet up in the air and wiggled her toes at me. The nails were painted in an alternating pattern of neon green and black. “Already one step ahead of you.”
