Page 34 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover

Nikki was given Teddy’s possessions to keep after he was taken into surgery.

In his possession was the key to Roz’s Bentley that he had forgotten to give back to her during their meeting at Mick’s estate.

He had driven Roz’s car home and Nikki had driven his Corvette.

But his Corvette was completely out of commission.

Knowing her mother-in-law would understand, Nikki hopped into her Bentley and took off.

As she drove, she placed onto the car’s screen, via her phone’s Bluetooth, the GPS tracking she had on Juda’s car.

She made her way outside of Philly to a farm-type community where Juda’s car appeared to be stationary.

Tears were still threatening to drop as she thought about Teddy laying on top of her and taking bullet after bullet on her behalf, and then seeing him so helpless in that recovery room.

She couldn’t help but feel loaded down with guilt over how she handled the whole thing.

And it was that guilt that made her grip that steering wheel. She had to get this right.

Nearly two miles outside of the property, she pulled into the parking lot of a small, boarded-up building that appeared to have once been some type of feed store. Then she pulled up the property on her customized GPS Live stream.

The topography of the property showed a vast farm, over twenty acres according to her tracking customizer, and she could see that the location of Juda’s car was well-fortified.

Men were at the gate at the entrance onto the farm, at the back of the property, and a man was on either side of the property.

Bales of hay appeared to be everywhere and there were several barns on the property as well.

There were other cars shown, besides Juda’s car, but there was no sign of Jackson Reeves himself.

The film was a tad grainy, and no positive ID could probably be made, but Nikki knew Jackson from the few times she’d seen him back in the day.

He was head and shoulders above the rest. Well over six-three.

None of those men she was viewing were anywhere near that tall.

But it wasn’t their faces she cared about anyway.

She cared about their guard behavior. That was what she needed to know.

She was able to study their movements for nearly an hour.

She needed to see if there was a pattern of behavior that the guards enforced before she tried to make any move onto the property.

One very definite pattern began to emerge seemingly every ten minutes.

But just as she was testing that theory one more time before she could make any moves, she could see out of her side mirror that a shirtless young white guy was approaching on her driver side.

She looked toward her passenger side mirror and saw another young white guy approaching on that right side of the Bentley as well. Both men had guns in their hands.

She thought she was parked where she couldn’t be detected. That was why she chose that particular spot. She knew there was a dilapidated trailer park in back of the boarded-up building, but nobody back there should have been able to see her or the car she was driving.

But apparently somebody did see her. Because they were absolutely coming for her. She knew a robbery and potential carjacking when she saw one.

She also knew she had to maintain her cool.

That was always ninety percent of it. She had to stay levelheaded but responsive too.

She couldn’t reach for her Glock inside her belt because that obvious movement would alert the men that she was on to them and they might react too soon.

Before she was ready. They might shoot through the back window rather than the side windows as she was certain, by their creeping movements alone, was their goal.

She, instead, with as little movement as possible, pressed open the center console.

Just as she reached into the console, both men stopped creeping and ran up onto each side of the Bentley with their guns aimed at her face.

But it was Nikki who quickly grabbed the loaded pistol Roz kept inside that console with her right hand and fired on the man furthest away, on her passenger side.

At the same time she was firing at the passenger side gunman, she pressed the car’s seat button with her left hand that caused the seat to quickly slide as far back as it could.

As she was doing that, the gunman on her driver’s side fired his weapon, too, shattering the glass, but Nikki had pulled back just in time and the bullets sailed right past her.

Then she fired on the driver side gunman, taking him out too.

Mick, driving his Escalade, had just turned onto the road where his GPS showed Roz’s car was located. That was when he and Reno, who sat up front, and Sal and Monk, who sat on the middle row, could see the two men running toward Roz’s Bentley.

“Oh no,” Mick said in a voice that was so uncharacteristically terrified that even though every man in that SUV was terrified too, it caused them to glance at him. But he was staring at Nikki in the front seat of that car.

He was already flooring it, so he couldn’t go any faster. But they all had to witness the two men run to either side of the Bentley and aim their guns directly at Nikki, who seemed to Mick to be as still as a rock as if she didn’t suspect a thing.

“Look up!” he screamed at her as he pounded on his steering wheel. “Look your ass up, got dammit Nikki, look up!”

But when Nikki fired on the guy on her passenger side, slid back in her seat, causing the guy on her driver side to miss, and then she fired on him too, Reno, Sal and Monk cheered.

“ Got damn she’s good!” said Monk.

“What your ass expect?” asked Reno. “She’s a Gabrini.”

Monk and Sal looked at Reno. “Okay, she’s a Sinatra,” Reno corrected himself, “but it’s all one family. She’s family is what I meant.”

“Then say what your stupid ass meant,” said Sal.

“Kiss it, Sal,” said Reno.

“Too stank,” said Sal.

But Mick’s heart was still hammering as he finally pulled into the parking lot and hurried over to Roz’s car.

He beat them all getting out of that car. He rushed over to the driver side where Nikki was, and opened the door.

When Nikki stepped out, Mick couldn’t help it. He pulled her into his arms as the other three men checked the area behind the boarded-up building to make sure those two crooks didn’t have backup.

But Mick’s only focus was Nikki. He thought they had lost her.

He didn’t care what it looked like as he held her, even though it did look strange to Reno and Sal especially.

They knew Mick was the most unemotional man they’d ever met.

But Mick’s public display of affection for Nikki only proved to him and them just how relieved he was.

It proved it to Nikki, too, who wasn’t accustomed to this side of Mick either. But she welcomed his embrace. The sudden appearance of those two gunmen had thrown her. She couldn’t lie. Not that she was rattled. She wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be rattled. But she was shaken.

“Who do you think you are going it alone?” Reno asked her. “Wanna be some she-woman?”

“How’s Teddy?” Nikki asked anxiously. “He’s still okay?”

“He’s fine,” said Monk. “He’s still in Recovery.”

“Which is where we thought your ass still was,” added Reno.

“Why did you leave?” asked Monk.

“Jackson Reeves is holed up on a property a couple miles up this road.”

Sal frowned. “How do you know that?”

“The night I went to see Juda Gavin at his trailer, I attached a GPS tracking device to his car so I could monitor his activities.”

“So you were suspicious of him all along?” asked Mick.

“He didn’t give me a reason to be suspicious, but it was a just in case kind of thing.”

Even Reno had to nod at that. “Good instincts, Nikki. Good instincts.”

But Mick wasn’t ready to congratulate her. He didn’t like to be blindsided and her sudden absence from that hospital blindsided him. He grabbed her by the arm and took her out of earshot of the others.

“Shouldn’t one of us go with them to make sure Mick don’t brutalize the child?” asked Sal.

“What child?” asked Reno. “Her ass had no business going it alone. She’ll get what she deserves.”

“You saw how Uncle Mick ran out of that hospital,” Monk said to Sal. “Ain’t no way he’s hurting Nikki.”

But when Mick flung her around to face him, and they all saw it, they had their doubts.

Mick looked Nikki dead in her eyes. “Don’t you ever pull this shit again,” he warned her. “You got information to share you share it with the family. You don’t take off without telling anybody anything! You hear me?”

“Yes sir.”

“You scared the shit out of me, Nikki. And when I saw those two gunmen approaching the car and you seemed to be unaware, I thought I was going to lose it. Teddy first. Now you too? I couldn’t bear it!”

Nikki had never heard Mick share his emotions with her to that extent. She didn’t know how to handle it.

“Don’t pull this shit again,” he said to her.

“I won’t,” she said to him. Nikki was genuinely sorry that she had worried him, but she wasn’t sorry that she left them behind. “I just didn’t want anybody else harmed because of me.”

Mick understood her. He would have felt the same way. That was why he let it go as Reno, Sal, and Monk came on over.

“What’s the plan, Uncle Mick?” Sal asked him.

Mick looked at the woman he allowed to become the underboss of his entire syndicate, a decision he didn’t take lightly. “How do you want to handle it, Nikki?” he asked her.

Reno and Sal glanced at each other. Was this their Uncle Mick handing over power? And to a woman no less? They were astounded.

But Nikki didn’t hesitate. She pulled out her phone. “My tracker has a live stream customization that allows me to observe what’s going on at that property,” she said as she opened her phone and showed Mick what she was talking about.