Needs, Wants and Other Weaknesses (The New Pioneers Book 6)

by Nam-Krane,Deborah

  "I'm going to walk out of this room," she said quietly, not looking at him, "and you're going to give me a two-minute head start. You're going to walk downstairs to the bathrooms on the right side of the Starbucks. I'm going to come out after I powder my nose, and you're going to look very happy to see me. Got it?" Before he could answer, she sauntered away, stopping twice to flirt with some of the older men in the room.

  Robert looked at his watch. When two minutes had passed, he finished his drink, left money in the tip jar, and walked out. He walked as slowly as he could to the escalator.

  One minute later, he had just glanced at the bathroom when he saw Hannah walk out. She smiled broadly and walked over to him. "There you are!" she said, linking elbows with him. "Why don't we go somewhere a little quieter, hmm?"

  Robert looked at the calendar of events. Perfect. "I know just the place," he said, then walked her back up the stairs to the fourth ballroom. There was loud cheering and conversation.

  Hannah looked around appreciatively. "The American Statistical Association really knows how to party, huh?"

  "Why are you dressed like that?" Robert demanded.

  "What's the first thing you thought when you saw me like this?"

  "That you look like a little girl playing dress up in her big sister's clothes."

  Hannah smiled. "And you don't think any of those guys up there go for that?"

  Robert folded his arms. "You blackmailed a low-level pimp so you could prostitute yourself to some partners in a law firm?"

  "You got this far and that's the best you could come up with?"

  "You are going to stop playing games with me, Hannah, and tell me what the hell is going on."

  "Three hours, and I'll tell you anything you want to know."

  "What happens in three hours?"

  "I meet you at Wally's, buy you a drink, and tell you everything."

  "Wally's on Mass Ave? That's pretty close to where you really live, right?"

  Hannah patted his shoulder. "Very good, Robert. You want more? Give me three hours. If I don't get to do what I need to, none of this is going to matter."

  "I am a cop. I can't let you go to knowingly break another law."

  "I swear to you I'm not going to do anything illegal." She sighed. "Don't you let people get their affairs in order before they turn themselves in?"

  "Is that what you're going to do?"

  "I'll let you decide." She licked her lips. "Do we have a deal?"

  Robert shook his head and looked at his watch. "If I don't see you at Wally's by ten-thirty exactly, I am going to get a warrant for your arrest for blackmail and fraud."

  "See you at ten-thirty," Hannah said as she turned to leave. "And enjoy the party."

  One second later, he heard a “whoo!” and then a screaming man thrust a beer into his hand. Before Robert could extricate himself, Hannah was out the door.

  ~~~

  I'm not on duty. There is no reason to call this in, he told himself as he walked to Wally's on Mass Ave. Baptiste won't thank me for telling him I'm going to Wally's.

  An alert buzzed on his phone. Multiple reports coming in right now of men breaking into women's hotel rooms at the Sheraton. Male suspects were guests at a law firm's function tonight.

  Robert angrily clapped his phone shut and looked straight ahead until he got to the bar.

  Hannah was sitting at a table in the back. She'd scrubbed her makeup off and put her hair in a ponytail. She was wearing a baggy long-sleeved shirt and jeans. She was relaxed and completely unflustered as Robert roughly pulled out a chair to sit next to her.

  "What did you do?"

  She looked at her watch. "I think you know what I did," she said.

  "I think if I took you into the station right now, that attorney you brought in yesterday would find an excuse not to show up."

  "Good thing that's not the only law firm in Boston, eh?" She smiled and cocked her head. "And what are you going to take me in for? Giving some men old enough to be my grandfather a room key? Or changing my mind?"

  "You obviously had more than one key and you knew those rooms would be occupied by someone else."

  "Did I?" She shrugged. "Tell me something. Do you think your captain is going to want you to arrest me when he's already going to be processing more than a dozen people for prostitution and solicitation tonight?"

  "Let's get back to that later, Hannah. Why did you do it?"

  "I wanted to get someone's attention."

  "Who?"

  She took a sip of her drink and snorted. "Yeah, right. You wouldn't believe me, and if you did, you wouldn't care."

  "Try me."

  She turned to look at him, and Robert saw that she was tearing up. She looked away, wiped her eyes, then shook her head. "When I was fourteen, I begged the police for help. I told them everything, and they didn't care. Somewhere, every groovy little detail is written down… That is, if they didn't toss it. I was a crazy, trouble-making kid, and..." She wiped another tear. "You don't care about people like..."

  "The police in Burlington?"

  Hannah swallowed. "How did you...."

  "Your father didn't stray too far from Wakefield for work, but your mother did. Powell's a busybody, but his range doesn't go out much further than the town line. It had to be your mother."

  "So you know?"

  "No," he said. "And not for lack of trying. I drove out to Burlington this morning, and they didn't have anything."

  She bit her lip. "They didn't even write it down."

  "Maybe not, but the woman at the desk remembered a teenager coming in ten years ago to report a missing friend. She remembered that you used the words 'kidnapped' and 'sold'." She tried to blink her tears away. "That must have been terrible for you."

  "It was worse for Josh," Hannah whispered. "And worse for her."

  "What was her name?"

  Hannah stood up and slammed the table. "Her name is Mariela, Detective. She is still alive, and I am finally this close to finding her. Good luck at the station tomorrow." She walked away and pushed past the crowd.

  Robert was ten seconds behind her. He caught up to her going left on Columbus. "Hannah, stop." She stopped but didn't turn around. "I'm not trying to upset you, but the odds are very—"

  "Her mother is dead," Hannah said, not looking at him. "I saw the pictures of her body seven years ago. Mariela wasn't with her, and the police didn't find any more..." Hannah's chest heaved. "She's still alive. Mariela was smart, and she knew how to survive. And she has a reason to."

  "Because she knows that you're coming for her?" Robert said gently.

  "Me, and Josh."

  "Tell me what happened."

  Chapter Six

  Hannah Bruges hadn't needed friends. She had her brother Josh, and she liked him better than anyone else she'd ever met. And after what happened with that creep Morgan Jenner in the fourth grade, people were too afraid to befriend her. Bonus: they were also too afraid to give her a hard time.

  Everyone treated her and Josh like they didn't belong there; it didn't occur to them that she agreed and couldn't wait to get out.

  There was a time when she was very small that she had felt sorry for her parents. Her mother cried when they didn't have money, which was almost all the time, and one time, her father came home and broke down in his own tears. He smelled funny, but it made her sad to see him cry.

  She stopped feeling sorry for them the first time she saw her father hit Josh. What had he done? Oh, right. He'd taken a message down wrong. Jerry could easily fix it, but he couldn't stand for anything to go wrong if it was anyone's fault but his. He slapped Josh. "Are you stupid?" Hannah looked at her mother, who shook her head and muttered "stupid kid" while she unloaded the grocery bags. Josh didn't flinch, and Hannah understood that this wasn't the first time he'd been hit.

  He walked out to their front steps and Hannah followed him. She sat next to him and put her head on his arm. "He's mean."

  Josh turned to look at Hannah,
and after a moment, smiled. "Yeah, he is, but don't let them hear you say that, because then you'll get in trouble, too."

  "I don't care!" Hannah protested.

  "Well, I do," Josh said softly.

  "Okay," Hannah said. That was their agreement for the rest of their childhoods: Josh protected Hannah at home, and Hannah protected Josh everywhere else.

  Hannah hated school from the first day. She'd taught herself to read when she was four, and Josh had helped teach her how to add and subtract before she got to kindergarten. It was boring, but she saw what happened to kids who didn't do their work. As far as she was concerned, those teachers weren't any better than her father. They didn't hit the kids, but they made them feel just as bad; she could tell some of them liked it, and those who didn't thought it was part of their job. She knew Josh wouldn't want her to get in trouble, so she did her work and pretended she was learning something.

  She sat on Josh's lap one evening while he was doing his homework. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to the math problem.

  "Division," Josh said. "I always get these wrong."

  "How come?"

  Josh's face darkened. "I don't see the numbers right," he whispered. "See, I have to look very hard to see that the two comes before the five. My brain keeps wanting to make it the five come before the two, and that's a different number."

  She looked closely. "And then you'll get the wrong answer."

  "Yep," he said sadly. "Sometimes, I think I'm crazy."

  "You're not crazy," Hannah said. "You just have to come up with a different way."

  Josh rubbed her head. "Yeah? And what's that?"

  "How do you do division?"

  "It's kind of like a lot of subtraction. It's easier if you know how to multiply first."

  "What's 'multiply'?"

  "Well, that's kind of like a lot of addition. So instead of you adding three plus three plus three plus three plus three, you multiply three five times. It's a quicker way to get the same answer: fifteen."

  Hannah counted out threes on her fingers, then nodded solemnly. "Fifteen," she agreed. "So how would you do division?"

  "So let's take eight. We want to divide it by four. Another way to say that is, how many times does four go into eight?"

  Hannah counted on her fingers. "Twice!"

  "Right!" Josh laughed. "I wish you could help me with my math."

  "I bet I can," Hannah said.

  The next day after school, she found Josh's old math workbooks from the first and second grades. She went through them that night. The next night, she went through his old third grade workbook. On the third night, she sat next to him when he was doing his homework. "I think I can help now."

  Hannah also liked to help with Josh's other homework; she'd read his work and tell him what to write, then look it over after he wrote it. "You are going to be so bored when you get to the fourth grade," he said when she was in the second grade. "You'll have already done all the work."

  "No, I won't," she said earnestly. "You'll be in the seventh grade."

  Seeing someone like Josh need so much help and not get it made Hannah even more convinced that school wasn't a good place. Because Josh was really smart. When someone in the neighborhood gave away their old computer, Josh fixed it up so it ran better than before. He bought a used modem and set up email accounts for the both of them. A few months after that, he bought another computer so they could have their own server.

  Hannah thought Josh should do more with computers and less with cars, but Jerry—she never called him Dad anymore—demanded Josh's help on the weekends. By the time he was twelve, he was probably just as good as Jerry.

  "I think I'm going to drop out of school when I'm sixteen and go work as a mechanic."

  "Like Jerry?!" Hannah exclaimed.

  "No, because I'm going to show up sober."

  "You can do other stuff," Hannah protested.

  "But I'm good at this, and I can make good money. Wouldn't it be nice if we had our own house and we didn't have to worry about Mom and Dad not being able to pay the rent?"

  Hannah sighed. "And then you'll do something else? Like work with computers?"

  "I don't know. I might get the keyboard too greasy to use anymore!" He chased Hannah around the keyboard, pretending he was going to smear her with non-existent grease.

  Josh was one of the tallest boys in the seventh grade, but Morgan Jenner was in the eighth grade and he was even taller. Hannah was never quite sure how it had started—the rumor everyone repeated most often was that Morgan's girlfriend had been checking Josh out—but by the time Hannah got to the courtyard after school, Morgan had gotten three punches on Josh.

  Josh's face was bloody, and Hannah could tell he was dizzy. "Get off of my brother!" she screamed, breaking the circle the other kids had formed.

  "Mind your own business, you little slut!" Morgan sneered.

  "Shut up about my sister!" Josh raged, but before Morgan could take more than two steps, Hannah had punched him in the stomach. "Don't touch my brother," she said as he doubled over. She kicked him in the crotch, bringing him to his knees. "Don't call me a slut!" She punched him in the nose so his face matched her brother's. "And don't be a bully!"

  When Josh went to high school, one of the upperclassmen taunted him about needing to be protected by his kid sister. Josh delivered one punch to the kid's solar plexus, then looked at him as he gasped. "Who do you think taught her those moves?" He looked around. "Anyone else?" Of course not. He walked home. Yep, he was dropping out as soon as he could.

  When Josh dropped out, their parents started charging him rent. When Hannah found out how much, she was incensed. "Isn't that what Aunt Ava is charging them? Why should you have to pay for the whole thing?"

  "Because I can," Josh sighed, "and they can't."

  When they started coming to Josh for money for groceries, Hannah had had enough. "Are there any job openings at the mall?" she asked her mother.

  Meg scoffed. "All they want to hire are illegals now."

  "Why?"

  "Because they don't have to pay them as much."

  "Isn't that against the law?"

  Her mother laughed. "Who's going to report them?"

  Hannah frowned. "What about your job? Do they need any help?" She smiled. "I was thinking I should start put in some money toward the bills now that I can work."

  Her mother perked up. "I'll ask tomorrow."

  The next day, Meg announced that Hannah could start working with her that weekend. "They need help with inventory, but they can't spare any of the people they have working on the floor. This is under the table, so they'll give you an envelope at the end of the day. Don't screw up and they'll ask for you to come back, got it?"

  "Yep."

  "You know Mom's going to keep your money, right?" Josh asked as they were doing the dishes later that night.

  "Yep," Hannah said as she dried. "Which is why I'm going to apply for something else when I get there."

  The way Meg and her manager had explained inventory, Hannah would have thought it was the equivalent of a shuttle launch. But really, it was just counting things. There was a list of how many things should be of each item, and when a couple of things came up short, Hannah searched through the backroom to see if she could find them. By the time she was done, all but three matched up to what they should have been.

  The manager seemed impressed not only with how thorough Hannah had been but by how she'd tidied up the backroom as she'd gone through. She looked at her over her glasses. "You're a good worker, huh?"

  Hannah shrugged. "I just like to get a job done."

  "Maybe too well," she said. "I don't think I'm going to need anything else like this for a little while now."

  "That's fine. Thanks for giving me the chance."

  The woman seemed to size her up. She nodded after a moment. "How about you let me treat you to lunch for doing such a good job, and we go talk to the manager at that expensive salad place in the food court? They're
pretty popular, and I think they could use some help."

  "Really? My mom said no one was hiring."

  The manager smiled. "No one is hiring just anybody, but everyone can use good help."

  By the end of lunch, Hannah had been hired for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shifts at Toss It. Hannah showed her gratitude by sweeping the backroom and tidying the desk.

  At the end of the day, the manager thanked Hannah and handed her an envelope as she walked out with her mother. Hannah counted the money and gave it to her mother. "Here you go," she said offhandedly. "That ought to be enough for the electricity."

  "How would you know?" Meg asked roughly.

  "I know exactly how much the utility and rent costs every month. I also have a pretty good idea of how much your credit card bills cost."

  "So then you know we can use every cent we take in," Meg snapped.

  Hannah shrugged. "Especially if Jerry doesn't work that often."

  Meg ignored her comment. "So did she say whether she'd ask you back?"

  "Not for a while," Hannah said as she got into the car and put on her seat belt, "but I start work in the food court next Friday night."

  "Oh, really?" Meg scoffed. When Hannah nodded, Meg became enraged. "Well, good luck getting here. My shift ends at five, and I am not going to drive home just to drive you back out."

  "That's okay," Hannah said airily. "I was going to bike over anyway."

  The next Friday, Hannah biked over to the Burlington Mall to begin her first job. She got there an hour early, said hello to her mother’s manager, and wandered through the mall before she had to change into her uniform.

  Ten minutes before she needed to change, she stopped by a pushcart. She didn’t like jewelry, but there was something about the way the pink stones on a necklace caught the light that made her take a second look. She picked it up and fingered it. It was delicate, and she was not, but she still couldn’t stop looking at it.