Justice

by Karen Robards

  “Go.” She unlocked the door, then turned back to him with her hand resting on the knob. “I appreciate everything you’ve done tonight, but I’ll be fine now.”

  Despite her brave front, she was pale and wide-eyed and bruised and so vulnerable looking that she made his gut twist. Without the least bit of premeditation, his hands cupped her shoulders and he bent his head to press his lips to her soft, eminently kissable mouth.

  Her lips parted beneath his. He felt their heat, the moist warmth of the inside of her mouth, like an electric jolt. She kissed him back, her mouth unexpectedly as hot and hungry as his, and for a sizzling moment the chemistry between them superheated the air.

  “Jess!” A voice above their heads broke them apart, made them both look up at the same time. Still slightly stunned by the unexpected impact of that barely underway kiss, it took Mark a second to process who he was seeing. Sarah stood at the top of the stairs that rose at the side of the hall, resplendent in purple pajamas and a head full of pink sponge curlers. At twenty-five, the sister who was next to Jess in age was a slightly slimmer copy of their mother, although she lacked Judy’s effervescent spirit and generally went lighter on the makeup. Tonight she was wearing none at all, and from the oily sheen on her skin where the light hit it he deduced she had covered her face with some sort of beauty-enhancing potion. Probably she slept in it.

  Sometimes knowing too much about women was a bad thing.

  Jess had slipped out of his hands. God, he shouldn’t have kissed her. At least not until he got a few things sorted out in his mind. Truth was, he didn’t know what he wanted where she was concerned. All he was one hundred percent sure of was that he wasn’t about to let her die.

  “What are you doing here?” both sisters demanded of each other.

  “Ron and I had a fight and he left. So I left, too.” Sarah’s chuckle had a forlorn quality. “Maybe when he gets home and sees I’m gone, it’ll make him think twice.”

  “Oh, Sarah. Where are the boys?”

  “At camp until Saturday.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed as she peered myopically down at them. Mark remembered that without contacts, which she clearly wasn’t wearing at the moment, she was as blind as Jess. “Is that Mark you were kissing?”

  “Hey, Sarah,” he offered, cursing inwardly as instant color bloomed in Jess’s cheeks.

  “Yes, and no, we’re not back together. He gave me a ride over because my air conditioner broke. And he’s leaving.” Jess looked at him then, a hard look that told him that as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. Then she pulled open the door. A wave of steamy heat rolled in. Outside, the street was dark and quiet. A nice, peaceful summer night, at least from all outward appearances. He could see the black hulk of the Suburban waiting at the curb. “Goodnight, Mark.”

  With the house full to bursting with women, the chance that a killer would come after Jess during the night was as close to zero as it was possible to get, he judged. He could safely leave her. With that in mind, he allowed her to bully him out the door.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” she whispered as he passed her, and he knew she was referring to that blistering kiss. Not something he wanted to discuss at the moment, especially with Sarah nearby.

  “Stay inside,” was his reply as he stepped out onto the porch. “You hear? Just in case.”

  “I’m not stupid,” she sniffed and shut the door on him.

  A wry smile played about his lips. Scanning the shadowy yards, sidewalk, and street with reflexive professionalism and finding nothing out of the ordinary as he went, Mark walked to the Suburban and got in. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and punched in a familiar number.

  Hasbrough answered on the first ring.

  “We need to talk,” Mark said. “Something’s happened. Jess needs protection.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You want some of this?” Lucy offered a piece of the chocolate doughnut she was eating to Jaden, who shook her head. It was just after midnight, technically the dawn of a new day, and Miss Howard’s Quik-Stop preferred customer card, a tiny laminated version of which had been attached to her key ring, entitled her to a free cup of coffee and doughnut daily. They’d been making use of it ever since they had learned of it, during their second day of hiding out, when they’d gone into a Quik-Stop in Anacostia and the clerk had pointed it out to them and explained the benefits. Lucy didn’t know when the entitlement ran out, if it ever did, but for now it was a lifesaver. They’d gone to Anacostia because Lucy had once had a friend there and she had hoped they could crash at her place. But when they’d gotten there, they’d found out the friend was long gone and the place, which had been in foreclosure according to the For Sale sign out front, had become a kind of flophouse. They’d hung around, staying out of the way, sleeping on the floor. The Grand Plan was to head for California, a place where Lucy had always dreamed of living, but there were a couple of problems with that. One was that two bus tickets to L.A. cost hundreds more than they had, and the other was that they had no ID. Lucy had picked up some copies of Street Sense, the homeless person’s version of craigslist that was available for free in newspaper form at soup kitchens and the like around the city, and had tried selling them for a quarter each. Jaden tried applying for a job at the nearest McDonald’s but had made the mistake of telling the curious manager that the reason she’d had no permanent address or phone number or ID was that she had seen a murder committed and had been hiding out. The manager had called the cops, and Jaden had barely made it out of there ahead of their arrival. Consequently, Lucy and Jaden had fled Anacostia, and Lucy had made Jaden swear not to talk about what they had seen to anybody else.

  “I’m sick of doughnuts.” Jaden sipped the coffee as they pushed out through the heavy glass door. Anxious and stressed, she was in full starvation mode. The way she had been eating lately, the coffee was probably going to be her big meal for the day. Just in case, Lucy had loaded it with lots of creamer and sugar, because those came free wwith the coffee and Jaden needed all the calories she could get. The only positive thing she could say about Jaden’s lack of appetite was that it was easy on the budget. Their little stash of money was almost gone now, depleted by trying to survive on the streets for the last three weeks. Lucy didn’t know what they would do when it ran out. After the McDonald’s disaster, applying for a regular job was out, and selling Street Sense wasn’t exactly bringing in the bucks. They would come up with something, though. Maybe sell their blood. The blood banks paid for that, didn’t they? Or maybe—well, something.

  “You didn’t even eat your hamburger yesterday.” Burger King had been running a special, two hamburgers for a dollar, and Lucy had succumbed to hunger and handed over a buck around 3:00 p.m. the previous day. Except for the single bite Jaden had taken out of hers, Lucy had ended up eating both. The sad thing was, by midnight, when she’d nagged Jaden into going out to get their daily doughnut and coffee, she’d been starving again.

  “I hate hamburgers.” Jaden’s shoulders hunched as she looked nervously all around. Lucy knew how she felt.

  The lights surrounding the Quik-Stop spooked them both. The white glow was harsh and way too revealing. Being so glaringly visible made Lucy’s skin crawl. Knowing Miss Howard’s killer was out there somewhere was terrifying. The thing was, he could have been anyone from a mob hit man like in The Sopranos to a guy Miss Howard had met online in one of those dating horror story kind of deals. Since he had seen them, figuring out who he was and then turning him into the cops seemed like the best way to make sure she and Jaden stayed alive. But since she didn’t see any way to uncover his identity, and cops spelled bad news for her and Jaden anyway, that probably wasn’t going to happen. Which left them with the alternative they’d been left with by default: hide until they could get enough money together to leave the city.

  “You want some of this coffee?” Jaden offered.

  “No.”

  Keeping close together, she and Jaden hurried across the
parking lot toward the relative safety of the darkness enshrouding the apartment buildings across the street. Having run as far and as fast as their funds would allow, they were now in College Park, Maryland, living on the fringes of the University of Maryland campus. Lucy’s thought was that they would be a lot harder to spot in a campus town filled with teenagers, many of whom didn’t look any older than themselves, and maybe they could score a couple of fake ID’s and use them to get jobs. The problem was, it was August, and the fall semester hadn’t started yet. There weren’t that many college students to get lost among. And the people who sold fake IDs seemed to be staying away until the college students came back.

  “Cop.” Jaden grabbed Lucy’s arm as a patrol car nosed into the convenience store parking lot. Coffee sloshed out of the cup to splash down on the pavement, barely missing their feet. Jaden jumped back but didn’t let go, her tight grip a sure indication of how close to the edge she was coming. They were both nervous wrecks, but Jaden showed it more. Lucy tended to keep what she was feeling inside.

  “Chill.” Despite her soft-spoken order to Jaden, Lucy’s pulse quickened. Her stomach clenched. Trying to make it look like she wasn’t looking, she tracked the cop car’s progress toward the front of the store. There was a lot of glare from the outside lights that reflected off the windshield, so she couldn’t really see the cop behind the wheel as the car stopped next to the curb in front of the door they’d just exited. It was a man, she saw enough to know that. He was by himself—didn’t they usually travel in pairs?—and he seemed to be looking their way. The length of time he just sat there like that made Lucy jittery as hell. Was he giving them a long once-over, or what? Then he moved, and she thought he was looking in the direction of the guy filling up at the gas pumps. One thing she knew: he wasn’t looking at them anymore. He was facing the wrong way.

  Relieved, Lucy muttered, “He’s not interested in us. He’s just here for the free doughnuts.”

  Jaden giggled, the sound high-pitched and nervous. Lucy was glad she’d made her friend laugh. It lightened the atmosphere, if only for the moment. Supremely conscious of the cop behind them, the girls kept walking, looking both ways, heading across the busy four-lane road. Lucy’s shoulders were tight. Hungry as she was, the doughnut hung forgotten in her hand. She couldn’t help it: despite the brave front she put on for Jaden, she quaked inside. At any second, she half-expected the car’s siren to go off, the cop to call after them to stop. All the cop had to do was demand to see some ID, and they were done. Once he found out they didn’t have any, he would order them into the back of his car, and when they couldn’t give him a home address to take them to, he’d take them to the police station instead. Once there, it wouldn’t take the cops long to figure out that they had escaped from a detention facility. She knew how the system worked: she and Jaden were wanted. One bad turn of luck, and they were goners.

  Luckily, they were low priority. No all points bulletins would have been issued or anything. They would only be discovered if they got picked up for something else or some nosy cop got suspicious for some reason and decided to check them out.

  “Maybe we ought to just tell them.” Jaden’s eyes darted her way. It was a sly, sideways look, meant to test her friend’s reaction.

  “We already called 911.” Which they had, from an as-hard-to-find-as-a-public-toilet pay phone, just as soon as they’d gotten far enough away from Miss Howard’s apartment to stop running. The dispatcher had taken their information and promised to send a car to check it out. Lucy, who’d made the call, had hung up when the woman had asked for their names. How the whole thing had worked out they had no way of knowing. Jaden had wanted to circle back around by Miss Howard’s apartment to see what had been going on, but Lucy had been adamant: they couldn’t ever go back there. She’d watched enough TV to know that that was one major way people got caught: they returned to the scene of the crime. “And you remember how that whole McDonald’s thing worked out.”

  “Yeah, but, you know, I meant, like, maybe turn ourselves in.”

  They stopped on the concrete island in the middle of the road to let traffic on the other side go by. The whoosh of the cars speeding past was loud enough to make Lucy raise her voice a little when she answered.

  “We escaped from Shelter House. We took their cash. We broke into Miss Howard’s apartment. We stole some of her stuff.” If there was an impatient undertone to her reply, it was because she’d said all this before. “If we go to the cops about what we saw, what do you think is going to happen to us? We’re going to get locked up again, that’s what, and we probably won’t get out until we’re eighteen. If we’re lucky. If we’re not lucky, maybe they’ll even say we did it. I mean, we broke into her house. How do they know we didn’t kill her?”

  “I know, I know.” Jaden sounded wretched. “But what if the killer finds us? I mean, I get nightmares that he’s out there hunting us.”

  The thing was, they were being hunted. Lucy knew it, sensed it physically like the pull of unseen eyes you could nevertheless feel staring. Just thinking about it made her heart pound. Constant fear kept her looking over her shoulder no matter where they went. Her stomach stayed in a perpetual knot. Miss Howard’s killer—no way was he just going to forget about them. But she couldn’t see any way he could find them. How could he? They weren’t even in D.C. anymore. He’d seen them, yes. But two girls in an area that was home to millions of girls, millions of people, had to be almost impossible to search for with any success.

  She shared none of this with Jaden. Jaden was already just about at the end of her endurance.

  “He’s not going to find us.” Lucy’s voice held several degrees more conviction than she felt. But she really was pretty sure of it. She hoped. “All we have to do is lay low.”

  “For how long?”

  Traffic finally thinned out enough for them to run across the remaining westbound lanes. Lucy’s answer was a little breathless because she was talking while they ran.

  “I don’t know. A while longer. We’ll manage, okay? Once we score some ID it’ll get easier. We—”

  A siren went off behind them just as they made it to the sidewalk. Startled, Lucy cast a quick, scared glance over her shoulder. The cop car was pulling out of the convenience store parking lot, lights flashing, siren screaming. It was headed their way, but it couldn’t be coming after them—could it?

  Beside her, Jaden dropped the coffee. The Styrofoam cup hit the pavement with a soft thunk. Hot liquid splashed Lucy’s feet. She jumped back but nevertheless managed to keep the cop car in view. She couldn’t be certain, because the windshield, with its reflections and everything, distorted things, but she was pretty sure the cop was looking straight at them. Swallowing hard, heart knocking in her chest, she forced herself to turn away.

  “Don’t run,” she ordered Jaden through gritted teeth, hooking a hand around her friend’s elbow and heading down the sidewalk at a walk, like she was innocent as could be, propelling Jaden along with her so that she was walking again, too. “That’s the worst thing we can do.”

  From the corner of her eye she watched the car, which was on the move again, ease into the westbound lanes, then nose over into the lane that was nearest to the sidewalk where they stood.

  Maybe he was coming after them. Just the thought of it made Lucy’s heart pound like crazy. She felt herself break out in a cold sweat.

  The light from the convenience store parking lot backlit the driver. He was a big man, with thick dark hair …

  She realized that Jaden was looking back over her shoulder, too.

  “How do we know it’s not him?” Jaden’s voice was hoarse with fear.

  Then Jaden broke and ran, jerking her arm free, tearing off across the strip of scraggly grass that separated the sidewalk from the dark parking lot behind them, bolting toward the gap between the buildings where they’d come through on the way to the store. Beyond that was the maze of the apartment complex, and another street, and, not too far aw
ay, the campus itself and the cheap room where they were holed up.

  After one wild-eyed glance at the cop car, which was now pulling up beside her with its stroboscopic lights flashing red all over her and its siren shrieking a warning, Lucy did the only thing left to her.

  Doughnut falling from her suddenly nerveless fingers, she ran, too.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dawn was just lighting up the sky the next morning when Jess hurried down Laundry Street’s sidewalk on her way to the metro station. Today of all days she absolutely refused to be late. It was the first day of her new job, and to say she was thrilled to her toes about it was an understatement. In her heart, she knew she could take no credit for Tiffany’s meltdown on the stand, but the opportunity it had opened up for her was a dream come true. She meant to seize the day, and the job, with both hands.

  The air was already thick and steamy, but not as thick and steamy as it would be later. Pink streaks swirling through the lavender sky to the east heralded the arrival of the sun. Its neon orange upper curve rode the horizon. At about fifteen minutes before 6:00 a.m., the rest of the sky was deep purple. Which was better than black, just like the old blue Taurus rolling down the street was better than no car at all, and the kid riding his bicycle toward, presumably, the university was better than having no one else outside at all.

  But not a whole lot better. Being alone didn’t feel good. Probably the attack last night had been random. But having to deal with fear on a day like this brought home the whole fly-in-the-ointment quality of her life: on the one hand, a promotion she could only have dreamt about; on the other hand, a would-be murderous attack, a lingering concern over what had become of Tiffany, and Mark’s reentry into her life. He had kissed her. And for a weak instant there she had kissed him back. Not, as God was her witness, that it would happen again. From here on out, her focus was going to be on making the most of the chance her new job represented. Mark might have made himself the center of her existence once; she wasn’t about to let him even begin to get in the way of her career again.