2

I slipped on the icy stairs as I ran out of the apartment building and managed to catch the frigid iron railing before I fell. I took a deep, frightened breath, angry at myself for the slip and for so many other things. I could have prevented this. I could have saved Lacey. Instead, I believed—what? That a good upbringing would protect her?

Maybe I did believe that. Maybe I had to believe it.

I stepped off the sidewalk and into the ice-covered snow that led to the driveway alongside the building. The snow crackled beneath my feet, then slipped inside my shoes. I wasn’t dressed for this weather—I had left the sweater upstairs and I was wearing loafers, for God’s sake, but I couldn’t waste a single second.

I fumbled with my keys as I half-walked, half-ran, my heart pounding. I’d locked the panel van, because to leave anything unlocked in this part of town was to invite theft. Still, I wished I hadn’t done it now, because every second wasted was a second that Lacey—and maybe Jimmy—couldn’t afford.

I knew what was happening. Jimmy had been trying to tell me for months and I hadn’t really listened. I thought it his

paranoia. He kept saying that Lacey would end up like his mother, and damn my idiotic brain, I kept thinking he was overreacting.

Somehow I managed to unlock the van and crawl inside. Next step: Make certain I didn’t flood the engine. This van didn’t like deep cold temperatures, making it a stupid vehicle to have in the middle of a Chicago winter. I kept planning to sell the damn thing, but it was useful in my work, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to get rid of it, nor could I afford anything else.

It started right up, but I knew better than to shove the gearshift into reverse immediately. This stupid van had stopped dozens of times, usually whenever I was in a hurry.

I took the opportunity to lean over, open the glove box, and remove my gun. I checked to make sure the gun was loaded. I kept the safety on. Then I put the gun and an extra magazine in the pockets of my coat. Fortunately, the gun I used was designed to be concealed and not go off. I just usually chose not to do it. I hated carrying a gun this way, but I saw no choice at the moment.

I yanked the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway, fishtailing on the ice. Two winters in Chicago had made me a better winter driver, but I wasn’t as good as the natives. I spent most of my adult life in Memphis where no one knew how to drive in snow and ice. I usually stayed home when the weather was bad.

Now I had to somehow drive carefully and get to the Starlite Hotel before Lacey disappeared. And I had to do it without attracting the attention of the one or two cops that occasionally came to Chicago’s South Side. It would be just my luck if one of them pulled me over, to find me panicked with a loaded gun in my coat pocket.

Fortunately, I drove this route almost every day, sometimes twice in one day, and I knew it well. I knew that once I got out of the neighborhood, the streets would be plowed and salted enough so that there wouldn’t be a lot of ice. I knew that at this time of the day the traffic would be minimal, and I knew how to time the traffic lights so that I could hit every single green.

I concentrated on that, and tried not to think about what could be happening to Lacey. She was thirteen going on trouble, Franklin liked to say, and he didn’t know the half of it. She had developed a full-grown woman’s body in the past two years, and she liked showing it off. She wore inappropriate clothes she borrowed from friends, put on too much makeup, and was boy crazy. Often, when I picked her up from school, she came out still wiping the makeup off her face and adjusting the more demure outfit she had left the house in but had stored in her locker for the day.

Jimmy had told me that she had been hanging out with the wrong people, and he said she sometimes cut class. He kept telling me that she was going to end up badly, and I didn’t listen. I figured she had triggered his fears from his mother.

His mother, who had been a prostitute for Jimmy’s entire life. She had gotten pregnant in high school—or maybe junior high school—and the baby’s father abandoned her immediately. Her family threw her out, and she raised Jimmy’s brother Joe by herself, turning tricks and trying to make ends meet.

By the time she had gotten pregnant with Jimmy, she had two or three clients per night. She had no idea who Jimmy’s father was, and neither did he. She kept disappearing throughout much of his life, but his older brother took care of him until Joe got involved in gangs and drugs, and the last time Jimmy’s mother disappeared, Joe was already out of the house.

Jimmy had stayed in their crummy apartment until the landlord evicted him, and then he finally had to tell me the truth about what happened. Until that point, I was just the guy who worried about this street kid and occasionally bought him meals. I tried to help him find a permanent home, but Martin’s assassination ruined all of that, and brought us here.

That trauma, I had believed, made Jimmy leap to the wrong conclusions about Lacey. I had dismissed him, rationalized his opinion away, and hadn’t paid attention.

I should have listened. Jimmy was one of the most intelligent kids I had ever met, and he saw things I didn’t want him to see, things I didn’t want to see. We had our last conversation about Lacey in October, of all things, and at that point, Jim had used language he learned from his mother, phrasing things in a way that made me so uncomfortable, I never pursued any of this again.

I turned everything over and over in my mind, and added to it the Starlite and its proximity to the school. Chicago had more than five hundred public schools and nobody cared that the schools in the Black Belt were in horrible neighborhoods. I hadn’t even given the Starlite’s proximity to the linked grade school and junior high school much thought, thinking the neighborhood gangs were the real problem for the kids.

After all, why would johns and pimps and small-time thieves be interested in kids?

Why, indeed.

I turned right just before I got to the school, fishtailing again. The streets were icier here and I had to pay attention or I’d make some kind of horrible mistake. The Starlite had a parking lot, but it hadn’t been plowed since the last snowstorm, so I just parked kitty-corner in front of the restaurant.

Then I jumped out, slamming the van door shut but not locking it. The ice on the sidewalk here had broken in chunks. I ran across it, hearing it crack and praying that I wouldn’t fall. I didn’t see Keith outside. Nor did I see a pay phone anywhere close.

Then I cursed out loud. Of course I didn’t see a pay phone. Places like the Starlite had pay phones on every floor, for their indigent residents to use if they needed to make a call. Keith

was waiting for me inside. Or maybe he had gone to the school for help.

I could only hope he wasn’t inside the Starlite. Because I had no idea what I’d do if I found some creep with his hands on Lacey.

The Starlite’s glass front door was yellow with cigarette smoke and age. I couldn’t see inside. I pulled my gun and yanked the door open. As I stepped inside, I flicked the safety off.

I could barely see, what with the cigarette smoke and the dim lighting. The place stank of alcohol, sweat, and semen. To my right was the registration desk, if you wanted to call it that.

I pointed my gun at the man behind it. He raised his hands, eyes wild.

I was about to demand him to let me into the room with Lacey in it when I saw movement. Beside the desk were stairs and on them were Jimmy and Keith helping Lacey down, one painful movement at a time.

Her blouse hung open, revealing the edges of a white bra. She wore a skirt so short that at first I thought it had been torn off her. The go-go boots on her feet looked like Jackson Pollack had designed them.

Then I realized that she was dripping blood.

It took all of my self-control to stop my free hand from going to my mouth. All the way here, I had thought about what could happen, but faced with the evidence—or just the beginning of the evidence—on a girl that I loved like family provoked a dozen emotions in me all at once.

My reactions would not help her right now. The only thing that would help her was to get her out of here.

I put the safety on and shoved the gun in the pocket of my coat. Then I walked toward Lacey and the boys slowly, so I didn’t startle her.

I surveyed the lobby as I did so, ready to grab the gun if I needed to. But no one looked threatening. In fact, no one looked. The man behind the reception desk thumbed through receipts as if nothing unusual had happened, as if someone pulled a gun on him everyday.

Maybe someone did.

“Lacey,” I said as gently as I could, as neutrally as I could. “Some guy hurt her, Uncle Bill.” Keith Grimshaw, short, not into his growth yet, spoke so loud that I was sure they heard him outside. I’d never seen this little boy—still eleven and unused to the evils in the world—so very angry. “We gotta call the cops. We gotta—”

“Not now,” I said in that same calm voice. I glanced at Jimmy. The last thing we needed was for him to encourage Keith. I had to get them out of this horrible place first.

Jimmy’s gaze met mine. It was level, and he seemed even calmer than I felt. But there was something adult in his face, something determined, something that I had never seen before. And then it vanished. His lower lip shook.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t—”

“Jim saved me, Uncle Bill.” Lacey spoke for the first time. Her voice was clear, her chin raised. “He beat the guy up and sent him away. Jim saved me.”

That was why they were coming down the stairs together. Because Jimmy had somehow gotten her out of one of those upstairs rooms. I didn’t want to know how he had done that. Not here, anyway. I needed to get them to the door.

“Uncle Bill,” Keith said, and I knew what was coming next. He was a good kid, raised right. He still believed the police could help him. More to the point, he believed they would.

I shushed him, because I had no words of comfort for any of them. Then I leaned forward and picked up Lacey. She was lighter than I expected, and I could feel the stickiness of blood against the hand cradling her thighs.

Oh, baby girl, I thought. What the hell did he do to you?

And then I shut that thought down.

I carried her out of that hellish hotel and into the thin, cold sunlight. Jimmy and Keith followed.

They helped me put her in the back of the van, and then they sat on either side of her, as if they still needed to defend her.

I wiped my hands on my coat so that I could grip the steering wheel, and then I drove a badly injured thirteen-year- old girl and her eleven-year-old defenders to the nearest hospital.