The Feds took everything, my father’s house, his cars, his condo in Boca, his furniture. They froze his bank accounts. They even tried to get my trust fund but since it had been set up for me by my grandmother before my father was a Drug King, they couldn’t touch it.
I was glad they took all my father’s stuff, it was tacky and ostentatious. My father had been a nothing, a nobody and married a rich girl. He’d come up from nothing the hard way, the dirty way, the vile way and he’d proven himself to my mother’s family, to the world by becoming rich, powerful and very, very frightening. He’d driven my mother to leaving us that was how frightening he was. She left me behind. She left everything behind. Didn’t even take a suitcase.
She just disappeared. Poof. Gone.
And she never looked back. Not once.
I’d been eleven.
I didn’t dwell. I’d lost a lot by then, a lot of friends, a lot of servants I’d tried to make into friends (a mistake I learned early not to make again), my grandparents were all dead. Losing my mother was just another in a long string of loss. I was used to that too and it didn’t faze me. Or, I should say, it fazed me (truth be told, it destroyed me), I just never let it show.
Hector was something else.
I knew right away he wasn’t what he wanted us to think he was.
I’m not a super-sleuth or anything. It was just that, you spend enough time around bad people; you know them when you see them.
You also know the good ones too.
And there was something about him. Something about the way he held himself, the way he looked, the way he looked at me.
God, he was beautiful. Quite simply the most handsome man I’d ever clapped eyes on in my whole, entire life. This was saying something. My father surrounded himself with fit, athletic, good-looking men; his personal army was recruited specifically to reflect on him.
Hector had flatly refused the makeover my father usually demanded of the boys from the streets that he fashioned into gentlemen criminals. My father respected that too.
Hector was Mexican-American. He looked rough and was straight out tough. One look and you knew you did not mess with him. He had thick, black, wavy hair, black eyes, long legs, broad shoulders and a lean, amazing body. He knew who he was and what he wanted and he had a confidence that was unreal.
It was hard to describe but, put simply, he was magnetic.
He never gave a hint that he was who he was. Actually, I thought he was a cop not a DEA agent. Still, I did what I could.
It wasn’t much. I would just, say, leave my father’s keys lying around when I knew he was going to be out of the house for awhile but that Hector would be around. Then I’d notice the keys gone for an hour then back right where they were before. Then I’d get in my father’s secret safe (he gave me the combo) and I’d take out files or books and I’d set them in locked file cabinet drawers, drawers to which Hector had the keys. I’d lay them right on top (a time saver). I’d wait then go back and put them where they were supposed to be.
Once, when I overheard something I thought would be useful, I even left a note in what I thought of as “Our Drawer”. When I went back, it was gone and I knew my father didn’t take it, he was playing golf.
The note was kind of stupid not to mention playing with fire. My father could have found the note. He wouldn’t have suspected me (I typed it out on my computer). He knew I would never, never do anything like that to him. But he would have gone through his workforce and someone would have gotten the blame.
I never did that again, by the way.
In the meantime, I tried to show Hector the cold shoulder. I really did, honestly. For months I was what I knew all my father’s men and all the society boys and all my father’s colleagues called me, the “Ice Princess”.
No, it was not original but it was effective.
I was Pure Chill to Hector like I was to everyone else.
Then, one night, I melted.
I blamed lemon drops.
I’d gone out and had way too many lemon drops. They tasted like candy. I forgot they had so much vodka in them.
When I got home after a night with “the girls” (my semi-friends or, at least, the women my father wanted me to hang out with which was to say the women who enhanced his reputation – what could I say, everyone around my father had a job, that was one of mine), I’d been drunk.
I heard noise coming from my father’s study. It was late and the house was dark but this was not strange. My father worked odd hours. So I thought it was my father in the study.
I went to say goodnight like any good, dutiful daughter would do. Being a dutiful daughter was another one of my jobs and I did it both publically and privately. I didn’t have the courage to get on my father’s bad side not even behind closed doors. I knew what he was capable of, my mother didn’t leave for no good reason, trust me.
But it was Hector in my father’s study. Looking back, he was probably in there for reasons my father would frown on, frown on so much he’d have ordered Hector’s murder. No kidding, what did I say about my father’s bad side? I was being very serious.