Tiptoe Kisses

Chapter 38

A small crowd of people have gathered, Santo anxiously pushes his way through to see who was shot.  The man with the tattoos is lying on the cold pavement with a bullet hole through the side of his head and one in his blood spattered chest near his heart.  He lays spread eagle with one leg slightly curved revealing something wrapped around his ankle.  It looks like an ankle monitor but Santo isn’t so sure.  He manages to get closer to the dead man as more people mill around his lifeless body.  Santo squats down at the man’s feet to take a closer look at him and his eyes roam to look at his ankle.  The man is wearing an ankle wallet and there’s definitely something inside of it.

Leaning over the man he slips the wallet off of him while another man claiming to be a doctor checks for a pulse.   Sirens can be heard in the background.  Santo hears a police officer’s voice behind him asking people to back up and move away from the victim.

Santo stands up palming the wallet in his hand then slips it into his jacket pocket as he fades into the crowd of people being told to move away.  He makes sure there’s no one following him as he walks back in the direction he came.  Just as he is about to cross the street he recognizes the woman getting into the back seat of a new black Jaguar XJR a few feet away and he ducks into a doorway not wanting her to see him.  The vehicle passes him but not before he gets a good look inside. It’s Alina and Clayton Simon they are kissing in the backseat of the car being driven by another man he doesn’t recognize.

Santo pulls out his cell phone to call Kyle then puts it back in his pocket.  He takes off running back to the hotel.  When he gets there he notices the same Jaguar sitting outside the hotel but only the driver is inside it.  Alina and Clayton Simon stand on the sidewalk as a valet loads a suitcase into the trunk of the car.  He waits until they drive off before walking across the street to go inside. 

He doesn’t have anywhere private he can go to so he checks into another room.  Once inside the room he pulls out the ankle wallet from his jacket and opens it up as he sits on the edge of the bed.  There’s a black IPOD Touch inside and Santo starts looking through the messages on it and checking emails. The dead man’s name was Emilio Bolero and from what Santo can piece together on the messages and emails, Mr. Bolero must have just checked in and thought he was meeting Alina here to arrange a hit on Santo.  Why was Bolero killed in the alleyway Santo wonders, that must have been Bolero’s suitcase they were putting in back of the Jaguar.

Santo checks the time remembering he was supposed to meet Alina in her hotel suite more than an hour ago.  He didn’t but she hasn’t bothered to call him to see where he’s at.   Holding his head in his hands he breathes a heavy sigh of relief.  She was setting him up to meet her here.  This man was supposed to kill him.  Santo opens the IPOD back up and starts going through the reminders and notes on it finding much more than he anticipated.   “Oh Alina, so sloppy my dear, so sloppy.  I don’t think your boyfriend knows what you left behind.”  He says out loud as he is reading through the reminders saved on the IPOD.

Located in the reminders of the nano are names, dates and time frames with coded instructions.  It’s a hit list and all the men on the list are dead except him and the three names below his.  On the Notes App he reads through pages and pages of information.  He clicks one more page before deciding to close it up and he see’s what he had hoped to get from Alina.

He sifts through the list of client’s recognizing some of the names on it and surprised by a few.  One of the client’s name on the list disturbs him.  He and his men rescued the man’s drug addicted daughter a few years ago from her drug kingpin boyfriend in Brazil.  Santo knows her father will be arrested when he turns this list over and he can only hope it doesn’t send her spiraling back into the drug world.