Under Cover Of Darkness

by Elizabeth White

  “Yeah, I’ve got tentative plans. Why?”

  She tilted her head. “You’re such a good translator.”

  “I should hope so,” he said. “I spoke Spanish before I learned English.” Jack knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t figure out where she was going with this conversational tack. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing, I just thought you might be interested in helping with an ESL class sponsored by my church.”

  “English as Second Language?

  “That’s right.” Meg leaned against the truck next to him, her shoulder brushing his elbow. Removing her cap, she gave him that look again. “You’d be great at it.”

  For a tense moment Jack felt as transparent as a crystal vase. She’s not at all afraid of me. She knows I’m a Christian. She knows I’m a cop.

  But from what he’d seen of her, Meg was far too naive to know any such thing. She didn’t know him at all. And he’d better keep it that way.

  “Sorry, Spanky, not my idea of a good time.” He gave her a wink to soften the blow and pushed away from the truck. “But let me know if something else comes up.”

  Meg skirted a series of metal outbuildings behind the office and entered the one farthest back on the property, which served as a combination repair and storage building. There she found Sam sitting at a work table, poking at the disassembled pieces of an auger with the fierce concentration of a little boy stationed in front of a pile of Lego blocks.

  “Sam!” Meg skipped across the open floor of the warehouse and skidded to an awkward halt in her unfamiliar three-inch-heel sandals. “Sam, guess what? Mr. Crowley approved my preliminary design!”

  Sam continued bolting a blade in place. His bristling mustache twitched in what, for him, passed as a smile.

  Impatient, Meg leaned on the end of the table and peered at the shambles of metal parts and rubber gaskets strewn across the table. Sunset had a mechanic whose sole responsibility was keeping the machines functioning, but Sam claimed he could think better with dirt and grease on his hands.

  Wiping his hands on a rag, he removed his goggles and looked at Meg. “Well now, don’t you clean up nice?”

  She twirled, making the gored hem of her forest-green skirt swing. A matching tuxedo jacket and ivory lace shell completed the only dress-for-success outfit in her closet. “You think Mr. Crowley noticed it’s the same thing I wore for my interview last year?”

  Sam snorted. “Not likely. So you showed ’em how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, huh?”

  “Yep. I thought Mrs. Grover-Niles was going to swoon when I showed her what the carriageway would look like with clematis dripping all across the arch. Do you know how many hours I spent in the newspaper archives, researching historic plant material?”

  “Too many, I expect,” Sam said dryly, “but I’m mighty proud for you. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off to celebrate?”

  Meg frowned. “Take the day off?” For reasons she wouldn’t admit to herself, much less to Sam, that idea held no appeal whatsoever. “There’s too much work to do! I have to get started choosing plant material for the front beds. Where’s Manny and the rest of the crew?”

  “I sent ’em to do that midtown median job while you were occupied this mornin’.” Sam tilted his head back and gave her a narrow look. “Why?”

  She took a sudden interest in her Spanish design jade bracelet. “Just wondering.”

  She’d spent a good bit of prayer time this morning agonizing over her fumbling attempt to get Torres hooked up with her pastor, Ramón Santos, who led the ESL class. Jack probably thought she’d been angling for a date. That was an embarrassing thought. She didn’t know what else she could do, but the more she tried to put him out of her mind, the more he insisted on camping out there.

  She wanted to know where he lived, what he liked to do in his spare time, what had happened in his past to make him so self-protective.

  Sam probably wouldn’t tell her, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  Meg lined up a jade cross carefully alongside its neighbor. “Sam, if you knew something dangerous about one of my guys, would you tell me?” She risked a look at him.

  “Anybody bothers you, I’ll kill him.” He said it so flatly that a chill walked up Meg’s arms.

  “Oh, no!” she said, alarmed. “Nobody’s even looked at me funny.” Well, if you didn’t count Warner. He was out of Sam’s province. “I was just…wondering about Torres,” she said in a rush.

  “Mmm.” Sam had a way of humming when he was considering what to say. “You were wonderin’ about Torres, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m thinking he deserves a chance, Meg.”

  Meg stared at Sam. If he confirmed her fears, everything would change. But she had to know. “He’s been in prison, hasn’t he?”

  Shaking his head, Sam picked up a screwdriver and tapped the handle on the work table. “You’d better ask him.”

  “I did, but he wouldn’t answer me.”

  “Well, then he doesn’t want you to know.” Sam’s brown eyes bored into hers. “You get my drift, missy?”

  Disappointed, she nodded.

  “Good.” Sam dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Now go get you some lunch and leave me alone so I can get this piece of junk fixed.”

  Meg shook her bracelet back into place and backed away. The enigma of Jack Torres bothered her like an itch between the shoulder blades. She was going to figure out a way to scratch it if it killed her.

  Chapter Five

  “Most doctors don’t make house calls these days,” Elliot Fairchild said to Meg Saturday morning as he turned his gray SUV onto a deserted street not far from her house.

  Meg glanced at her cranky chauffeur. Maybe she should have taken him for coffee first. “I know,” she said, “but these people are proud, and they’d never come to the free clinic.”

  A piece of paper blew against the windshield just long enough for Meg to read the advertisement for a bar down the street. The paper scuttled away, drawing Meg’s attention to cracked sidewalks and beer bottles rolling against the storm drains. At one time, this had been the business section of an upscale neighborhood. Over the years it had deteriorated into a fusion of graffiti-painted walls and dusty plateglass windows fronted by iron bars.

  “When your dad finds out I brought you here he’ll fire me,” Elliot said unhappily.

  “He can’t fire you. You’re his partner.”

  Elliot winced as the SUV bounced into a pothole deep enough to plant a tree in. “Still. I don’t like it. You should’ve let me come by myself.”

  Meg regretted involving her father’s good-natured young partner in an escapade that obviously made him uncomfortable. Benny would have been better company, but she was studying for finals; besides, Elliot was the one with MD after his name.

  “The Herreras don’t know you, and I had to bring the food.” Meg checked the two gallon-size Ziploc bags between her feet to make sure sixteen-bean soup wasn’t leaking onto the carpet.

  “I could have—”

  “Elliot, I wanted to come, all right? The Lord told me to do this.”

  Elliot gave Meg his patented wrinkle-browed look. “The Lord says weird things to you, you know that?”

  She made a face at him. “If you’d seen Tomás’s hand…it was starting to get those red stripes out from the cut. That means trouble, right? He kept breaking it open and getting it dirty.”

  Sighing in defeat, Elliot went into doctor mode. “How old is this little boy?”

  “He’s sixteen.” Meg leaned forward. “Turn in here.”

  “This is it?” Elliot braked with a jerk.

  The parking lot of the Starlight Inn spread out on their right like a vast asphalt desert. The hotel itself was a staggering pile of cinder block and iron, with a neon sign flickering above a canvas overhang that looked like it might collapse in the next strong wind.

  “This is the address Sam gave me,” Meg said. She neglected to
mention that Sam had forbidden her to set foot in the neighborhood without an armed guard. “Just—” she gulped “—park under the overhang, I guess.”

  “Meg, I can’t leave my car here! It’ll be stripped in five seconds flat.”

  “Okay, well—” She noticed a group of young men playing basketball in a schoolyard down the street. They were all dressed in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, but one towered several inches above the others. “Hey, that looks like Jack Torres!” Giddy with relief, her voice rose. “And there’s Tomás. Drive on down there.”

  “This is a bad idea,” Elliot muttered. “Looks like a gang.”

  He crept down the street, dodging craters with tight-lipped concentration. Before he’d come to a complete stop in the circle drive, Meg had already opened the door.

  “Wait!” Elliot protested. “Let me go first.”

  But Meg jumped out and crunched across broken glass, rocks and crabgrass toward the basketball court, a chain-net backboard leaning drunkenly in the corner of the parking lot. The game in progress was fast, rambunctious and noisy. Meg had a feeling her Spanish swear-word vocabulary was increasing by the moment.

  She put her fingers to her lips and blasted out one of the earsplitting whistles her brother had taught her. The action on the court stopped. Distracted, Tomás let a boy twice his size shove him onto his rear, and he rolled over with a grunt of pain. Torres, who had the ball, turned around with a quizzical look.

  Meg waved. “Hey, y’all. Are girls allowed to play?”

  “I’m not believing you brought her into this neighborhood in a Lexus,” Jack said between his teeth. He leaned over Tomás’s shoulder to watch Meg’s friend sew up the boy’s hand. Tomás had reluctantly agreed to sit on the car’s gleaming hood to have his cut examined, while the game continued.

  “I would have brought the limo, but my driver’s on vacation.” The young doctor glanced up, his brown eyes myopic but shrewd behind a pair of Buddy Holly glasses that tempered his Lurch-like voice and build. “Have you ever tried to talk Meg out of something she’s dead set on doing?”

  “My car’s still sitting in the driveway because Dad can’t find the right part for it,” Meg volunteered, “so we had to bring Elliot’s car.” She peered around Fairchild’s arm, wincing in sympathy as the needle flashed in the sunlight. “Hang in there, Tomás, it’ll be okay.”

  Tomás tried to smile, looking slightly green from the shock of three shots—tetanus, antibiotic and local anesthetic—not to mention the visual impact of being sewn back together.

  Jack sighed in exasperation. “St. John, you shouldn’t be here at all. How’d you even know how to find this place?”

  “I can read a map.”

  “I meant—” He met the doctor’s amused gaze. “Never mind.” Jack knew how he’d found her phone number. Would someone that innocent-looking go snooping through employee files?

  Meg’s persistent kindness reminded him of Dottie Rook, his third-grade teacher, who’d been the closest thing to a mother Jack had ever known. He couldn’t remember ever thanking Dottie for trying to set him on a straight path. Ashamed that he hadn’t seen to Tomás’s injury himself, Jack felt his own spiritual lack. How long since he’d done more than ask God for help in emergencies? He hadn’t even been to church since Rico’s funeral, over a year ago.

  Seeing Meg here, away from the context of work, threw him off balance. Wearing a peach-colored knit top and denim shorts that showed off long, tanned legs, she observed the operation with the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. She looked fresh, sweet and utterly out of place.

  For her own safety he had to send her back where she belonged.

  As Elliot Fairchild knotted the last suture, Jack picked up the boy’s hand and examined the neat row of stitches. “Good job, Doc. Sometime when you’re not busy, I’ve got a button off a shirt.” He spoke to Tomás in Spanish. “Now you’re put back together, I’ll treat you to a game of Time Crisis down at the laundromat.” Trong’s Coin-Op Laundry was the boy’s favorite hangout.

  “Okay.” Tomás gave Meg an uncertain look, mumbled “Gracias, señor,” to the doctor, and slid to the ground.

  “Wait, I brought you some soup,” said Meg, thrusting two plastic bags of something squishy at Jack. “You need to put it in the refrigerator.”

  “Thanks.” He reluctantly took the bags and looked down at Meg’s hopeful face. He could tell she wanted to be invited to stay. Steeling himself, he gave Tomás’s shoulder a friendly thump. “Come on, dude. We’ll share the wealth with Mr. Trong. See you Monday, St. John.” With a wave to Meg over his shoulder, he led the way toward the laundry.

  He could feel Meg’s gaze all the way.

  Meg studied the board, looking for a place to use an X, a C, two G’s and three E’s. Benny’s last score had been forty-two, so it was no surprise Meg was suffering a dismal loss. “It’s a wonder anybody will play this game with you,” she grumbled.

  Benny looked amused. “Roxanne can still beat me.”

  “I bet.” Meg grinned. Benny’s eighty-year-old adoptive mother was still sharp. “When are you going home again?” She put her X underneath an O and made “ox.”

  “Maybe Fourth of July. There’s a big family reunion.” Bernadette twisted a dark curl around her finger and gave Meg a cajoling look. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “I’d go farther than Mississippi for some of Roxanne’s homemade ice cream,” Meg said, smiling. “But Ramón’s planning that big church party for the Fourth. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” Disappointment pulled down Benny’s full mouth. “I wanted you to meet my brother Grant. He really needs a wife—”

  Laughing, Meg upended Benny’s rack of tiles. “And he’s so desperate you think he’ll fall for me?”

  “Oh, you knew what I meant!” Benny reracked her tiles and studied them. “You’ve just been sort of restless lately. I thought it might be a dearth of romance. Dearth! Hey, that works right here.”

  Rolling her eyes, Meg added up thirty-five points for her roommate. “I concede, O great Scrabble Queen. Do you think a dearth of romance is my problem? Maybe I should cave in to my parents and toss my cap at Elliot.”

  Benny snorted. “You’ve been reading too many historical romance novels. Why Elliot?”

  “He went with me out to the Herreras’ this morning. Almost hyperventilated when his Lexus bottomed out one time, but he got over it and behaved like a champ. Sewed up Tomás’s hand, and he was even nice to—” Meg stopped. Elliot and Jack had eyed each other like a couple of junkyard dogs.

  “Nice to who?” asked Benny, a curious gleam in her eyes.

  “Nobody.”

  Nobody with gleaming muscles and long, sweaty black hair and exotic eyes. Meg grimaced. Dearth of romance indeed.

  The doorbell buzzed, and Gilligan started barking. The roommates gazed at each other in dismay. At nine o’clock, Benny was already in her pajamas. Meg had on a lime-green tank top over her rattiest pair of cutoffs, with the Elmo slippers her nephews had given her for Christmas on her feet.

  “Are you expecting company?” asked Benny.

  “Nope. Maybe it’s one of your seminary friends.”

  “Maybe,” Benny said. “I’ll go throw on some clothes while you answer the door.”

  “Okay.” Meg got up and tossed an afghan around her shoulders for modesty. “Shut up, Gilligan,” she scolded the dog, who followed her to the door without noticeably lowering the decibel level. Looking down at him, she flipped on the porch light and opened the door. “I said, shut up!”

  “Can’t you just feel the love,” said Jack Torres.

  Jack stood on Meg’s tiny porch, looking down into her lamplit face. In spite of the fact that it was eighty degrees outside, she was draped in a blanket, her hair loose around her shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” Meg picked up the dog, but it continued to growl, hackles raised.

  “I come bearing gifts.”

  She looked down at th
e greasy towel-wrapped item in his hand. “What is that?”

  “You brought me lunch today, so I brought you—” he flipped the towel back “—an idler pulley.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It sure is dirty.”

  “The laundromat was closed.”

  “You don’t put car parts in the—oh. You’re kidding.” She tugged the multicolored afghan higher on her shoulders. He watched her gaze flicker to the dark yard behind him and back to his face. “If that goes in my ol’ car, you went to a lot of trouble. Want to come in?”

  It had probably been a bad move to come here. After Meg had left the neighborhood this morning, he’d done some looking around and found the idler pulley in a salvage yard. It cost more than it was worth, but he’d thought—

  Well, what had he thought? That he was going to win the princess’s favor with a used car part?

  “Nah, I’m going.” He set the lumpy towel down on the porch. “Thanks for bringing the doctor out this morning. The kid’s hand is better already.”

  “I’m glad.” Meg smiled and opened the door wider. “Please, come on in.”

  “Who is it, Meg?” called a low-pitched female voice inside the house.

  Meg turned. “Jack Torres from work.”

  “Who?” A young woman with wild black hair and café-au-lait skin stood on tiptoe to peer over Meg’s shoulder.

  “Jack, this is Bernadette. Benny, Jack is the one who rescued me from the interstate the other day.”

  Jack gave Meg’s roommate a quick once-over. Even in baggy overalls she was fragile as an orchid.

  “Jack brought me an idler pulley. Isn’t that sweet?” Meg elbowed her roommate.

  “Yeah.” Benny folded her arms and rolled her big, dark eyes. “Give him a gold star.” But she moved aside to let Jack in.

  He flinched when the dog snarled.

  “Be quiet, Gill,” Meg said, sending Jack a teasing look. “I’ll let you know when to attack.” She dumped the dachshund in a big wicker chair, then backed toward the hallway. “I’ll just, uh—I’ll be back in a minute.” With one more wide-eyed glance at Jack, she ducked away.