by Matt Lincoln
“Hello, there. Welcome to Edler.” I motioned into Room Five. “We have some fresh coffee and snacks if you’re hungry. My name’s LaShawn, by the way. And I’m glad you found us tonight.” I hadn’t seen her before. She was probably a runaway but hadn’t been one for long, I guessed.
Her eyes didn’t have that hollow fear or the blank abscess that kids living for a long time on the streets had. That and her clothes weren’t in bad shape. They fit her, and they weren’t ripped, torn, or badly stained. They had been hers, not borrowed and not lived in yet. That meant that there was still time to get her back where she belonged if I could get her to trust me.
She had light-colored hair and fair skin but tanned. I couldn’t see her eyes from this far away yet, so I took better note of the clothing. I could use that for identification purposes later, when I went through the missing teens' website.
She was wearing a black tee that was a size too large. Her leggings were green and yellow plaid, with tiny pink hearts. There was a jacket tied around her waist that had writing along the sleeves, but I couldn’t make out but a few letters. It looked black.
The girl took a few steps in, and she moved to hold herself. It was a defensive reaction, trying to secure herself around strangers. So, I stepped out of the way of the door and backed up. “My friend Cing is in here with another lady, if you’d rather talk to her.” She didn’t move. Instead, the girl just stood and watched the doorframe.
“But I’m willing to hear you out if you need someone to talk to.” I didn’t want to push her. “I think I’m gonna slip back in and get some coffee. And there’s a mini muffin calling my name, you know?” I smiled at her and slowly walked into Room Five. I went right for the counter, poured a cup of coffee, and waited.
Cing had gotten Bryelle calmed enough to stop crying, and they were sharing a quiet minute of reflection. That’s what Cing called it. It was a chance to gather your thoughts before diving into deeper things. She had a knack for it.
My patience was rewarded. The teen appeared next to me, and I handed her my untouched cup of coffee. “There’s cream and sugar if you like. I’ve even seen a guy pour salt into the coffee if your tastes lean toward that.”
“Gross,” she replied. “Who does that?”
Her voice was small, in more ways than one, as if she were timid and shy. I didn’t look at her directly. I just poured another cup for myself and gestured to the paper plates of snacks to my right.
“My friend over there brought these graham cracker pie things, and I don’t know that I’m brave enough to try one yet. I like to live dangerously, but… even I have my limits.” I hoped that would elicit a grin or something. It had been known to work before.
“I’ve tried them before. They’re not too bad. The peanut butter ones are the best.” She was eyeing everything, and I knew that look. She probably hadn’t eaten in a while, but she was unsure if she should trust us yet.
“There are peanut butter ones? Dang it. Well, I’ll try one if you get one, too.” I leaned in a tiny bit, not too far to invade her space. “I don’t want to hurt Cing’s feelings by not trying something. She worked pretty hard to set all this up.” I glanced over at my Edler partner and saw her smiling at us.
“Yeah, I guess.” The teen reached out, and I discreetly turned my back to her. I knew that she was going to take a few things and hide them for later. I didn’t want to shame her, and I didn’t want her to know that I knew. This was a sign of neglect, and my first thought went to the fact that I needed to call social services as soon as I could.
Armed with my coffee and one of the cookie pie things, I went and sat down with Bryelle and Cing. I figured that the girl would join us if we didn’t force anything from her. Sure enough, she slid into a chair with a buffer chair on either side of her. Cing addressed her with another smile.
“Hi, I’m Cing. Are you doing okay tonight?” That was a loaded question, but it made newcomers see this as a normal place with normal people here to help them.
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.” The girl answered her and then took a bite to keep from having to say more. She surveyed the room and the chairs and made a not-so-subtle glance at the door.
“Bryelle?” Cing wanted to get her in on this so that the new girl wouldn’t feel like we were judging and focusing on her. “What did you think about during your minute of reflection? I’d like to hear it if you’d like to share.”
“Well, I reflected that I might have been in the wrong for gossiping about Mary’s past. I don’t know for sure that she was cheating on Milo, and I should have remembered that he shared a lot of time with her.” Bryelle looked to Cing for confirmation and acceptance.
Cing nodded at her. “That’s a good thing to reflect on. I reflected on the fact that sometimes, I need to see how important it is to accept the little things about a situation that I can’t change. Like tonight, I felt very badly that I had let someone treat me unfairly. And I will try to be better at accepting things that make me feel unhappy. Because occasionally, we just can’t help how other people deal with us. All we can do is manage how we recognize that treatment.”
“That is very true,” I responded to this. “We can only be responsible for how we act or how we react to any given thing. That is good advice, Cing, thank you.” Even Bryelle looked happier and impressed with that.
“So then,” Bryelle replied, “I should accept that Milo is mad at me, but I shouldn’t get mad at him for it because I don’t have to?” She seemed to be mulling that over and was unsure if it was really what she wanted to do.
Cing turned to the new girl while Bryelle figured things out for herself. “I hope that you like the snacks. We try to get different things every night, so the next time you come in, we may have cheese sticks and apple slices. We like to keep things fun around here.” She grinned at the teen in her best motherly way.
“So then, I can come back sometimes?” The relief in her tone was plain. This girl was looking for a soft, safe place to land, and she had no intention of returning to where she’d come from.
“Every night if you want,” I told her. “Cing and I are just two of the people who work here. There are people here all during the day, and we’re open all night, too. So that if you ever need help with finding a job, or getting back home, or finishing school, we’ll be around to help out. No matter what.”
I hoped that would ease her mind because I really needed to know her name. If I was going to look for her and find out where she belonged, I needed to know who she was. “So, can I ask you a question, then?” I waited until she at least nodded at me to confirm that I could. “What’s your name?”
I could tell that she was hesitant to give up that much information to us. Free snacks were great, but a name was something else. She probably knew what we could do with it, and the risks were high that the police or a social worker could come busting through the doors looking for her. I needed to let her know that I wasn’t going that route right now.
“I don’t want to call you ‘hey you’ or ‘girl in the black tee-shirt’ is all. It would be nice to call you by your name the next time you come by, you know?” That made it feel friendly, and I hoped that she could see that.
She smiled and shrugged at me. “I’m Jozie. Just Jozie.”
We barely talked after that, as she was just content to sit, nibble at her food and listen to all the other people who came and went throughout the night.
By early the next morning, I finally got into those admit records. Cing had taken over the group which consisted of Bryelle still, the new girl Jozie, and one of our long-time friends, Keith. He was known to come in to see Cing because of the letter she had written that helped him get to see his kids again. He thanked her every time he saw her.
It was close to five in the morning when I heard the chime sound. Then there was a cry for help out in the hallway, and I bolted out of my seat in Room Three. I found Lyriq Hargis, one of our success stories, dragging in another guy with a green shirt from
the outside. I ran over to help.
Cing came out of Room Five and also rushed over to help us. The guy that was not Lyriq looked young, with brown hair and skin, and he was wearing some very trendy clothes for a guy on the streets. There was a shoelace tied to his foot, and whatever it led to was blocked on the other side of the door, meaning that we couldn’t pull him in any further.
Cing saw the problem and went to open it. The lace led to a battered-looking guitar case that was tied at the handle. Lyriq fell down once the tension was released, and the other guy fell with him. I picked Lyriq up, sliding him out from under the young guy.
“I found him in the alley when I went to relieve myself. He was mumbling something about that guitar, so I figured that it was important, right?” Lyriq dusted himself off and looked at Cing and me. “I didn’t know what else to do with him. There wasn’t anyone else around. And I heard on the news that there are people dying in the alleys, so when I found him alive, I thought maybe, you could help or something.”
Lyriq had been a long-road-to-recovery type of guy. Once a meth addict, everything had fallen apart for him a few years ago. He had done some time in the State facility, but once he came out of there, he was ready to start fresh. He’d come to us one night with almost no hope left. I had worked with him non-stop, every night until he got that handy-man job at the Redding Apartments two blocks away.
He was younger than he looked, and his health had suffered from the years of drug abuse. His dark skin looked weathered, and his hair was almost all gone. He liked wearing ball caps and overalls with extra pockets sewn onto the outside to hold everyday items like nail clippers, scratch paper, or extra buttons.
“You did good, Lyriq. Thank you for not leaving him there.” I started looking over the young man’s body for a bloodstain or something that would indicate a wound or injury of some kind. I didn’t find anything, though.
“You should call the cops or the hospital, shouldn’t you?” Lyriq was watching the guy, then reached down to untie the shoelace attached to his foot and guitar case. The shoelace must have been Lyriq’s.
At the mention of the word cops, Jozie darted for the door. She and Bryelle had been watching and listening from the door to Room Five, and now we had a full-blown problem on our hands. Cing tried to stop the teen, but she was already gone by the time we registered it.
With that opportunity lost, we focused on the guy lying on the floor. “Lyriq? Can you help me take him into Room Eight and get him on a cot? Laying on the floor can’t be good for him.”
“Should we be moving him?” Cing asked as she was pulled out her cell and dialed.
“He’s not injured, that I can see. And it might be a while before the police can get here. Unless you’re calling for an ambulance there?” I looked up at Cing, who was shaking her head. “No, Room Eight it is. Lyriq?”
Together, he and I got the guy into the room and got him up on a cot. They were simple, no-frills cots, but it beat sleeping on the ground for a lot of people. The room had four cots set up, with several more leaning against the walls for bad weather nights. We usually wound up setting them along the corridors at those times, just so that we could keep an eye on everything. I told Lyriq about Room Five, where the snacks and coffee were, and thanked him for his help again.
Cing came in a few minutes later, still on the phone. “They said that they’d be by as soon as they could.” She had brought along the guitar case and placed it near the cot. “I’ve got Lyriq drinking coffee and snacking. He and Bryelle are friendly enough, so do you need me to do anything?”
“Thanks, but I can’t think of anything.” I shook my head at her. “There are no obvious signs of injury on him, so that leaves pretty much only one thing.” It was an all too common thing in the last few nights.
“If this is an overdose, LaShawn, we need to call an ambulance. It’s protocol.” She wasn’t wrong, and I knew that.
“Yeah. Do it. I’ll look for some ID, just so we’ll have something to tell them when they arrive.” I grabbed a chair from the next room, and Cing went out to make another call. I placed the chair beside the cot and carefully looked for a wallet on the guy.
My movements must have alerted his body or mind or something because he started to stir. I watched him blink a few times and squint real hard. Then he asked, “Where am I?”
“You’re at the Edler Memorial Community Center,” I told him. “One of my regulars found you and brought you in. I’ve been looking after you until you woke up. Glad that you didn’t go the other way.” I’d seen enough ODs to know that they didn’t always come back from them.
“What happened to me?” His voice was scratchy. There was no telling right now how long he’d been out. His system was going to need time to re-acclimate.
“I was hoping that you could tell me that. But we’ll start simple, huh? What’s your name?” I wanted to go easy on him in case he had the urge to fight or fly. Most did once they realized that they were still here.
“Colby Tamez. Hey, is my guitar here?” He started to look around, and only when he saw the case did he look like he was going to be okay.
“Okay, Colby. My name’s LaShawn Spindle, and I’m going to get you the help you need.” And I had every intention of keeping that kind of promise to him. Not only because I knew that help was coming, but because this was my job, to help people like him.
3
Jake
I was on my way to visit two newly acquired friends when I got a text from LaShawn Spindle, who was a very old friend of mine. He didn’t give much detail in the message, just a brief greeting before asking if I had time to talk about some things later on. Once I parked my automobile, I texted back. Sure, how about tonight? Your work or my place?
I guessed it wasn’t an emergency by the way it was phrased, so I tucked the cell into my back pocket and headed for the door to the structure before me. I had met Dr. George Yout only a few months ago, by way of a creature that I’d sooner forget. And while George was a decent kind of person, his ex-wife, Kippy Ozoa, was not. At least from what little I knew firsthand of her.
I had met George when an ill-fated rescue mission in the Azores had left two of my three team members injured and in need of care. Rosa and Doc had suffered wounds to their ribs, leg, and hand that needed specialized care and treatment. So, without any other good options, I let our colleague at the time, Kippy, bring them to Miami and to the attention of George.
As it turned out, he was a much better sort than I’d given him credit for in the beginning. I was still learning about him, but I trusted him to look after our recent abduction victim, Arik Fu. The eighteen-year-old was a recovering Adderall addict who had a Federal Judge mother that was not all that she seemed to be.
During our last mission, it came to light that Judge Miranda Fu was working with both the DEA and a Colombian drug cartel called the Yabut. There had been a lot of double-dealing and double-crossing going on between the three entities, and my team was left trying to figure all of it out.
Arik had fallen by the wayside and was, we suspected, being used as a pawn or as collateral damage. Either way, it was decided that he was safe here and that he had a better chance of finding a normal life away from his mother for the time being.
I used the door knocker to announce my arrival, an intricately carved brass Caduceus, the symbol of medicine, two snakes with the winged staff. I thought it was quite clever, considering who George was. Within a few minutes, the door opened, and there stood Dr. Yout.
He had graying blond hair, and his facial hair was looking scraggly and bold. He wore a pale green linen grandad shirt with a narrow collar and exposed leather button front. His jeans were worn and faded light denim, and he had a dishtowel draped over his right shoulder. It seemed that I’d interrupted his cooking.
“Hey, George. How are you doing?” It was good to see his familiar and welcoming face again. From the open door, I could smell lamb and bell peppers and mint simmering. George looked delighted
to see me and reached out to take my hand.
“Jake. I’m so grateful that you could make it. Please, do come in.” He moved and motioned me into the foyer of his home. I smiled when I saw him, as it had been some time since our last visit together. I liked his easy-going manner and friendliness that just rolled off him. I stepped into his home and took a look around.
While I had been a guest there a few times before, I had not once entered through the main entrance. This place was amazing. It had stone floors, with a very rustic and old-world feel to the walls and décor. There was a chair that looked half torture device, half throne in the hall that led to the kitchen at the end, and at the left, I saw a gathering room for company.
The walls bore a Scottish flag, a coat of arms, family pictures, and various framed and plaque awards. The aroma of the food weighed heavily in the air and permeated the rooms. George ushered me into the kitchen through a huge rounded archway. Once there, I saw a very tidy and Tuscan themed cooking area.
The floor had square ceramic tiles with random patterns and designs. The walls were stuccoed in tan, and the cabinet surfaces matched the tiling from the room. It was a little overwhelming, but it looked very much like a place where George had used his worldly influenced taste to make it his own.
To the left of the arch was a hefty mission style table with benches instead of chairs. A woman was sitting on the left side, shredding lettuce into a big bowl for a salad. She looked me over, and I could tell that she was related to George. It was in the eyes, the nose, and the brow.
She had blue eyes and jet black hair pulled from the face with a headband. She wore a lightweight blue jacket shirt over a white tank and shorts. That put me at ease, as I’d come dressed in a tee and cargo shorts. I was glad that I wasn’t too underdressed.
“That is one of my daughters, Verity, the younger. She has been visiting me from her studies in the Netherlands. Or rather, attending a post meeting here in Miami. Please, join her at the table. I’ll have everything ready in a matter of minutes.” George returned to his cooking venture, so I settled in at the table opposite her.
