Broken, p.3
Broken, page 3
Jobs meant money. In his line of work, sometimes that money could be very, very lucrative. But he wasn’t in the mood.
“Not interested.”
She shoved a picture in front of him.
Juanita might be a lousy actress, but she definitely knew what made people tick. The picture she held had him stopping dead in his tracks. As he stared at the battered face of a young woman, rage and hatred curled through his gut.
Hell, she barely looked old enough to be out of high school.
“How old is she?” he asked, his voice rough.
“Nineteen, I think.”
“Who’s the skip? Her boyfriend?”
Juanita rolled her eyes. “No. He’s her husband, if you can believe that. She married him a few months ago. I read the report while I was waiting for you—there were a couple of domestic disturbance calls made to the local police, but this last time was the first time he’d actually been arrested. His mom ended up paying the bail and then he up and disappeared.”
“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. The long, wheat blond strands fell right back into his face. He stared at the picture for another ten seconds, a muscle jerking in his jaw. “Shit. Fine. Give me the damn file.”
“NOT how I wanted to spend the day,” he muttered to himself.
His skip had proved to be pretty good at keeping a low profile, not hanging out at home, or with the few friends Quinn had managed to track down.
So he hadn’t been able to finish the job yesterday, which meant he had to get it done today. Had to, because he didn’t want to waste any more time than necessary on a fucking wife beater.
Of course, the wife wasn’t all that interested in helping Quinn find her bastard husband, as evidenced by the fact that he was leaving her apartment with nothing new.
Irritated, he shut the door behind him and made his way down the busted sidewalk to his car. It was one of those crossover SUVs, a Taurus X, black with tinted windows, equipped with GPS, and it was roomy enough to haul in the people he picked up for skipping out on bail.
He’d spent most of yesterday talking to people who knew his current skip, Louis Blanford. That had been a waste of time and today he’d gone by to talk to the wife.
She hadn’t wanted to meet his eyes, wouldn’t even really look at him, as she spoke in a hesitant, whisper-soft voice. And of course, she didn’t know where her husband was, hadn’t seen him, blah, blah, blah . . . After spending half an hour trying to get her to talk to him, he gave up and left.
“Hey, wait up.”
Quinn glanced back over his shoulder as a young woman came rushing out of the apartment. She was probably a few years older than her sister and her pleasant, round face might have looked sweet and innocent to some. The look in her eyes, though, was anything but.
Quinn looked into those eyes and saw fury. Hatred. Disgust.
Directed at her brother-in-law, he decided as she came to a stop a few feet away and said, “I can tell you where you might be able to find him.”
“Where?” He cocked his head, studying her.
“That dickhead hangs around some bar in East St. Louis.” Her blue eyes flashed from behind a thick pair of glasses. “I think it’s called Babes or Bitches—can’t remember.”
She smirked and added, “It’s Wednesday so it’s possible you might see him there tonight—Kari used to complain that she never saw him during the week because of her schedule. She had Wednesdays off, but he was always at that dumb bar because they have some sort of special on the wings.”
Quinn nodded. Something moved just out of the corner of his eye and he glanced up, saw Kari there. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, but she glared at her sister like she wanted to smack her.
“She knows you’re out here talking to me,” he said, angling his head toward the sister.
The girl set her jaw. “I don’t care. He won’t stop until somebody makes him and Kari won’t.” Then she sighed and brushed her hair back from her face. “I don’t know. Maybe she can’t.”
Quinn wished he could tell her that he’d make the bastard stop, but unless he put the man in the ground, it wasn’t likely.
OF course, putting him in the ground was an appealing option.
Hours later, as he dealt with the skinny, smelly son of a bitch, he decided the option was growing more appealing by the second. Then the fucker spit at him.
“Do that again and I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat.” Quinn reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue bandanna, used it to wipe the spit off his face. Then he threw the bandanna in the face of the wife beater he’d just hauled in off the streets.
The bastard’s bounty wasn’t all that much, but for guys who knocked women around, Quinn would do the job for free. If he didn’t need to pay for nice little things like food, rent, and gas for his bike.
Lewis Blanford swallowed and stared at Quinn, some attempt at bravado trying to make an appearance. “You can’t do that, fuckface. It’s illegal and I’ll sue your ass.”
Quinn lifted a brow. “You’d be amazed at what I can get away with, Blanford.” Then he smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a smile that had made more than one man feel like pissing in his pants.
“You want to see just how much I can get away with? Try it again.” Quinn leaned in and lowered his voice as he made the threat.
Blanford went white. He swallowed, a muscle jerking in his jaw. He curled his lip in a sneer, but didn’t quite manage to meet Quinn’s gaze.
“You just wait until you get a bitch screwing you over and see how you handle it,” he muttered.
Quinn didn’t bother replying. He’d been screwed over by bitches before, he’d been screwed over by friends, and he’d been screwed over by total strangers. Hell, he’d been screwed over by his mother every day of his life, right up until the day she died.
The day he reacted to any damn thing by beating up a woman was the day he’d sprout wings and fly.
He stepped to the side and gestured to the Taurus. “You going to get in on your own or do I need to help you?”
The last time he’d been forced to “help,” it had ended with a trip to the emergency room after he’d broken a man’s arm. He really hoped that wasn’t going to be how things went this time, but he never really knew how things would play out when he located his skips.
He needed the job, he liked the money, but he was getting damned tired of some of the shit.
Blanford was apparently smarter than he looked. Of course, lice were probably smarter than Blanford looked. The jeans he wore were slung so low, they’d fallen down when he tried to run from Quinn. He’d tripped and ended up landing facedown in the dirt with his skinny, naked ass hanging out. The sweatshirt he wore was so grimy and stained with sweat, no amount of Clorox was going to clean it. He stank to high heaven, and Quinn wondered if the man had any idea soap and deodorant existed.
As Blanford climbed into the back of the car, Quinn decided he was damn glad he hadn’t ever gotten around to getting his own car to use for work. He’d just keep using company cars—there was no way in hell he’d let something that dirty in a car he owned. And even though he could do pretty much whatever was needed to bring in the people who went and skipped bail, he figured tying somebody to the top of a car to transport him might just be pushing it.
Bail-jumping. Bounty hunting.
How in the hell had he gotten into this?
“Because you’re good at finding scum,” he muttered.
Not a rancher like his dad. Not the doctor-type like his twin brother. Hunting down trash seemed to be his calling.
Probably because that’s where you came from . . .
You ain’t nothing but trash.
It was a sly, insidious whisper, the echo of his dead mother’s voice. Long dead—more than twenty years had passed since she’d overdosed.
If it hadn’t been for the guy who’d been shooting up with his mom, Quinn didn’t know where he’d be right now. It turned out the police were looking for the man, though, and very enthusiastically. They’d busted the door down early that morning, discovered their suspect, lying on the floor in a drugged daze next to a corpse . . . and Quinn, in the closet.
If the police hadn’t found him that morning, if Quinn had woken up and found his mother dead, he would have hit the streets and never looked back. Which meant he wouldn’t have landed with his dad and Luke on the ranch in Wyoming. That one little twist of fate had probably saved his life. If it hadn’t been for Dad and Luke, he might have ended up a bottom-feeder like Blanford.
“Now that’s a depressing thought,” he muttered, slanting a look at Blanford. He rolled his shoulders and shoved a hand through his hair. Then, blowing out a sigh, he climbed into the car.
It already reeked, a sickening mixture of body odor and fried food. As he started the car, he hit the button for the window. A blast of hot air came through, and in the back, Blanford swore.
“Shit, man. It’s hot out. Ain’t this thing got AC?”
Quinn ignored him.
“LITTLE cunt.”
Ugly words, spoken in an ugly tone, with ugly anger flashing through a pair of pale blue eyes.
“Little cunt, one of these days, I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
A new voice . . . soft, shaking, unsteady.
“He wants you dead.”
Sara Davis came awake with that voice echoing in her ears. After two years, she still heard that voice, all too often. She still had the dreams, all too often. And she was still on the run. As soon as she felt like she might actually remember what it was like not to run, she would have to pack up and start all over again.
She took a deep breath—through her mouth. In the little apartment where she lived, it wasn’t ever safe to breathe too deeply through one’s nose. Not when the aromas consisted of a nasty mix of stale food, marijuana, various bodily wastes when the plumbing screwed up, and sweat.
Holding her breath, she counted to ten and then let it back out. Sitting up, she kicked her legs over the side of the plain twin mattress. She hadn’t spent money getting a frame for it—the moment she’d looked inside this place, she’d known she’d stay only as long as it took to find someplace else.
That had been six weeks ago, and it was taking a lot longer to find a decent place than she’d hoped. Of course, decent was relative. She’d be happy with someplace where she could breathe normally without worrying about the hazard it might pose to her health. Someplace where she wasn’t constantly hearing the conversations from her neighbors, someplace where she didn’t have to share a bathroom with three other tenants would be a godsend.
But there were a number of things that kept the nicer places out of her reach, and finding a tolerable one was getting harder and harder.
From the apartment below hers, she heard a crash, followed by raised, angry voices. Tuning them out, she covered her face with her hands and thought longingly of the time when she’d woken up in a nice comfy bed. Back then, she’d always slept naked, loving the way her black silk sheets felt as she snuggled into them.
The feel of silk was nothing but a memory now.
Sleeping naked was just plain stupid—you didn’t want to be naked when the only locks on the door could be broken by a persistent two-year-old or a clumsy drunk. She slept in cotton jersey pants and a T-shirt, with her hand wrapped around a canister of Mace.
Once upon a time, she’d had a cute little cottage, and her bedroom had taken up most of the second floor. The walls had been painted a dark, vivid shade of purple, and framed prints of fairies had danced upon them. Her bedroom used to smell like vanilla, lavender, and spice, courtesy of her love for potpourri and candles.
Now she had the lovely odor of unwashed bodies, faulty plumbing, mold, mildew, and fried food lingering in the air. She’d given up potpourri and candles long ago, which was a good thing, because it would have been money down the drain in this dump. No amount of Glade, no amount of Febreze, no amount of potpourri would do anything to improve the atmosphere here.
Candles might—if she lit a few dozen and then the room accidentally caught on fire. If the place burned to the ground, that would be a huge improvement.
The alarm clock on her cell phone chirped and she sighed, pushed a hand through her hair. It was a drab shade, caught somewhere between brown and blonde and cut to chin length. She never let it grow much longer, although she took care of cutting it herself these days.
Questions warred in her mind as she reached for her phone, staring at the time. She had someplace she was supposed to be, but right now, she wasn’t entirely sure she should go.
She knew she wanted to, but that was a far cry from knowing if she should.
The voices downstairs rose once more, and as if on cue, voices from the apartment overhead joined in. Surrounded by angry, raised shouts on what felt like all sides, Sara dropped back on the mattress and reached out, blindly feeling around the little plastic crate that served as a table.
Her fingers brushed up against the napkin and she lifted it, read the address.
Hell. What could it hurt?
YOU can know who a person is simply by staring into their eyes.
Somebody had said that to her once, and they were words she lived by.
Sara kept sunglasses on whenever possible. She avoided looking people in the eyes at all costs. If she’d kept to that rule a little more firmly, she might not be standing on a nice tree-lined street in St. Louis’s West End. Which would mean she might not have this odd, itchy sensation that something big was going to happen.
Some sort of change. Sara wasn’t exactly opposed to change, provided she got to do it on her terms and had some control over things. But this wouldn’t be one of those changes. She knew it in her bones.
Slipping her sunglasses up, she eyed the old house in front of her. It had been done up into apartments, and she could already see that somebody put a lot of time and love into it.
Gnawing on her lower lip, she shifted from one foot to the other. She didn’t need to be here. She should have just thrown the address away the second she had a chance. But she hadn’t. She was here, and now she was debating about whether she should just hightail it back to the bus stop and disappear.
Only one thing kept her from doing just that—the kindness she’d seen in Theresa Kingston’s gaze the day before. If you could truly know a person just by staring into their eyes, then Sara knew that Theresa was one of the kindest women on earth.
Sara wanted to trust that instinct, but when it came to kindness, she had a hard time. The biggest part of her said she could trust Theresa. But there was a voice, doubtful, reminding her, always, of what could happen if she trusted the wrong person.
She closed her eyes and played the scene through in her head again, tried to figure out what her instincts were telling her.
“I heard you were looking for a place to stay.”
“Hmmm. Maybe.” Which translated to YES! DESPERATELY.
“Well, if you’re interested, I’ve got a vacant apartment in my house. It’s nothing fancy, just a studio apartment with a little kitchenette.”
“Sounds nice, but I’m pretty tight on money right now.” Tight didn’t quite describe it—she saved every last penny she could, and since she didn’t make a lot of pennies, she didn’t have many left over to add to her savings.
Theresa leaned back against the padded back of the booth where she liked to sit. Every other day, the older woman was there, right at 11:00. Come rain or shine, or at least it had been that way for the past six weeks. “Ahhh, but I haven’t told you how much it costs,” Theresa said, smiling.
More than I make here, Sara thought glumly. But she pasted a smile on her face and said, “Sorry . . . I’m just so used to everything being out of my range around here.” And the stuff that wasn’t out of her range, she couldn’t risk taking.
Most landlords didn’t want to rent out apartments without doing a credit check, a background check . . . driver’s license. Sara couldn’t chance any of those.
Somebody called Sara’s name and she glanced over her shoulder, saw one of her co-workers loading plates onto a tray. “Be right there.”
She turned back to Theresa and opened her mouth, but the older woman cut her off.
“Here.” She pressed a napkin into Sara’s hand, a napkin and five dollars. A five-dollar tip, for a cup of coffee. “Just come by and check it out, Sara. Really, I think you’d love it.”
Her instincts told her that Theresa wasn’t any sort of threat to her. Still, in hindsight, Sara should have just thrown the napkin away, finished up her day at the café, and then quietly disappeared. She didn’t need people noticing her. Being nice to her. Being friendly.
When people started being friendly, it meant only one thing.
Time to go.
She no longer trusted her instincts—she couldn’t afford to. The girl she’d once been would have looked at the elderly woman and fallen in love. Theresa looked like Mrs. Claus, complete with a tidy white bun in her hair and rosy cheeks, and was always ready with a kind word or a joke to share.
Sara desperately wanted to accept that kindness.
Setting her jaw, she shoved the napkin in her pocket and hitched her backpack a little higher up on her shoulder. She was going to go back to the roach motel that masqueraded as an apartment. She was going to pack her stuff. And she was going to leave.
In another month or two, it would start getting cooler. Then winter would settle in. Maybe she’d head farther south this time. Someplace warm. Maybe she could get lucky and even find a place halfway . . . well, like home.
“Sara, is that you I hear out there?”
She just barely managed to keep from flinching when she heard Theresa’s voice calling her name. Steeling herself, she pasted a smile on her face and waited as the older woman bustled around the corner of the house, carrying a tray of flowers and beaming.
Huh. People really do beam when they smile that big . . . Theresa set down the tray of flowers and rushed up the brick walkway to greet Sara.
