Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

He smiled as if he had read my mind. “Nice of you to worry about me but you seem to have forgotten who got you your first heavy bag and taught you how to punch it without breaking your wrists. I wasn’t always an absent-minded professor. I learned how to handle myself early.”

“You’ve never been an absent-minded professor, Bobby.”

“Twice I disarmed students who threatened me or somebody in my class.”

I had heard both stories. “All that was a long time ago, and the kids had knives. These are bad people with guns.”

“But not that smart, according to you. Sure, they did a drive-by. The question is, are they dumb enough to shoot up a hospital in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Probably not,” I conceded after a moment. “They’re looking for my clients’ daughter because they want to stay off the radar. A shootout would put them on and make them a high priority.”

“You’ve always been smart enough to look for help when you needed it.” He took a long breath to let that sink in. “So let me help you this afternoon when the hospital is full of people with cell phones who can all dial nine-one-one. I’ll follow you in my car. I can sit in the lady’s room or outside the door, wherever they prefer. Let your chaplain friend handle the mornings. See if the boy’s father can do tomorrow afternoon. Then I’ll do the next day. Save the overnights for yourself and sleep till one or even two.” He leaned toward me the way he always did when he wanted to drive home his point. “I know, three old men. Maybe we will seem like the Over-the-Hill Gang, but if we take the day watch while this lady gets better, you can do something useful with your afternoons.”

“Like checking on the flower shop,” I said.

“And finding her daughter before the other guys get lucky.”

25

Carl Williamson agreed to sit with Mona the next day, Tuesday, but only if I went with him first to see Winslow so they could apologize to each other. Outside Mona’s private room, after I introduced Bobby to them, I described my phone conversation with Carl to Winslow and Oscar. When I finished, Winslow sucked his teeth.

Oscar put a large hand on his friend’s shoulder and lowered his face a bit to look him in the eyes. “Win, sounds to me like he knows Keisha didn’t give his boy drugs, and after all this you gotta know his boy didn’t give ‘em to her.” He let Winslow consider that a moment. “Think how much better you’ll both feel when Rimes gets the bastards who did this to your kids.”

Despite what I had let Carl believe during our meeting in his kitchen, I had been hired to find a missing woman, not the thugs who might have hurt her. Having brought Winslow to me, Oscar knew this better than anyone. But without my having said anything, he understood the parameters of my mission had changed. Not only had Keisha, through Fatimah, charged me with protecting her parents, now I was expected to get the bastards too. Winslow gazed at me, eyes red and eyelids so weary his blinking looked slow and deliberate. Having covered his wounded wife with his coat and seen his daughter flee in fear, he too knew things were different. It took him a moment to find the words to reaffirm his priority was still Keisha.

“Mona’s awake,” he said, his voice thin. “I didn’t say nothing about Keisha being here last night and people looking for her ‘cause I don’t want her to get all upset. But if you’ve got folks here to watch over her, that’s so you can find Keisha and bring her home. Right?”

“Yes.”

Then he nodded, and despite the two-visitor limit, we all went into Mona’s room.

She looked much better than when last I had seen her. Still tubed and wired, she was sitting up and talking. Color had come back into her cheeks. Winslow kissed her forehead and said he was heading back to Oscar’s because he needed to rest. Then he introduced Bobby as my stepfather. He said Dr. Chance had come to visit because Mr. Rimes had told him so much about the two of them. Instead of shaking her hand, which had a needle taped in place on its back, Bobby nodded toward her in what looked like the beginning of a bow. It was his pleasure to meet her, he said. He hoped she wouldn’t mind if he sat with her while her husband and Oscar took a break and Gideon continued doing the job she had hired him to do.

“So you a doctor too?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse, the aftereffect of a tube withdrawn earlier.

“Not that kind,” my godfather said.

She looked at me and narrowed her eyes at Bobby, the doubt roused by our lack of resemblance suggesting she might have misheard her husband, who, plainly, had misheard me. “You really his daddy?”

“Since he was twelve,” Bobby said, with a tone that settled it. He took the chair beside the bed and leaned close to her. “I can tell you all kinds of stories about what he was like as a kid.” Then he smiled.

Mona smiled, looking as flirtatious as an elderly gunshot victim could.

Chuckling, Oscar steered Winslow out.

And I went to work.

26

The neon lights were still on in the plate glass windows of Flowers by Fatimah but dark curtains behind them kept the shop interior hidden. The arc window in the upper part of the front door held a CLOSED sign. My hands gloved, I tried the handle anyway, but the door was locked.

I had parked around the corner on Bailey. Now I looked both ways on Kensington before I went up the driveway—which was clear because it had been shoveled in the past day or so and last night’s dusting of snow had already melted. The windows were too high to peek into. At the