Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story (5 page)

I hoped it was a long time.

People started shouting and screaming. Families
came out the front doors, wearing bathrobes and pajamas, barefoot against the
cold.

I silently apologized to them.

No one came out of Duane’s apartment.

Families, carrying children, holding
blankets, turned and looked at their homes. Voices rose in confusion at the
lack of smoke and flames.

Valentina ran to my side. No one seemed
to notice her in all the chaos.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“No one came out,” I said.

“What are we going to do?”

I was about to tell her that I would
break in the back, when the door banged open. The little girl came out wearing
footie pajamas. Her hair was a rat’s nest and she was sobbing.

“Help me! Help me!” she yelled. “My mommy
won’t come. My mommy won’t come.”

“Get her to the car,” I said as I
sprinted for the main door. I didn’t want anyone else to answer her summons.

So far, no one had noticed her. They were
still talking and yelling and looking in the opposite direction.

Valentina ran at my side. We reached the
little girl at the same time.

“Annie,” Valentina said, crouching in
front of her and putting her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “We’re going to get
your mom out.”

“
Get
her to the car
,” I repeated, then pushed the door open.

The apartment was a jumbled mess — overturned
chairs, a ripped couch. The television was on, but no one was watching it.

That sour smell was here too, and it
turned my stomach.

I hurried down the corridors, checking
the kitchen, then the bathroom, and finally one of the bedrooms. The interior
smelled of old blood.

I flicked on the light.

A body was leaning against the wall, a
spray of blood behind it, and a pool of blood below. It took me a second to
realize that the body did not belong to Linda Krag.

It was a man’s body. It had to be Duane.

Sirens started in the distance, very
faint, but growing.

I cursed.

A gun was on the bed.

I left it there and checked the other
bedroom.

Linda Krag was huddled in her daughter’s
bed, eyes wide. “Leave me,” she said, but I didn’t know if she was talking to
me or just repeating what she had been saying to her daughter.

I wasn’t even sure she had seen me.

I scooped her in my arms. She moaned when
I picked her up. I carried her down that hallway. I could feel dried blood
against her skin, but I didn’t know if it was hers or his. She hadn’t showered
in days. The stench of her made my eyes water.

The sirens were getting closer.

I hurried out of the building. People
were wandering around, searching for the fire. In the distance, I could see
flashing red lights.

Valentina was standing beside my car,
leaning on the passenger door. Annie was inside the car, in the back seat.

“Open up,” I said.

She didn’t have to be told twice. She
opened the door to the back seat. Annie leaned forward and Valentina shooed her
away.

I put Linda inside. She toppled toward
her daughter, but I didn’t care.

We had to get out of there.

“Get inside,” I said to Valentina as I
pushed the door closed.

She did. I got in the driver’s side, and
started the car all in the same move. Then I backed around the corner, so that
no one could see my plates. I backed the entire block, then turned right, away
from the apartment buildings, heading toward East Washington Avenue.

“Screw in the dome light,” I said to
Valentina.

She gave me a funny look, visible in the
street lights, then did as she was told.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“I’m dropping you off, then we’re going
to Chicago.”

She leaned over the back seat. “Linda
needs medical attention.”

“She’s not getting it here,” I said.

“Smokey,” Valentina said.

“You didn’t ask me where Duane was,” I
said.

She looked at me. “Where’s Duane?”

“Daddy’s dead,” Annie said in a very
small voice.

“Jesus,” Valentina said, looking at me. “What
happened?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t want to
know. And this is the last we’re going to say about it. Right, Annie?”

“Smokey,” Valentina said, reprimanding me
for my tone.

“Right, Annie?” I repeated.

“Okay,” Annie said.

The capitol dome loomed in the distance. We
were only a few miles from the hot line.

“Where are you taking them?” Valentina
asked.

“Back to Helping Hands. We’ll find them a
new apartment,” I said. “Can you get into the back seat, and see if Linda will
make it all the way to Chicago?”

“I’ll make it.” Linda whispered the
words. “I’m just fine. Thank you.”

I was relieved to hear her respond
directly to me. But I knew she wasn’t just fine. She wasn’t protesting my
presence like she had the first time I tried to take her to Chicago.

“I’m going with you,” Valentina said to
me.

“No,” I said.

“You need me,” she said.

I turned toward her, trying to keep at
least part of my gaze on the road. “Maybe you don’t understand. I am about to
commit a felony. I don’t want you involved.”

“Don’t,” Linda said from the back. “We’ll
be all right.”

“If I take you to a Madison hospital,” I
said to Linda, “they’ll arrest you and take Annie. Do you want that?”

“Nooo.” The reply was soft, and I wasn’t
sure if it came from Linda or Annie herself.

“Jesus,” Valentina said.

“So,” I said to Valentina, “I’m taking
you home.”

“No,” Valentina said. “You need me. They
need me. We’ll work this out. I’ll take a bus home tomorrow.”

The truth was, I did need her. I needed
her to monitor Linda’s condition. I needed her to keep Annie calm.

I needed her to keep an eye out, to make
sure we weren’t being followed.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get the hell
out of here.”

***

Three hours and one furtive gas stop
later put us in Chicago at four in the morning. I drove immediately to the
hospital nearest my house.

Valentina blanched as we pulled into the
parking lot. I had driven her there once, saving her life and changing it
forever.

Linda had passed out sometime along the
drive, but she was breathing evenly. I had Valentina bring Annie inside. I
carried Linda.

The emergency staff took her from me,
placing her on a cart. In the florescent hospital lights, it became clear that
she was bruised everywhere. The cast on her arm from her previous injury was
cracked and ruined. And there was dried blood around her mouth and nose.

“What happened?” The emergency room nurse
asked me. She was glaring.

“Her husband happened,” I said, deciding
not to lie about that at least. I lied about the rest, though. “She lives next
door to us. I couldn’t just leave her there.”

“Good thing you didn’t,” the nurse said,
and wheeled her away.

I stayed and filled out the paperwork,
using my own apartment building as Linda’s address, and making up a last name
for her. I figured the hospital would never check, and Helping Hands would
cover the bills.

Valentina took Annie to the waiting room
while I worked. When I finished, I followed them there.

They were alone in the room. Newspapers
were scattered around them. Valentina had used one to cover Annie. Valentina
had fallen asleep in the chair by the door, Annie on the couch near her.

I sat down, my heart pounding.

Now I would have to deal with my split-second
decision. Obviously Linda couldn’t take the beatings any longer, and she had
shot Duane in the face. Then she collapsed. Annie hadn’t known what to do or
maybe was too frightened to move, until the fire alarm forced her out of the
building.

They might have been alone with that
corpse for a week or more, until the neighbors reported something. Then the
police would have come, charged Linda with murder, put Annie in foster care,
and no one would have heard of them again.

No one would have cared that Linda had
been repeatedly beaten within an inch of her life. Her only hope would have
been an insanity plea, which probably would not have worked — especially
since the prosecutor would have said that she had run away from Duane before,
and she clearly did not want to be with him.

I was giving Helping Hands a hell of a
burden — the damaged mother, the terrified child — but I figured we
could deal with it. And if someone determined that Linda was no longer fit to
care for her child, we would find Annie a good home, a sympathetic home, one
that would help her grow and overcome these last few years.

I’d seen that work. It had worked with my
son Jimmy.

Annie sighed and twitched in her sleep. The
newspaper fell off her, and I picked it up, gently putting it back over her.

Then I looked at her, really looked at
her, for the first time since we picked her up.

She had an ugly bruise on her forehead. It
was black and purple and it had seeped down to her nose. Something had hit her
hard there.

I felt a quick anger at Duane, and then I
froze. I looked at her hand, dangling down toward the floor.

Her thumb was bruised too. And there was
a pinch mark on her index finger — the kind you got when you didn’t know
how to properly hold a gun.

My breath caught. The bruises lined up. If
she had held the gun on her father, and the gun had gone off, the recoil would
have sent her hands backwards, hitting her forehead with enough force to make
that bruise.

Daddy’s
dead
, she had said.

And her mother was in Annie’s room, not
the adults’ bedroom.

Hiding?

Letting her daughter defend her?

I shivered just a little. I didn’t want
to know, and I wasn’t going to ask. I had already broken enough laws for these
two. I would let the experts from Helping Hands work with them — and I
would never mention my suspicions.

I had brought them here — risked at
least two felony charges — so that they could stay together.

I wasn’t going to be the one to get in
the way of that.

Valentina stirred. “How’s Linda?” she
asked sleepily.

“Badly beaten,” I said. “But they think
she’ll be all right.”

“Good.” Valentina looked at Annie. “Bastard
beat her too. I had someone look at the bruise. She doesn’t have a concussion.”

“That’s a relief,” I said.

Valentina was still looking at the
sleeping child. “Think they’ll be all right?”

“At least now they have a chance,” I
said.

And no one could ask for more than that.

About the Author

Kris
Nelscott is an open pen name used by award-winning bestselling writer Kristine
Kathryn Rusch, which she uses for historical mysteries.
 

The
first Smokey Dalton novel,
A
Dangerous Road
, won the Herodotus Award
for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best
Novel; the second
, Smoke-Filled Rooms
,
was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third,
Thin Walls
, was one of the
Chicago Tribune
’s best mysteries of the year.
Kirkus
chose
Days of Rage
as one of the top ten mysteries of the year
.
 

Entertainment Weekly
says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler.
 
Booklist
calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and
Salon
says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the
strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”
She is working on the next Smokey Dalton novel, and a new series about a
battered women’s shelter in 1972.

If
you liked “Family Affair,” you might enjoy these Kris Nelscott works:

Clinic

Dangerous
Road

Guarding
Lacey

Smoke-Filled
Rooms

Thin
Walls