Heart of a Hero

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.” Which he knew was a lie. It was undoubtedly worse. Getting into the driver’s seat would be hard, getting out might be impossible. “Besides, what are you complaining about? You’re only what, five-six?”

  Unconsciously, she rocked forward on her toes. “Seven.”

  He snorted. That was tiny in comparison. “I’m six-three.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head as if she were taking full measure. “You look more like six-two to me.”

  He grinned. “Was that humor?”

  Dakota raised a shoulder, then dropped it carelessly again. “Yeah.”

  “I guess there’s hope for you yet,” he commented. The wind was picking up. They had to get going, but he really didn’t relish stuffing himself in behind the driver’s wheel. “A sense of humor is what separates us from all the other animals.”

  “I thought divorce did that.”

  The response was so effortless, Rusty had to laugh. “You keep it up and we’ll have to see about getting you a comedy gig after this is over.”

  His smile could be labeled intimate. Warning bells went off in her head. Humor faded from her features. This wasn’t going to go any further than was absolutely necessary.

  “After this is over, we won’t be seeing each other at all,” she reminded him tersely.

  She’d changed right in front of his eyes. Why? But for now, he thought it best not to ask, not to challenge. “Right. I forgot.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  He paused, his hand on the rusted section of the door handle. The hell with his resolve. He had to ask. “Is there any reason why your barriers go up as soon as you start being the least bit human?”

  She was going to hotly deny his observation, then knew there was no point. So she was honest. And defensive. “Yeah. It keeps me alive.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “I’d say it also keeps you lonely.”

  She didn’t need or want to be analyzed. “You can say anything you want,” she told him coldly. “As long as you find my son.”

  “That’s the main idea.” He started to get in, but stopped with only one leg inside the vehicle. He raised his eyes to hers. “You’re pretty familiar with this area, right?”

  “I lived here for four years,” she replied, her voice guarded. “Why?”

  He stepped out of the car again. Being in control didn’t necessarily mean that he had to be the one who drove. “Because any way you slice it, this is a sardine can, but there’s a little more room on the passenger side than on the driver’s side. I thought I’d let you drive if you don’t have any objections.”

  She stood her ground even though he came around to her side. “Let me drive?”

  She was touchy. He gave her some slack because of what she was going through. Getting into a discussion over word usage was dumb, any way you looked at it.

  “Request that you drive,” he corrected amiably.

  It was hard to pick a fight with a man who smiled so much. “Better.” She rounded the hood, crossing to the driver’s side. “Okay, get in.”

  “Easier said than done,” he muttered, trying to fold his body into the small space. It took some effort. “If it was any more crammed in here—” he shut the door “—I think my knees would pierce my chest.”

  She laughed, starting the car. Like a dog shaking off water, it undulated into life. “That’s what you get for having bony knees.”

  He decided it was useless to point out to her that his knees weren’t bony, only his position was cramped. “Since we don’t have a reservation, maybe you should pick the hotel.”

  She debated driving to the Desert Rose. Monica and Alan were still working there the last she’d heard and it would be wonderful to actually see familiar faces. But that was exactly the reason she couldn’t go there. She was afraid to let anyone know she was here looking for her son.

  Not that she thought Monica and Alan, or any of the other people she’d come to know while working here, would give her away willingly, but she’d already learned the hard way that Del Greco’s men knew how to extract the information they were after and she didn’t want to risk having another one of her friends put through what Erica had suffered. One person on her conscience was more than enough.

  So she chose a place where she was sure she wouldn’t run into anyone from her past.

  “They tell me the Ali Baba is lovely this time of year,” she quipped, making a right turn at the end of the block.

  He gestured as much as he was able. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  “It’s ‘lay on,’” she corrected, taking another right. The car in front of them was crawling. Dakota noticed as she turned to check before changing lanes that Rusty was smiling at her. She could use a laugh right about now. “What?”

  She kept surprising him. Maybe that was what he found so attractive. Gorgeous legs, a killer body, hair like ripened sunlight and skin like cream only went so far, after all. “Aristotle. Shakespeare. Were you going for an English degree?”

  He couldn’t be further from the truth. Funny, it all felt like a million years ago now. Another lifetime, really.

  “Nursing, actually. Considering the kind of life I was exposed to, I thought it might come in handy.”

  He wondered if she was referring to organized crime. Just how peripheral had she been? “That doesn’t explain the reading material.”

  She smiled. God, but she’d been naive then. Was it only two years ago? “I was trying to absorb as much knowledge as I could along the way.” She shrugged, knowing how that must have sounded to him. “I like knowing things.”

  “A nurse, huh?” She would have to work on her bedside manner, but then, he knew he was seeing her at her worst. Most women weren’t contenders for the congeniality award when their children’s lives were at stake. “Does that mean when we reach the hotel you can surgically remove this car from my body?”

  She laughed. “I can try.” Looking at him when they stopped at the next light, she shook her head. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “No, not in my nature,” he acknowledged simply. “Anything in particular you’re referring to?”

  She supposed she liked that about him, that he dug in. She knew what happened to people who didn’t. They lost everything. “Yes. Trying to get me to lighten up.”

  And he was succeeding, he congratulated himself. Marginally. “I figured since we’re going to spend the next few days together, it might not be a bad idea to get you to relax. Otherwise, you just might snap on me.”

  “Maybe at you, but not on you,” she told him pointedly. Did she appear that weak, that vulnerable to him? “I’ve been carrying my own weight ever since I was fourteen.”

  So that was when the turning point had happened. When she was fourteen. She’d been robbed of a third of her childhood. “Maybe it’s time you set it down,” Rusty suggested.

  As if she could. “The second I do, someone’s going to come by and run me over.” She had absolutely no doubts of that.

  “Maybe not.”

  When you allowed yourself to become too trusting, the world played you for a fool, and she refused to be anybody’s fool. “Just because I lived and worked in Vegas for four years doesn’t mean I’m a betting woman. I like a sure thing.”

  He wouldn’t have thought that of her. She seemed to be a woman who liked living on the cutting edge. Showed that you just never knew. He watched the parade of bright lights go by as she drove. “Read the last page of the mystery book, do you?”

  She spared him a look. “Before I decide to buy it, yes.”

  Other than in situations involving his work, he liked being surprised. “Then why bother to read it if you know how it turns out?”

  That was easy enough to explain. “Life doesn’t come with a last page to turn to. I take my happy endings where I can.”

  He studied her profile for a moment. It took him a second to realize that his palms felt itchy. He wanted to reach out and trace the perfec
t features.

  He kept his hands where they were.

  “Sometimes you have to risk things to get there,” he told her.

  “And what have you risked?” she asked, turning the tables. Let him answer a few questions for a change. “Been involved with many women?”

  “A couple,” he admitted vaguely, though he wasn’t about to lie to her to make himself out to be something he wasn’t. “Between college and work, there hasn’t been much time to be involved with my own bed, much less with someone in it.”

  Just as she thought. A blind man giving a dissertation on the nuances of color. “Well, after you’ve risked being committed a time or two, come back and we’ll talk about that little lecture you were about to launch into, not before.”

  She certainly got riled easily. “No lecture, just an observation.”

  “Keep those to yourself, too.” Dakota glanced at him and doubted that she’d seen many people who’d looked more uncomfortable than he did. “Unless you don’t want any help getting out of that seat.”

  “I’ll be good,” he promised, only half kidding.

  He rarely felt stiff, except after a particularly grueling workout, but he sure as hell felt stiff now. The trip from the airport couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes, but it felt as if he’d been in that awkward position for hours.

  Dakota pulled into a parking lot and they got out of the car slowly. Rusty stood rotating his shoulders and his neck to get his circulation moving again. He could have sworn that everything had frozen and congealed inside him for the duration of the ride. As something clicked into place along his spine, he looked around.

  The Ali Baba was a motel rather than a hotel. Clean, at least from outward appearances, but definitely old. Its sixteen units were arranged in a horseshoe pattern framed by an archway that had the words Open Sesame painted over it.

  “Cute,” he murmured.

  She tried to read his expression, wondering if he was being sarcastic. “The sheets are clean and to my knowledge, the board of health has never closed down the kitchen.”

  “It has a kitchen?” he asked, surprised. He maneuvered the two suitcases out one at a time, taking extra care with his. There were things inside he didn’t want damaged.

  She nodded. “Small, but adequate. I lived here for a while until I got my own place near Caesar’s Palace.” She saw that he was looking at her with a glint in his eye that she found all too familiar. She’d seen it in the eyes of ringside patrons night after night. “If you’re trying to envision me without clothes on, I hate to disappoint you but we had costumes.”

  “I’m sure you did. Caesar’s Palace has a first-class reputation.” He hadn’t been envisioning her nude. He found it would be far more tantalizing to envision swatches of material strategically placed along her taut body. But he was only needlessly torturing himself, Rusty thought. She was a client and he’d do well to keep that foremost in his mind.

  When she swayed like that in front of him, it was hard to.

  Walking up to the manager’s office, he held the door open for her and then went in himself. The man behind the counter was dozing. He looked like an aging elf with a faded bushy mustache that appeared to have once been bright red. A fringe of hair, far shorter than his mustache, adorned his bowed head. There was a television set on in the background, showcasing highlights of last week’s football games. Huge men repeatedly piled up on top of one another.

  Rusty cleared his throat. “Excuse me.” The man continued to sleep.

  Leaning over, Rusty gently shook him by the shoulder. Near lashless lids popped open to display eyes the color of dirty water.

  “What?” the man demanded, scrubbing his hand over his stubbled face. A smoker’s cough accompanied the single word for several seconds.

  “We’d like two rooms for the night,” Rusty told him.

  “Ain’t got two rooms,” the man told them. “Got one. It’s the holiday season. Take it or leave it.” Blinking, he focused on Dakota for the first time. What passed for a semi-leer sprouted beneath his mustache. “If it were me, I’d take it.”

  Rusty turned to Dakota. “Want to try someplace else?” Rusty offered, even though the idea of refolding his body again so quickly didn’t hold all that much appeal for him.

  Dakota debated a second. They were both tired and she didn’t feel like being choosy, and something told her she could trust him to behave. He’d had the opportunity in her apartment to push further and to his credit, he hadn’t.

  “No, we can go someplace else in the morning.” She wrote a false name on the ledger, then handed the pen to Rusty. He raised a brow when he glanced at the name but said nothing. He understood her reasons. She looked at the quirky little man behind the counter. “Is the kitchen still open?”

  The small eyes darted to the wall clock that was just behind her. “Nope. But the vending machine works. And there’s an all-night restaurant a few blocks down. You can get something there.”

  He remembered the salads that had been tossed away. Since she’d asked about the kitchen, Rusty assumed that she was finally hungry.

  “I’ll crawl back into the clown car and get us some late dinner,” he offered.

  Her stomach pinched in response to the word dinner. “Do you mind?”

  “No, it keeps me flexible,” he lied. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Provided he’d be able to get out of the car once he reached his destination, he thought.

  First thing in the morning, he promised himself as he left her standing with the luggage, he was going to rent another car.

  Chapter 8

  After moving the seat as far back as possible, Rusty discovered that getting behind the steering wheel of the compact car wasn’t as excruciating an ordeal as he’d anticipated. It definitely wasn’t comfortable enough to convince him to not exchange the car for another, larger vehicle first thing in the morning, but for the length of time it took to go to a suitable take-out place and return with dinner, he could put up with it.

  Although he wasn’t actually familiar with this part of Las Vegas, he’d taken two case-related trips to the city in the past couple of years. Each time he was here, he promised himself that he’d come back when he had some time to just take in the city properly. He hadn’t made it yet.

  Maybe someday, he mused.

  As he drove he studied the area and the way it changed between day and night. The difference was amazing. Bedford wasn’t like this. There the change was only a matter of lighting. Las Vegas was a whole different world. It was always ablaze with lights, tourists and activity. In the daytime, however, the city was a brisk, bustling place, full of vitality, of promise that the next spin of the wheel, the next turn of the card, would be the one. People were full of hope.

  At night, a different atmosphere took hold of the streets. The lights and the tourists were still here, but now the homeless and the hopeless began to appear, creeping forward out of the shadows like silent apparitions, not by ones or twos, but by fives and tens, taking possession of the streets. The sidewalks and doorways now belonged to the homeless and the drifters, to the prostitutes and the runaways—the lost souls who would do anything to get enough money just to make it through to tomorrow.

  The latter two groups could be seen staking out various corners, displaying their wares, displaying bodies too quickly used up, faces too soon aged.

  Rusty felt a pervasive sadness eating away at him as he automatically checked out each group, ever watchful for runaways, lost sheep who needed to be returned home. Working at the agency had left an indelible mark on him.

  ChildFinders concerned itself not only with the missing children their clients paid them to find, but with the ones no one thought to look for. The ones whose faces were stored in a Web site database that had grown woefully too crammed.

  Since beginning his association with ChildFinders, Rusty had seen children lost far too often. Arguments and conditions at home became too explosive, too much to endure. Ki
ds ran away to what they thought was freedom only to find themselves truly imprisoned. With nowhere to turn, they took their place amid the streetwalkers, thinking this was just a temporary gig to see them through. A temporary gig that permanently claimed them. All too quickly, their fates were sealed.

  Their fates and, eventually, their coffins.

  Stopping at a traffic light, Rusty glanced across the street at several women calling out to passing cars. Trying to find takers. There were three of them, three strolling hostesses of the evening, he noted wryly. Two were in their thirties, maybe even their twenties, it was hard for him to tell.

  But one was much younger.

  Someone honked behind him and he realized that the light had turned green. Rusty stepped on the gas, driving to the next corner and then making a U-turn, temporarily forgetting about the errand that had originally sent him out. He made his way back, driving slower.

  She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, maybe even less. The layers of makeup she wore made it hard to be accurate.

  He could tell by the walk, by the furtive glances over her shoulder while simulating a cocky stance. She was a runaway. Somewhere, a parent, a sister, an aunt, was wringing her hands, wondering if the girl in the tight leather pants and cheap white faux fur short jacket was dead or alive.

  Digging deep into his jacket, not an easy feat by any means, he took out the small digital camera he always kept handy and took several shots in quick succession. He slid the camera under the seat when he got close enough for her to notice him.

  Rusty deliberately slowed his car. Like a magnet set on high, the vehicle attracted the streetwalkers, who clustered around it, calling out their offers.

  “Looking for some fun, mister?”

  “Hey, you don’t want either one of them, they’re used up. You look like someone who wants something fresh and young.” Leaning into the vehicle, the girl who’d caught his attention all but spilled out of her tank top.

  “Hey, I saw him first,” the prostitute with the ill-fitting silver wig snapped, pushing her competition out of the way.