The Boss's Debt

Talia Vasquez has one night off, and she spends it at the festival on Calle Ocho with her sister Lina. A kid lifts her phone out of her back pocket. A stranger in a dark shirt catches him by the collar, takes the phone out of the kid's pocket, and gives it back with an easy smile. An hour later she sees the same man at the mouth of an alley, talking comfortably to Rafael, who is Torres's head enforcer. *He'd been placing himself in her path, and she'd walked right into it.* Talia runs Vasquez Cocina in Little Havana. The debt on it was her father's, gambling and bad loans and worse promises, and she inherited it with the deed. On Saturday morning an envelope is sitting centred on her desk blotter, sealed in crimson wax. Inside: a payment booklet from her sister's dialysis centre, a Polaroid of Lina taken through the clinic window from across the street, and a typed letter saying the arrears stand at twelve thousand four hundred dollars and that patience has limits. Torres names his terms on the phone. He will extend the forbearance and forgive the interest on the arrears. In exchange, he is installing a partner chef with operational authority in her kitchen. If she refuses, the whole debt comes due, and a different kind of visitor goes to the clinic. The chef arrives Monday in pressed whites with his own knives. His name is Diego Reyes, and Talia sets her rules before he unzips the roll: nothing changes on the menu without her approval, and he stays away from her sister. *If I find out you're here for any reason other than cooking, I will bury you.* Then she finds a news photograph of a widow at a funeral, and a hyphenated surname that does not match the one on his resume. Diego was DEA. His brother went undercover in a trafficking network and did not come out, and the case Diego took off the books when he resigned runs straight through the man who owns her restaurant. By then Talia has already planted a listening device in his locker. Her own brother, Marcos, has been quietly negotiating to sell the building out from under her. Her grandmother Elena is holding a key to a safety deposit box that nobody was supposed to know about. And Lina's kidneys will not wait for anyone's investigation to reach an indictment. A contemporary romantic suspense set in Miami, with a working restaurant kitchen, a loan shark who keeps two sets of books, a dead agent's unfinished case, and two people who each have a very good reason to lie to the other. Closed-door.