CLOSE TO YOU: Enhanced (Lost Hearts) (46 page)

             
"What do you mean, you used to have a job at the capitol?" Teague knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

             
"I got fired." Kate's mouth looked a little puckered. "Brad seemed to think I'd been nothing but a waste of money since I got to the station."

             
"That son of a bitch!" Teague couldn't believe it. "Doesn't he realize what you've gone through?"

             
"He doesn't care. He didn't want to hire me in the first place, and he doesn't have to keep me now." Kate looked remarkably unconcerned.

             
But Teague knew better. She loved her job. "I'll talk to. him."

             
"No, you will not. I've already had one person fixing my employment." Kate's eyes flashed. "I'm not having another one."

             
"I think we'd better eat." Juanita placed little bowls of sour cream and
pico de gallo
on the table, and a small smile creased her thin cheeks.

             
When Teague and Kate had seated themselves, Juanita rolled into her place and took each of their hands. "At every meal, I always thank God for another day of life. Today I thank God for your lives, too."

TWENTY-SIX

              By the time Teague and Kate left Juanita's apartment two hours later, Kate had been regaled with Juanita's humorous version of Teague's teenage years. She hadn't told Kate everything—she hadn't told Kate the big thing—but she had painted a picture of a swaggering tough who stood down gangs to protect his little cousin in the school yard and then whimpered over a haircut.

             
Teague watched as Kate laughed at all the right places, and the sound of her merriment felt like knives in his gut.

             
But she was thoughtful and silent as they made their way to her car. She probably made some assumptions. Probably the right ones. The next hour would be difficult, but he'd been through worse hours, and when it was over—well, it would be over.

             
He watched the scenery swing by, and said, "You've taken a wrong turn, Kate."

             
"I'm not taking you home." She took another turn.

             
"I don't want to go to your house."

             
"I'm not going to my house, either." She had a determined jut to her chin. An ominous jut.

             
He waited, but she didn't continue. "Where are we going?" he asked.

             
"To the park on Town Lake."

             
Which was a pretty park and a pretty lake, but he wanted to get this confrontation over with, not have a picnic. "Why are we going there?"

             
"It's wonderful this time of year." That was no answer, but she didn't volunteer anything more.

             
She pulled into the almost empty parking lot. The grass was still green—of course, it was Texas and barely November—but some of the leaves had turned color. Through the branches, the lake was smooth and blue. A couple huddled together on a picnic table. No one else was in sight.

             
Kate turned to Teague. "Shall we walk?"

             
"Sure." His head still hurt, but he figured the pain would be relieved as soon as he finally told her what he had to tell her. "We've got to talk, anyway."

             
"I know." She opened her door. "So let's walk."

             
Ah. That was why she'd come here. She wanted to talk, too, and on neutral ground.

             
They strolled side by side across the lawn toward the lake's edge, but this time she didn't reach out and take his hand. This time, she didn't touch him at all.

             
The day was chilly, probably fifty-five degrees, and even with his leather jacket on he was cold. He told himself it was because he'd just left the hospital. Actually, it was the distance between them. A distance he'd better get used to.

             
Not far from the water, she sat on the grass, turned up her collar, tucked her hands in the pockets of her sweater. The silence between them became uncomfortable, then deadly, and Kate made no effort to lift it. If someone was going to start the conversation, it had to be him.

             
He was glad he was standing over her. He could impose the truth on her. She needed to know.

             
"It's my fault Juanita's in that wheelchair." There. The truth had come out too bluntly, but at least he'd said it.

             
"I'd sort of figured that out." Kate tucked her face further into the collar of her sweater. And waited.

             
"Juanita . . . when Juanita talks about me, I sound so innocent. I wasn't." God bless Juanita. She loved him and made him out to be better than he was. "I ran with a gang. Was one of the leaders. Played out my life on the streets. Drank and did drugs. Would have died in the gutter, just like my mother predicted, except . . ."

             
"You got a wake-up call." Kate looked across the lake.

             
"Sure. You can call it that. My mother . . . I'll never forget what my mother said that morning." The words, the ones he never could speak aloud before, spewed forth dipped in the vitriol of the past.
"Teague, you little bastard, don't be so goddamned stupid. You're a god-damned stupid half-breed gringo and if you get knifed, no one will care. I sure as hell won't. But that kid is only fourteen. You can't take her to a gang fight. Her father's the meanest son of a bitch I ever met, and I've met a few. If something happens to his kid, he'll kill you. Besides, she's smart. She's a nice kid. Not like you."

             
"Your mother must have been a pleasure." Kate didn't meet his eyes.

             
The dark emptiness now encroached without any encouragement. "A lousy mother is no excuse for what I did."

             
"No, you're right." Kate accepted that all too easily. "So you took Juanita to the gang fight."

             
"From the time she was little, she tagged around after me. She worshiped me, and I took care of her. It made me feel strong. Benevolent." Bitterly he said, "What a joke."

             
"She still seems to like you. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was selling me on you today."

             
Juanita
had
been selling him to Kate. "She wants me to marry."

             
"Of course she does. And why not?"

             
"I . . ."
I haven't met the right woman
. But he couldn't say that. He didn't believe it.

             
And from the sudden sparkle in Kate's eyes, she wouldn't accept that answer.

             
"Finish your story," she said.

             
"That kid is only fourteen. She'll follow you into hell
. . . and she did. Juanita wanted to come see a gang war, so I
brought
her. It was time she toughened up, smelled the blood, felt the excitement of fighting with knives, of winning. We broke windows. We looted. We waged war on one another, and the police couldn't keep up with us." He still remembered the dust rising from the streets, the shouts, the sweat.

             
His head throbbed harder. "Then somebody broke the rules. Someone brought a gun." The words had been so easy, words he'd rehearsed all week, a flat retelling of horrific events. But now they dried up and he was left with one memory

             
The sound of that single gunshot.

             
He'd heard a lot of gunfire since, but even now, it rang in his ears.

             
He walked away from the memories and from Kate, but he couldn't stay away. He had to finish the story. He came back, and again he told himself it would all be done in about an hour. He could survive anything for an hour.

             
"One bullet. That bullet severed Juanita's spinal chord. She almost died." She had fallen at his feet, still conscious, and looked up at him. "I should have died."

             
"But you didn't." Kate seemed disconnected in a way he'd never imagined. "God or Fate or whatever you believe in decided you should stay."

             
"Yes. And face what I had done." Over and over again. "That night when I went home . . . I found the cops there."

             
"To arrest you?"

             
"No. To tell me my mother went out on the streets, drunk and God knows what else, screaming insults at the police—and somehow, she ended up dead." The dark and the cold enveloped him. "It was a hell of a day."

             
"So you killed your mother, too."

             
At Kate's cruel words, the last, faint shred of hope, a shred he hadn't even recognize, shriveled.

             
He bared his teeth. "No. No, I'm not taking credit for that. My mother was a prostitute when it suited her. If she had a windfall, she spent it as fast as she could. She was mean drunk and she was mean sober, and she didn't go out that day to rescue Juanita. She didn't want me to take Juanita out because she was scared of her brother. She went out that day . . . because she liked to live in hell, and hell was happening almost on her doorstep."

             
"I know." Kate's gaze flashed to meet his. "Juanita told me."

             
For the first time, Teague realized he'd been handled. And as Kate stood and brushed the grass off her rear, he got the feeling he was about to be handled some more.               "What else did Juanita tell you?"

             
"After you were shot, she was worried to death about you. We talked quite a bit. She pretty much told me what you told me, but she added a few things." Kate shook back her hair, the same way she did when she was doing an interview. "She said before the accident her father used to beat her, and you stood up to him. Even when you were half his size, you attacked him, distracted him, took the blows for her."

             
"It made me feel important."

             
"To be someone's hero? Sure it did, but you suffered a lot of pain for that importance." Kate walked to the shore, picked up a stone, and skipped it across the water. "Juanita told me while she lay bleeding in the streets, you stood guard over her, protected her from the riot, rode with her in the ambulance. She said her father tried to kill you in the waiting room."

             
"Yeah, if someone was going to hurt her, he wanted it to be him." What a great family he'd come from.

             
"She said that he chased you out of town, that you went and joined the service." Kate skipped another rock. "She said when she came home from the hospital, her father left her in her bed to rot. You sneaked in when you had leave. You took the most dangerous missions so you could have the extra pay, and as soon as you had enough money, you left the service, brought her to the Shriner's Hospital for her surgeries; then when she had recovered, you gave her a job at Ramos Security."

             
"I owed her."

             
"Of course you did." Kate turned and walked toward him, right at him, her eyes fixed on his, and now he saw the determination in her. "But you paid the debt. Juanita's not a stupid woman, and she's not some wheelchair-bound saint who sees only the best in you." Kate lashed at him. "She knows what happened. She knows what you owed. She told me you'd more than paid the debt. And she loves you. Do you value her love so little that you believe you're worth nothing?"

             
"You don't understand. It's not that simple." But it took all his strength of will not to back away from Kate's advance.

             
"Yes. It is. You did a horrible, stupid thing. So did everyone in those gangs that day. But I doubt any of them have paid as dearly as you have." Before he could answer, she continued, "I've done horrible, stupid things, too. I got a ticket for driving too fast—but I didn't drive off the road or cause an accident."

             
"That's hardly the same thing."

             
"It could have been worse, but I was
lucky
. And I'm a smart woman, but that day I got mad at you for lying to me, so I went to Hobart thinking I could do a simple investigation. Look what happened. I got you and Melissa Cunningham shot, and I came this close"—Kate held out her fingers a centimeter apart—"to being killed myself. What do I owe Melissa? What do I owe you?"