Page 1 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover

YEARS EARLIER

“ A new car ? For me ? Oh Mill you didn’t!”

Young Nikki Baker threw herself into the arms of her man so hard that his thick gold chain nearly embedded itself into his chest. She laughed and backed off.

And looked at the car again. It wasn’t a new car.

It was more like a hunk of junk. But she was in that love bubble where anything Emilio did for her was grand.

“Nobody’s ever given me anything like this before. Not even close.”

“Get in. Crank it up. I had my man check it out for you. It’s a bad ride, Nikki, no lie.”

Nikki gladly took the keys and hopped inside.

It was summertime in Miami and she was in hotpants and a halter top.

Her super-curvaceous body and large natural breasts, topped off by her gorgeous, velvety-smooth dark-brown face, often made her a target for those drug boys who wanted a trophy like her on their arms. Her boyfriend, Emilio “Mill” Cabrera, who always seemed to be shirtless to highlight his Dominican-black six-pack abs, and who always wore that thick gold chain around his neck and had his jeans purposely poised halfway down his ass, was one of those boys.

To the old ladies who sat on their stoops gossiping and shaking their heads at all the illegal activity swirling around them, he was a straight-up gangbanger ruining the neighborhood.

Even to his mother, whose house Mill and Nikki lived in and whose driveway they were standing on, he was a no-good thug.

But to eighteen-year-old Nikki Baker, who’d never been in love like this before, Emilio Cabrera was the kindest, sweetest, most beautiful boy in the world. He sold drugs and she knew it, but he told her it was only weed so she convinced herself it was no big deal.

By the time she found out Emilio was moving more than just weed, and that opioids were by far his drug of choice, she was in too deep to turn back. By that time she loved him more than life itself.

She had just recently fled her mother’s house, who had fled her father and his gangbanging lifestyle so that she could give Nikki a better life.

But by the time Nikki was a teen, she was getting tired of her mother’s rules and regulations and as soon as she turned eighteen she was out of there.

She ended up in Liberty City, in Miami, where Emilio, who already was eyeing her, happily took her in.

By buying her a car he was taking their relationship, at least she thought, to the next level.

“Crank it up,” he said to Nikki with his grilled-teeth smile as he leaned his slender body over the frame of the front driver side window. “Give it a spin, my love. It’s a smooth ride.”

It took two attempts by Nikki, but the engine finally turned over and the car was humming. Loudly as if it needed a new muffler, but it was humming nonetheless. And Nikki could not have been happier.

Until Emilio took it a step further. “While you’re driving and showing it off, I need you to make a run for me, Nick.”

Nikki looked at him suspiciously. “A run? What kind of run?”

Emilio looked over at his mother’s porch and snapped his finger. One of his boys that was hanging on the porch came down with a brown paper bag and handed it to him. He handed it to Nikki.

“What’s this?”

“Just a package I need you to take over to Oliver’s house.”

Nikki was astounded. “Drugs?”

When Emilio didn’t respond, she knew that was exactly what it was. “Oh hell no!” She quickly got out of the car. “Are you nuts?”

“Come on, Nikki, come on!”

“Are you out of your mind? I told you to leave that shit alone and now you want me all up in it too? Hell no!”

“But he needs it now.”

“Then send one of your boys.”

“They got other drop-offs. I’m sending everybody. I got to move this product by nightfall or I’m in trouble, Nikki. No lie. They’ll make an example out of me if I don’t come through. I’m sending everybody everywhere.”

He then placed his hands on Nikki’s arms and began rubbing them. “Outside of my boys, you’re the only one I can trust. These fools out here ain’t trying to help a brother out. I’m just a Dominican to them. Same skin color but not the same. You’re the only one I can trust baby.”

But Nikki dug in. “No.”

“Nikki please.”

“I said no!”

“But I’m in trouble!”

“Too bad, Mill, that’s just too bad. What’s wrong with you? How could you ask me to do something like that? I’m not having anything to do with drugs and you know that. I told you that.” She folded her arms. “You can forget that shit. No way am I making any runs for you or anybody else!”

And Nikki held true to her word that day. And Emilio gave up and let it go.

But five months later, after Emilio was talking about how they were going to get married and have a baby, which he knew was her heart’s desire, Nikki was sitting in an airport in Thailand.

She followed every rule Emilio had taught her, even down to looking everybody in the eye and smiling incessantly and talking and being pleasant.

Contrary to popular belief it was the quiet ones, Emilio had said, that the authorities always paid attention to.

Not the loudmouths. He told Nikki to be a loudmouth that day.

A loudmouth with a small fortune in opioids hidden deep down in her luggage in a compartment Emilio swore could not be detected on radar screens nor human searches.

She was sitting happily in that shiny airport in that foreign country as she watched a group of serious police officers do exactly what Emilio said they wouldn’t do: They were paying attention to her and her alone.

Very close attention. Every time she looked their way they were looking at her.

But she knew she could never show nervousness.

She continued to laugh and talk with those who spoke English around her. She thought she was good at it.

Until those same police officers that wouldn’t stop staring at her left their post as a group.

They were all skinny, all serious, all with guns on their slim hips and batons down their sides.

And they were coming, not for the quiet ones, but straight for the loudmouth Emilio had insisted would keep her off their radar.

Her heart was hammering.

It would begin the darkest forty-eight hours of Nikki’s entire life. Forty-eight hours that she would do everything in her power, to the very depths of her soul, to keep forever tucked away deep down into the furthest reaches of her being.

When Nikki Baker got married to her first husband and became Nikki Tarver, and when Nikki Tarver got married to her second husband and became Nikki Sinatra, she never once spoke about those forty-eight hours, those horrific dark days, to a living soul.

And she aimed to keep it that way until her dying day.

Until circumstances intervened, despite her best efforts, and she could remain silent no longer.