Jesse (3 page)

“We don’t know who the girl is. And I
thought you told the police that she tried to help you out.”

Royce looked at Curtis who’d had contact
with the cops from the start.

“What did they say to you?”

“Not Sondra, the young girl. Have you
talked to her yet?” No one made eye contact with her and she grabbed him by the
arm. “Jesse Michael, what did you do to her?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything. She was
already pi…mad when I got to her and trying to leave. The cop tried to
insinuate that she’d set the fire for the reward. She left about half an hour
ago.” He realized what he’d told her seconds after he’d said it. He closed his
eyes before opening them to look at her again. The look of anger surprised him,
but the tight grip she hand on his hand hurt.

“I told you to watch over her. Was that
so hard for you to do?” She pinned Daniel with a look. “Did you find out about
the building? Who owned it?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was bank owned and not
insured. As far as I can tell, it was just an empty building without insurance.
I did find a couple of things, something that didn’t sink well, but I have my
team looking into it.”

“That girl saved me. She could have
simply let me die when Sondra told her I was dead, but she didn’t. She even
went back in for the old fool when, by all accounts, the girl had already
carried me to safety.” She lay back on the bed. “Please find her for me. I need
to thank her personally for helping me.”

“I don’t think she wants to be found,”
Kasey said quietly. “When she left she was saying something about the fault of
the Hunters and that had she only stayed in her flop house she’d not be in
pain. I got the impression that she didn’t like Jesse particularly.”

He looked at his mom. He could see she
hurt, but not at what she’d just heard. He, however, was mad enough for them
both. “If you think I did anything to this girl, you’re wrong. I don’t have a
single clue as to who she is. And as for finding her, I have a little bit to
say to her as well.”

Chapter 3

The cut on her arm was throbbing. She
hadn’t had a chance to look at it, but she was pretty sure that she’d pulled a
few of the stitches out when she tossed Hunter to the floor. She grinned as she
set another tray of dirty dishes through the washer. That had almost been worth
it.

“Joe, there’s some soup left if you want
it. It’s not a lot, but it will fill the void if you’re hungry enough.” She
wasn’t, but nodded to Doyle O’Donnell, the owner and cook. “And I put you a
sandwich in the fridge for you to take home. Some jack wipe ordered it and
didn’t want it ‘cause I put too much lettuce on it.”

She knew that he was lying to her. If a
customer had said that to him, Doyle would have popped him in the head with his
baseball bat and told him to eat it anyway. He was that sort of guy. But he
liked her, and he was the only person who knew she was homeless. He’d been
having mistakes like this one more and more lately. She nodded, too emotional
to say anything.

Letting the washer do its thing, she
went to the table and sat down. As soon as her butt hit the chair Doyle set a
large bowl of chili in front of her and a sleeve of crackers. She normally
didn’t care for chili, but hunger wasn’t picky. She started to eat and listen
for the washer at the same time. When he slid a glass of milk in front her with
a terse, “drink it,” she grinned and continued to eat.

“You’re bleeding there.” Doyle took her
hand and turned over her arm to have a look. “You should get that checked out
before your arm falls off. I don’t have time for you to learn to wash the
dishes one handed. You’re slow enough as it is.”

“It’s fine.” She took her arm back only
to have him pull it back. “Don’t, Doyle, its fine.”

She didn’t watch as he cut away the
gauze. Her stomach was already protesting over the pain. She thought if she
looked then all this good chili would come back up over both of them. She heard
him hiss, but didn’t ask. She knew it was bad.

“You’re gonna have to go and get the
stitches put back in, girl. You’ve opened all but a couple. Looks like you
might have had as many as fifty here.”

She glanced at the cut and jerked her
head back. It was as bad as she thought. “I can’t. I told you before that I
can’t afford a bill. Going back to get it fixed will only give them the
opportunity to figure out I can’t pay and then I’ll go to jail.” She’d told him
about the police and what they’d said about the fire. She hadn’t told him about
the Hunters. At least not this encounter with the Hunters. He did know about
the apartment building.

He got up and came back with a first aid
kit. “You’d think somebody’d be a little happy that no one died in that fire
rather than complain that you didn’t hang around to file no report for them.”

She only nodded. She couldn’t speak, not
while he was probing at her arm like he was. Sweat poured off her face and she
knew that any second she was going to faint from it. Leaning her head on the
table, she tried taking deep breaths, but all it did was make the scent of
blood fill her mouth. Jumping up and holding her hand over her mouth, she ran
to the bathroom.

She could hear Doyle cussing on the
other side of the door. It might have made her laugh any other time, but she
was seriously trying to hold onto herself. When she was emptied of her dinner,
she sat on the cold floor and thought about her life.

Her parents were both dead. She’d not
been overly close to them anyway, but she missed them at times. They had both
died in a plane crash when she’d been about fifteen. So she’d lived with her
grandmother, her dad’s mom, until she turned eighteen. It had only been three
years, but had seemed thirty. The day she’d turned old enough to be on her own
she left and hadn’t been back since.

She’d wanted to go to college and had
for a few years, but money was tight and she couldn’t always afford the books
required. After getting most of a forestry degree, she’d had to drop out. Then
when she’d landed a job working in a nursery she thought she was going to be
able to get her degree. But Mother Nature decided to deal her a different set
of cards.

A freak storm, they’d called it. Hail
the size of baseballs had broken nearly every pane of glass in the old green
house. And if that wasn’t enough, every one of the newly planted flowers and
vegetables that she’d moved to the sales floor the night before had lain broken
and dying when the storm passed. The Hamiltons, owners of the nursery, had been
devastated. And the insurance company waited just long enough to pay them off
that the business had been ruined and any chances of a career she might have
had. They retired to Florida where they could finish out their years living off
their kids. After giving her five hundred dollars bonus, they left the day
after the check cleared.

After that, each time she started to get
a little ahead, something would happen. The apartment she lived in, the
refrigerator had broken down. The landlord said it wasn’t his, so he wasn’t
going to replace it. The stove stopped working; again, she had to pay for the
repairs. Mrs. Rivers didn’t have the full amount for her rent two months in a
row because her worthless son had taken her retirement checks. The list was
endless and here she sat on a semi-clean floor feeling sorry for herself. She
flushed the toilet and got up.

Dizziness swamped her, but she simply
held on until it passed. She couldn’t afford to go to the hospital any more
than she could afford to lose her job. Washing her mouth out and covering her
arm as best she could with paper towels, she went back to the kitchen. There
was a mug sitting in place of the soup and she could see that along with the
first aid kit was a large, white towel and some bottles of meds. She moved
toward the dishwasher when Doyle caught her.

“Sit,” he commanded. “If you won’t go to
the hospital, then I bring it to you. Missy is coming over. She works at the
clinic. She said she’d stitch you up tonight, but tomorrow you come see her.” Joey
opened her mouth to protest and he glared at her. She shut up with a snap of
her teeth. “Good girl. Now sit and drink that broth. It’s beef. You need the
vitamins.”

She didn’t have the heart to tell him
she didn’t think it would stay down either, but sipped at it until the nurse
showed up. She taped the wound closed, telling her that she needed to clean it
first before she’d stitch it and complained to Doyle the whole time about his
dirty table. When he walked away grumbling about women and their need to have
everything spotless she winked at Joey. At least she thought she winked. The
pills she’d given her were making her feel decidedly slappy…happy.

“He’s such a big baby. Nearly cried when
he called me to tell me you’re hurt. He has a tender heart for those he
considers friends.”

Joey nodded, but didn’t say anything. She
was suddenly fascinated with watching the little strips of tape being put on
her arm.

An hour later she was lying on the floor
of the bar she worked at. Doyle had wanted to take her home, but she didn’t
know how to tell him she couldn’t find her button holes much less her flop, so
he’d given her the blanket he’d had in his car and told her to sleep it off. She
thought maybe she was asleep before he turned off the lights.

~~~

Jesse was in his office when Curtis
walked in. He’d spent most of last night on a security issue in the building
and had finally had to call Kasey in to help. She was his assistant, but in
reality she knew the building better than he did.

“Mom comes home tomorrow morning. Her
lungs are clear and her ribs are healing nicely.” Curtis sat in his chair and
propped his feet on his desk as he continued. “I’ve had someone looking for
anyone to fit the description of the girl. I thought maybe she might live close
to the fire. Turns out I was right.”

Jesse wanted to ask about what he’d
found out, but also knew from years of being his brother that if he asked, he’d
get nothing. So he continued to write his report on the missing lunches that
Kasey had helped him with.

“She went to the clinic this morning.
They’re putting in the stitches again, as we speak.” Jesse looked up at his
brother. “I thought you’d like to go with me to see her.”

Jesse leaned back in his chair, knowing
there was a catch. “And you came to me because…”

Grinning, he dropped his feet to the
floor and stood. “I thought maybe if I took you then you’d piss her off again
and I’d get to see her throw your ass to the floor. Think you can arrange it
for me?”

With a very heartfelt, “fuck off,” Jesse
grabbed his coat. He was standing at the elevator waiting on it to open when
Curtis came up beside him and handed him a file. There wasn’t a name, but he
opened it anyway. A bloodied arm was the first thing he saw.

“Christ, Curtis, a little warning next
time.” He stepped into the opening as he thumbed through the other pictures. “Is
this her arm or are you perverted about open wounds?”

“Hers. She thinks these were taken for a
school assignment. The nurse working at the clinic took them and sent them to
me ten minutes ago. She said the girl was in a great deal of pain, but refused
any drugs.”

The cut was long and nasty-looking. There
were some strips of tape being removed like someone had tried to close it that
way. The ten or so pictures showed the wound in various stages of the tape
being removed then the stitches being put in. The last picture showed the open
gash in her arm and a profile of the girl.

“Did she give a name?”

Curtis shook his head.

“Then how are they treating her without
some sort of background information.”

He knew as soon as he asked. It was a
clinic, not a hospital. And the one where they were headed was known for
treating druggies and other issues that weren’t high on the list of getting
valid information.

“The student nurse said she thought
maybe the girl was a friend of the woman who runs the clinic. She said she
thought maybe she’d been the one who’d put it back together. The girl, the one
from the fire, asked about having her leg looked at too. Something about a
burn. Did you know she’d been burned at the fire?”

He hadn’t, but it wouldn’t have
surprised him to know that she had been burned. The fire was massive and fire
fighters were still at the scene putting out smaller explosions that still went
off. The building had been storing chemicals that hadn’t been removed when the
owners had moved out.

They drove over instead of using the
limo. This place wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods and the limo would draw
unwanted attention. They pulled in the lot twenty minutes after Curtis had come
into his office.

The building had seen better days. The
paint was peeling off in, not strips, but in hunks. Jesse thought if the
building was still standing this time next year, he’d be surprised. But when
they entered he was taken aback. The place was immaculate.

Plants lined the wall behind the counter
and the walls were a bright white. He glanced at the magazines on the little
table they passed and he could see that they were current, unlike the ones in
his own doctor’s office. The girl behind the counter must have been the one
that Curtis had been speaking to as she nodded them through with a low “four”
as they passed.