0758215630 (R) (13 page)

“No other family?”

She shook her head. “A grandmother—we called her Granna. She died when I was eight or so.”
Just Gus . . .
And on that long-ago night, she’d lost him forever.

He lowered his head, lifted her chin so their eyes could meet. “You should know I’m having a hell of time resisting the urge to put my arms around you.”

She wanted those arms.
Oh, how she wanted them.
“Keep resisting,” she said, “or that ‘Part One’ you’re so interested in will never get told.”

“Go on, then.” He cupped her shoulder briefly, let his hand slide off her. “I’ll save my questions—and keep my arms to myself—until you’re done.”

“Thanks.” She got her direction again, held it, determined to keep her voice firm, her emotions trimmed. “Both my mother and father were addicts, so for most of our early years Gus and I lived with Granna, a custody thing probably. And that was okay. Better than okay, really. I loved her. So did Gus.” She stopped. “But when she died . . .”
Everything changed.
April rubbed her forehead when the old images came: Granna, being carried out of their snug apartment, an old man at one end of the stretcher, a young man at the other, complaining because the ancient elevator wasn’t big enough. Granna sleeping under the white sheet, Gus beside her, his silent tears making rivers on his handsome face, his hand holding hers so tight it hurt. She let the memories drift back to where they’d come from, deep in her heart, where she guarded them jealously, and where she so often replayed Gus’s words:
It’ll be okay, April, I promise. I’ll look after you no matter what.
A promise he couldn’t keep.

One look in Joe’s eyes reminded her she’d stopped talking again, but true to his word, he hadn’t prodded, hadn’t interrupted her thoughts. She went on, “When Granna died, our mother came for us. I remember wondering who the strange lady was. If I had seen her before it had to have been when I was very young, because I don’t remember recognizing her. And for a while, I was excited about the idea of having a real mommy and daddy.”

Now that memory brought only pain.

“About six months later, my father died”—April met Joe’s gaze briefly—“from an overdose. After that my mother went a little crazy, I guess. She owed money or needed drugs, I don’t know which.” Her mouth was dry, her lips, even though equally as dry, fused together. She tried to dampen them. “She was down to her last . . . saleable asset.”

“Which was?”

“Me.”

“Jesus.” The word came out of his mouth on a low growl.

April paused again. “I remember a tall dark man coming to get me . . . he wore a red wool cap.” She stalled on the nonessential memory. But, in the grayness of a dirty kitchen oddly bleached and shadowed by the light from the bulb over the kitchen table, the cap was so bright, so vivid. She’d never forgotten it. “I remember my mother standing in the corner watching. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and she was thumping the back of her head against the wall.”

“And your brother?”

“He wasn’t home. There was never much food in our, uh, house, so Gus used to go out sometimes to get us something to eat. Sometimes from the alleys behind the restaurants . . . wherever.” She didn’t want to think about that. “Anyway, even if he’d been there, there wouldn’t have been much he could have done. He was barely twelve years old.”
But be would have fought for me. I know he would have done that, at least. He would have tried. Not like the woman who was her mother who watched her go—banging her head on the wall.
“After that night— after the man took me—I never saw him, my brother, or my mother again.”

“Did you look?”

She nodded. “For Gus, yes. Phylly had someone do some checking about a year or so after I came to live with her.”
When she thought it was safe.
“By that time, my mother was dead—same cause as my father—and Gus had disappeared.”

“Into the system?”

“No. There was nothing.”

“And that was it. You let it go. Your brother and the piece of shit you were sold to.”

There was nothing accusatory in his tone, more a levelheaded grasp of an ungraspable situation, but the words were nettles in her brain.

“Yes.” She gave him a level gaze. “We let it go, because there wasn’t a choice. I didn’t want to be taken away from Phylly, and there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d have been given custody of me. She was straight with me about that from the beginning. That no one in authority, be it police, social workers, or judges would go for the idea of a young, out-of-work dancer taking a nine-year-old girl across state lines.”
Plus there was the money she’d “borrowed” from the man who’d locked that nine-year-old in his basement
—
a man masquerading as an oh-so-proper citizen—but who had friends in all the down and dirty places.
April knew it was the illegal types rather than the legal ones who terrified Phylly the most.

The man Phylly had taken her from was seriously connected and cared even less than Phylly about crossing state lines. Then there were the outstanding charges against Phylly, like the boss from the club she’d been working in wrongly accusing her of stealing the bar cash. Joe didn’t need to hear that. It was ancient history now, but back then, as Phylly said later, her life was a hot mess. There were a hundred reasons for her and April to fly under the radar.

“Why do I have the feeling you’ve left out as much out as you put into that story,” Joe said.

“My story. My way.”

Silence.

“Fair enough,” he finally said, but he didn’t look pleased about it.

She went on. “I did look for Gus again, a couple of years ago, but”—she lifted a shoulder, tried to look as though the disappointment of not finding him wasn’t a shadow on her soul—“nothing. It was as if he’d vaporized.”

“What was his name—obviously it wasn’t Worth?”

“Hanlon. August Hanlon. Both of us were named for our birth months.”

“Hm . . .” he said, but for a moment he looked distracted.

April shook away the sadness that came with thinking about Gus, and determined not to speculate on her brother’s fate, she went on. “Anyway, from the time Phylly took me out of the house that night and brought me here”—she gestured to Planet Vegas outside the window—“it was just the two of us—until Cornie came along.” An addition they’d both been crazy happy about and still were. April was seventeen, Phylly thirty-three, when Cornie made three, and April had been a hybrid mother/sister to her ever since. With Phylly still working chorus and the crazy hours that came with it—and still a bit crazy herself—when Cornie entered their lives, most of the household jobs and child rearing was left to April. And she’d loved it. They’d made a family. The first she’d ever had. She looked at Joe, about to tell him that, but stopped herself. Afraid talking about how good things were between her, Phylly, and Cornie would be rubbing salt in his own childhood wounds.

If Joe wanted to ask anything about their family connection, he didn’t. He ran a hand over his jaw, then set his half-full water glass on the table under the window. Pacing a few steps away, his expression deadly serious, he turned back to ask, “Who took you that night? Do you remember?”

Her heart stone hard in her chest, she answered, “Oh, I remember him all right, every hard line in his face. I remember he had creases in each earlobe, like seams, and a dark spot, right here”—she touched directly under her chin—“a birthmark shaped like a big teardrop—or to be more specific like those drawings of sperm. And I remember he had the coldest, blackest eyes I’d ever seen.”

“A name? Did you hear his name?”

“I never heard it.” She left the window and walked toward the center of the room. She was done talking, and done answering questions. “All of that was a long time ago, and to be honest, I’ve tried to forget it ever happened. Thanks to your mother, I almost succeeded.” Maybe she and Phylly had raised denial to an art form, but it had worked so far, and there was no point in messing with success. Or disturbing deep-freeze memories.

“Not good enough.”

“I’m hungry. Shall we have room service?”

He stood in front of her. “That’s it? We leave it there?”

“We leave it there.”

When he gripped her arms, she tried to pull away. He didn’t let her. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Did the bastard who took you”—the muscles along his jaw went taut— “touch you?”

April couldn’t stop the quivering, the onslaught of icy fear, but she shook her head. “No. I wasn’t meant for him.”

Joe frowned, continued to hold her arms, his grip easing somewhat, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. “I don’t get it.”

She again tried to pull away, and this time he let her go, but he remained standing over her, a wall of avenging masculinity, until she continued, “I was a luxury item, a green-eyed blond child, without a soul in the world who’d come looking for me.” She stopped. “The night Phylly took me was the night I was supposed to be put on a ship for southeast Asia—to my new owner.”

Chapter 13

With every word April said, Joe’s gut had tensed as if taking a blow, and he’d had a hard time keeping his mouth shut and his hands off her. He wondered if she knew how she looked telling her story; her wide eyes looking away from him—sad and childlike, as was the constant swallowing and straightening of shoulders, as though what she was saying would get her in trouble somehow. Either that or she was terrified of losing control, determined to keep her more fragile self together—while keeping everyone else out.

April Worth had taken the art of being composed to a whole new level.

She turned away from him and headed to the bar area. Once there, cool as the granite countertop she stood beside, she said, “Shall I order dinner or would you prefer to go out?” It was as if she’d put up a stop sign, closing off memory lane, a road she hadn’t liked traveling in the first place.

“I take it we’re done talking,” he said.

“I’m done. We haven’t started on you yet,” she said, adding, “Dinner. In or out?”

“In.”

She picked up the phone, raised a questioning brow.

“A steak. Medium. Some vegetables.”

He watched her place their order and wondered how the hell he was going to eat. Christ, he’d thought his childhood was a butt-pain. Hers was a damn heart attack.

Joe knew what it was like to be an
unnatural
—meaning having an indecipherable childhood; only pieces and bits of anything remotely normal—but having to
be
normal in spite of it.

Her own mother had sold April for cold hard cash—and if Phyllis Worth hadn’t come along and got her out of that house, she’d have been in a container heading to God knows where, and one of the ugliest most abusive lives a young girl could know. He looked at her, tried to ignore the constriction in his lungs, the uneven beat of his heart, the damned irony of it all—for the first time in his life, he had something to thank his mother for. It might not be enough to obliterate that ER bench and melting ice cream sandwich, but it was
something
.

“I’m going to freshen up,” she said. “Dinner will be thirty, forty minutes. That okay?”

Joe thought she was more than fine just the way she was, but he understood the drill. She needed space. “Fine.” He walked toward her. “What you told me . . . Getting past that. It’s a hell of a thing.” He stroked her hair.

“It was a long time ago. And as to that ‘getting past it’? Life doesn’t really give you a choice.”

“Maybe you’re right, but it’s not fun dragging it up again.”

“True.” She paused and a slight frown creased her forehead. “Made me feel like that nine-year-old girl again.” Then touching his face, she added, “Now, I’m going to get my act together for dinner, and come back here all grown up.”

He turned her hand, kissed her palm. “Good, because I’m a lot more comfortable around consenting adults.”

She gave him a quick smile. “I’ll bet you are.”

He watched her disappear into the bedroom.

He didn’t know a lot about kids—on a personal level— but the idea of someone hurting a child,
trafficking in them,
made him dangerously angry.

In the last two years, partnering with Julius Zern in Guardian, protecting families—particularly the kids—had become a large part of their business, and it took them all over the world. But generally the work was for wealthy, high profile parents who were afraid of kidnappers and ransom notes—not sickos with travel plans.

Joe’s relationships with kids might have been all business—one game of video bat battle hardly counting—but he liked them and he respected their innocence. He’d even taken a bullet for one once. Because kids weren’t meant to be hurt. By anyone. Anytime. Ever. Period.

Out of all of April’s story, one thing stuck like a burr in his brain. He couldn’t pinpoint why he was so sure, but he was; this trouble with Phyllis Worth meant trouble for April. It was connected—and he had to figure out how.

Joe went to the phone, dialed Kit. Got Julius instead. “What are you doing there? I thought you were in Mexico City with the Milonos.”

“Was. Nick Milono’s meetings went better than expected so the family decided to come home early. Plus one of the kids wasn’t doing so well with the air down there,” Julius said, his unusual bass-toned voice more gravelly than usual.

“You sound like crap.”

“Feel like it, too. Got a head cold. Where the hell are you?”

“Vegas.” Joe tried to visualize his partner, six-foot-four and outweighing him by twenty pounds, being broadsided by a cold virus. Normally it would take the offensive line of the Oakland Raiders.

“Nice. Who’s the client?”

“Not so nice—brutally hot. And there is no client.” He rubbed his jaw. “It’s kind of . . . personal. And if it’s all the same to you, I’ll leave the complete story for a stool in a dark tavern and too many beers.”

“Your call.”

“Is Kit there?”

“No. He’s going out with . . . what do you call those beautiful creatures with curves? Been so long, I forget.”

“Kit’s got a date?”

“Yeah. He’s caught himself a live one.”