“Yes. I will not be surprised. He would steal from a dying man. But what do I do now?”
“Well,” Jack said, “you and your cousins can go break his legs.”
Jorge smiled. “Yes. I have thought of that. We have even talked of killing him, but we are not that sort of people.”
“The other thing is to do about $6,000 worth of damage to his property.”
“Yes, but I would rather have the money. The sweet taste of revenge will not pay my bills. And I am trying to avoid trouble with the police. The truth is, Mr. Jack, I need money more than I need revenge. I just want what is mine. Will you help me?”
Jack leaned back, thinking. Jorge was the type of customer that kept Jack in the business. A guy with a genuine beef and nowhere else to turn. But right now, Jack had no idea what he could do for him.
“I will if I can. But I need to know more about Ramirez. Tell me all you know about him. Everything you’ve learned during all these months of working for him.”
Slowly, as Jorge spoke, a plan took shape…
6.
Alicia wasn’t hungry, so she put off lunch. She liked this quiet time when no IV-therapy sessions were scheduled for the clinic and the day-care kids were having lunch; the staff and volunteers who weren’t with the kids were out grabbing a quick bite. Usually she stayed in her office and caught up on her paperwork. But today she was restless.
And she didn’t know why. It wasn’t because of Hector—the little guy with the “mad buth cut” seemed to be responding to the antibiotic. She simply had to move.
She left her cluttered desk and took a stroll through the empty halls, lost in thought, wondering what to do next. Wait for Jack, or make another contact? She’d scraped up the name of someone else. Should she—?
She stopped. She’d heard a sound… almost like a whimper. She stood frozen, her body tingling as she listened.
And then she heard it again, fainter. And then a low voice, whispering… from somewhere around the corner…
Moving on tiptoe, and glad she was wearing sneakers, Alicia peeked around the corner and saw…
An empty hall.
She was beginning to think she’d imagined the noises when she heard the whisper again… coming from a hall closet just a few feet away. The door was cracked open, and the voice was definitely male…
“See? Didn’t I tell you it wouldn’t hurt? There now… doesn’t that feel nice?”
Biting back a surge of bile that almost choked her, Alicia reached for the door. She watched her hand tremble like a leaf in a gale as it neared the knob. She forced it to grip it and pull.
And then she saw them, like a flash picture: a middle-aged white man—a volunteer she’d seen around recently but didn’t know by name yet—blinking in the sudden light, his hand down the pants of a little black girl, no more than four years old—Kanessa Jackson.