Twilight (3 page)

“Dana!” Kate protested.

She was clearly as shocked at hearing such language as Dana was at having uttered it. She’d learned to temper her tart tongue the day she’d fallen in love with a minister. Ken had never voiced his disapproval of her tendency to curse, but she’d seen the disappointment in his eyes whenever a particularly foul word slipped out. She’d been home less than twenty-four hours and she’d been cursing a blue streak ever since. She doubted that Kate had ever said anything harsher than darn in her life.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I can’t help it. It’s just that the thought of Rick Sanchez brings out the worst in me. He got Ken killed.”

Kate was shaking her head before Dana could complete the sentence. “You know better than that. Ken was at Yo, Amigo because that was the kind of compassionate, caring man he was. He saw the good in those kids. He wanted them to have a chance. You wouldn’t have loved him if he hadn’t tried to live up to his own ideals, if he hadn’t put himself on the front line, no matter the cost to himself. Ken believed in that program. He believed in Rick Sanchez.”

“And he died because of it,” Dana repeated. “I can’t forgive Sanchez for that. I won’t.”

“Is he the one you can’t forgive, or is it yourself?” Kate asked quietly. “Are you sure you’re not taking risks to punish yourself?”

Dana’s eyes brimmed with stinging tears, and her throat clogged up at the softly spoken question. That was the trouble with having a friend who knew your deepest, darkest secrets. All those confidences could come back to haunt you, Dana thought.

“I should never have told you,” she whispered.

“Yes, you should have,” Kate contradicted, automatically handing Dana a pristine hankie from her pocket. “If you hadn’t told me that you and Ken had fought that night, it would have eaten away at you. You have to forgive yourself, sweetie. Ken was going to Yo, Amigo that night, whether you two had argued or not. He’d made up his mind, and he was every bit as stubborn as you are. It wasn’t your fault he got killed.”

“No,” Dana agreed, clutching the handkerchief and ignoring the tears that streaked down her cheeks. “But I shouldn’t have let him leave when he was so angry. Maybe that’s what made him careless. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see that there was someone there with a gun.”

“And maybe he just got in the way of some drug-crazed kid,” Kate said. “That’s what the police think.”

“One of the kids Rick Sanchez protects,” Dana countered bitterly, bringing the argument full circle.

Kate sighed. “There’s nothing I can say to talk you out of this, is there?”

“Nothing,” Dana agreed.

Kate’s expression turned resigned. “Then tell me what I can do to help.”

“Just be my friend.”

“No, I want to do something constructive. You helped me when my life was a mess. Now it’s my turn. I can work a phone with the best of them. You’ve always said I could talk anyone into doing anything I wanted. Let me put those powers of persuasion to work for a good cause. We’ll be a team.”

Dana laughed at the excitement sparkling in her friend’s eyes. “Kate, you are not a private investigator,” she pointed out.

“Technically, neither are you.”

Dana was taken aback for a minute, until she realized that Kate was right. She had long since let her license lapse. Hopefully her skills were a bit more up-to-date, though after last night’s disaster, she had to wonder. Not that she’d ever admit to such a thing.

“What about your kids? What about the risks?” she asked, throwing Kate’s earlier arguments right back into her face.

“One’s seventeen, the other’s nineteen,” Kate said dismissively. “They barely know I exist, anyway. Besides, I’m just going to be chatting on the phone, like I always do. How much danger can there be in that?”

“Famous last words,” Dana retorted. “Are you really sure you want to help?”

“I really want to help. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

“I will,” Dana promised. Unfortunately, without any of the clues she had hoped to find at Yo, Amigo, she had no clear-cut idea just yet what the first step ought to be.

3

R
ick couldn’t decide whether he’d done the right thing by calling Kate Jefferson first thing in the morning. Obviously, she and Dana Miller were close friends. He had found the slightly plump, angelic-looking blonde at the Millers’ house when he’d finally worked up the courage to stop by to see Ken’s wife and try to make peace with her. Besides, she had made him promise to call the minute Dana turned up.

Knowing how Ken’s widow felt about him and about Yo, Amigo, at first he hadn’t expected Dana to come anywhere near him—not for a long time, anyway. Only after careful thought had he realized that she was not the type of woman to let things lie. Obviously Kate knew her friend very well.

Even now his lips curved as he thought of the audacity Dana Miller had shown, first in breaking in, then in accusing him of assault when he’d tackled her. She was a handful, all right. Ken had always told him that and now he’d seen her in action firsthand.

She was going to be trouble. He knew that, too. She had the same sort of passion for her particular cause that he had for his, which put them at cross-purposes, for the moment. Oddly enough, they both wanted to find Ken’s murderer. She would destroy Yo, Amigo in the process, if she had to. He was convinced that no one connected to the program had had anything to do with the shooting.

The kids he worked with weren’t saints. Far from it. They’d been handling knives and guns and wearing gang colors starting at a frighteningly early age. Most of them had been touched by tragedy and violence more often than white, middle-class America could imagine. They’d responded the only way that made sense to them, by seeking protection in numbers, by arming themselves. Only a few had learned the lesson that violence only spawned more violence. It solved nothing. As injustices mounted and anger deepened, the violence only escalated, unless they learned another way. He’d tried to teach them that.

Even so, even knowing that his message had convinced only a handful of the teens he worked with, Rick knew in his gut that not one of them would have harmed Ken Miller. They had respected the
padre,
as they called him. The youngest ones had clustered around him, desperately seeking the warmth and love he radiated, the father figure he represented. The older boys grudgingly admired his straight talk and his jump shots. Ken had run circles around them on a basketball court, playing with a ferocity that had been startling in a man normally so placid.

Rick hadn’t relied solely on his gut in reaching the conclusion that no one he knew would have harmed Ken. He was a little too cynical for that. He’d asked questions, gently most of the time, forcefully when necessary. He’d laid it all out for these tough kids who were trying to find their way. One of their own was down, and he wanted to know the names of the people responsible. The future of Yo, Amigo, their future, was on the line. He believed so strongly that any one of them would have ratted out his best friend for Ken’s sake, that he would have staked his reputation and his life on it.

When no one had stepped forward with so much as a whiff of innuendo—much less a solid clue—it convinced him that his kids were innocent. That left a whole lot of unanswered questions. He was as frustrated as Dana Miller had to be. He was also convinced that the answers had to lie outside the hood.

The difference was, she was going to tear his fragile grasp on the souls of these boys to shreds trying to find those answers. She was going to put herself at risk by poking and prodding and turning up in every dangerous nook and cranny until she found something. For every boy in the program who’d respect her for trying, there were a dozen on the streets who would take advantage of her. Some would only take her money for leads that would merely take her down blind alleys. Some were capable of doing far worse.

Rick figured either he was going to have to trail along behind, protecting her, or he was going to have to find some way to join forces with her—for the program’s sake and for hers.

Of course, that meant seeing her again, trying to cut through the pain and the hatred and the anger to convince her that they were on the same side. His pulse raced predictably at the prospect. His quick rise to any challenge was both a blessing and a curse. After the way he’d responded to the woman struggling in his arms the night before, he figured this time it was downright suicidal. His body apparently didn’t have the same high moral standards his head did, standards that said a man shouldn’t be intrigued by his best friend’s wife. Ken’s death hadn’t changed that. In his eyes, Dana Miller still belonged to her late husband.

“
Que pasa,
Señor Rick?”

At the sound of the softly spoken question, Rick’s gaze shot up. “Maria, you have to stop sneaking up on me,” he told the teenager with the huge brown eyes and shy, dimpled smile. “My heart can’t take it.”

The shyness faded, replaced by a knowing twinkle. “Oh, I think your heart can take quite a lot, Señor Rick.”

“And how would an innocent girl like you know a thing like that?”

“The others talk,” she said, then shook her head. “As if you didn’t know that already. They think you are
muy
sexy, a how-do-you-say-it, a chunk?”

Rick laughed. “That’s
hunk,
as if you didn’t know that already. Your English only fails you when it suits your purposes.”

“No, no,” she protested.
“Para me, anglais es muy difficile.”

“Maria, you were born right here in Chicago.”

Her chin rose a defiant notch. “But my parents, they speak only Spanish at home,” she protested, her expression all innocence. “I heard no English until I went to school.”

It was a common enough story in certain immigrant neighborhoods, including this one. Rick happened to know, however, that Maria could speak and understand English like a native, unless it seemed inconvenient to do so.

“The way I hear it, you were a quick study. I’ve seen all your transcripts. Straight As. That’s why the
padre
was trying to help you get a scholarship to college.”

At the mention of Ken, she immediately sketched a cross across her chest and her eyes turned sad. “I miss him every day,” she said softly. “He was very good to me and the others, especially my brothers.”

“He loved you all. He wanted you to succeed.”

Maria perched uneasily on the edge of the chair opposite Rick’s desk. She folded her hands in her lap in the pose of a proper young lady, but it was only seconds before she began to fidget nervously. “What do you think will happen now? Will they find the person who killed him? They don’t seem to try very hard anymore.”

Rick couldn’t deny that. It was one reason he could understand Dana Miller’s determination to take matters into her own hands. “I don’t know whether the police have given up,” he told Maria honestly. “But I haven’t.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“No, but I think someone knew exactly what he was doing that night.” It was the first time he had voiced that particular opinion, but he was forced to temper it by acknowledging the other possibility, the one Dana Miller and the police shared. “On the other hand, if the killer is from the hood, I’ll find him.”

Maria looked shocked. “You think one of us could have harmed him?”

“No one in the program,” he said firmly. “But others, who knows? Others believe anything is possible here. The only way to prove them wrong is to find the person responsible. Have you heard anything, Maria? Anything at all? Is anyone bragging a little.”

“Who would brag about such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.

“We both know there are people who would like to see the program fail, who would gloat if we lost our funding. They might even commit murder to bring us down.”

“But why? What you do here is good.”

“Not for those who want to recruit every young child into a gang. They’re afraid we might cut into their power.”

“They are fools!” she declared dismissively. “And I have too much work to do to waste time on them.”

As she left his office, Rick smiled at her vehemence. There was no chance that Maria would become one of the lost souls. Raised by two strict, doting, Catholic parents, she and her brothers had been taught right and wrong. Unlike so many others, they had been surrounded by love. They had been taught the value of hard work, grit and determination. There would be no shortcuts, no straying from the straight and narrow.

When Juan Jesus, the youngest, had gotten too friendly with members of the toughest gang in the area, the entire family had come to Rick for guidance. Dollars had been scraped together for the tuition to a private school in Ken’s suburb. A family in Ken’s congregation had taken Juan Jesus in as one of their own on weekdays. Ken had brought him back to his family on Friday afternoons and picked him up again at dawn on Monday mornings for the trip north of town. Those days away from the hood had been the boy’s salvation.

Only Maria knew that the small pittance the family had raised was a fraction of the actual tuition. Had the others known, they would have been too proud to accept the arrangements.

Ever since discovering that Rick and Ken had chipped in to pay the rest, Maria had been coming to the program headquarters every morning to do whatever jobs needed doing. She typed. She answered phones. She cleaned. She bullied Rick into eating, when he would have forgotten. She stayed as long as he did, sometimes longer.

Unofficially, she counseled the teenage girls who trusted her with secrets they might never have shared with Rick. All in all, Rick knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal when he’d made the contribution to Juan Jesus’s education. And when Maria had her college scholarship, he guessed she would study psychology or social work and make an even greater contribution to his program, or another like it.

Now and again, when he saw the flash of passion in her eyes for Yo, Amigo’s goals, when he heard her sweet voice of reason working its magic on a potential backer, he could envision her in the state capital or in Washington, making a difference for all of the teens who seemed intent on sacrificing their youth, or their lives, to gangs. For now, he might be the brains and the drive behind Yo, Amigo, but Maria and a few others like her were its heart. Ken Miller had been its soul.

Not a day passed that Rick didn’t miss him. Not an hour passed that he didn’t contemplate his own inadvertent complicity in bringing Ken into the barrio, where he died. Not a minute passed that he didn’t want to avenge his friend’s death.

Thinking of that brought him full circle, back to the fury he’d read in Dana Miller’s eyes the night before. She was trouble, all right, and it was way past time he faced it. His warnings last night weren’t nearly enough to make her back down.

“Maria, I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said as he passed the desk where she was trying to make sense of the piles of paperwork that accumulated on a daily basis, paperwork that Rick had no patience for, even when he understood the necessity for it.

“I’ll be here,” she told him with a wry expression. “You haven’t touched this in a week. It will take me most of the day to see which is important and which could have been tossed into the trash, if only you’d bothered to read it.”

“
Gracias.
What would I do without you?”

She shook her head. “I cannot imagine.”

“Neither can I,
nina.
Neither can I.”

“Then it is good you won’t have to find out.”

“Until next fall,” he reminded her. That was when he was convinced she would have the full scholarship to Northwestern that she deserved.

“Even then, I will be here to worry you every day,” she insisted.

It was an old argument and one they wouldn’t resolve today or even tomorrow. Maria Consuela Villanueva was a woman who knew her own mind, probably had from the time she was two, Rick guessed. There had been times he regretted the age difference between them. She was barely eighteen to his thirty-four. Had she been a few years older, she might have been a good match for him. As it was, he thought of her only as the kid sister he’d never had. Even when she was at her nagging, pestering worst, he would have protected her with his life.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

He thought of the likely battle that lay ahead. Either Dana would slam the door in his face and he’d be back in no time, or she’d listen. He was counting on the latter. He held no illusions, though, that he could persuade her easily to accept his help.

“I’m out for the day,” he said, “unless there’s an emergency.”

“What constitutes an emergency this time? Fire? The arrival of the mayor? A delegation from the capital?”

“Those would do,” he agreed.

“Where will you be?”

“With Ken’s widow.” He shrugged, then added realistically, “Or nursing my wounds beside Lake Michigan with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.”

“Better you should take bandages,” she retorted.

Rick stared at her suspiciously. Something in her tone alerted him that she knew something about what had gone on here the night before. “Why would you say that?”

“People talk,” she said enigmatically.

“Maria! Spit it out. What are people saying?”

“They say that bruise on your cheek is the work of Mrs. Miller. Since it was not there when I left last night, I assume you’ve seen her since then.” She tilted her head and studied his face. “She must not have been glad to see you.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t,” Rick agreed.

“And you think today will go better?”

“Probably not.”

Maria opened a cabinet behind the desk and plucked out a handful of Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide from the stock kept on hand for the multitude of kids with minor wounds who turned up on their doorstep nearly every day. They were all too practiced at coping with major wounds as well, at least as long as it took to send for an ambulance.

“Then these may come in handy,” she said. “Of course, people say she is also a trained private eye, like Magnum.” Maria was a very big Tom Selleck fan. She thought he was even “chunkier” than Rick.

“She was a private detective,” Rick corrected. “What does that have to do with anything?”