“How did you know about him?” She was suddenly wary. “Oh, yeah. I told you.”
“Does he?” I asked. For some reason talking made me feel better. I sat up.
“Does who?”
“Reverend Grove. Does he have what Leon wants?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, but I wasn’t sure that I believed her. “I told Leon that he did though. I was seein’ William for a while back there, and I thought he could help me against Leon. But when the church was gone I didn’t know what to do.”
Silence brought back the awareness of pain. I didn’t care about Grove or Leon either. I didn’t care what they were hiding or looking for.
“Why are you still here?” I asked.
“When you went outside I looked for a back door, but there wasn’t one, and where could I go anyway?” she asked. “Maybe Leon’s waiting around outside somewhere.”
The thought of that killer lurking outside my door made me queasy again.
“How did he know you were here?”
“He made me come,” she said in a pained tone. “He told me to come in and get his property from William or else he was gonna break somebody’s neck.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”
“You have to help me, Mr. Minton.”
“I can go to the market next door and use their phone to call the police,” I offered.
“No. No, not the police.”
“Why not? He’s threatenin’ you and he almost killed me.”
“Leon has a lot of friends,” she said. “Even if he gets arrested, he’ll send somebody after me, and maybe you too.”
“Me? Honey, I don’t know either one’a you. All I was doin’ was sittin’ here mindin’ my own business.” I thought of Fearless then, of how he was always saying how he was minding his own business when all hell broke loose.
“But now that he’s seen you, he might think that you’re in this with me.”
“In what? I don’t even know you.”
Elana reached out and touched my chest then. It might sound like a silly gesture, but when a woman like that lays hands on you, it’s hard to ignore.
“Listen, honey,” I said, despite my thrumming heart. “You’re gorgeous. I only meet a woman like you about once every five years or so. But when I do, somebody always ends up wantin’ to kill me. And you know I could find me an ugly girl, be half as happy, but live ten times as long. I don’t want anything to do with you or your boyfriend or your ex- boyfriend. So please, go back out the way you came and shut the door behind you.”
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see the struggle in her face. She wanted to convince me, to make me her protector but couldn’t quite figure out how.
“I don’t even have bus money. If I go out there alone he could kill me,” she said.
That was my downfall right there. I took pity on her the way I did time and again with Fearless. I came to a compromise in my head even though I knew that what I should do was throw her outdoors.
I made it to my feet and said, “Okay, I’ll give you a ride wherever you need to go to get away, but that’s it.”
3
ELANA DIDN’T COMPLAIN when she saw me pocket the .38.
“Might as well go out the back,” I said. “I mean, he’d probably be covering the front. Does he have any friends?”
“He was with two friends.” Elana sounded defeated. I clearly wasn’t the protector she needed.
“What’re their names?”
“What difference do that make?”
“Well, let’s go out the back door,” I said. My head was still light and my stomach was churning. I swallowed once and gazed at a piece of wall with a cabinet handle screwed on at just about waist height. The reason that Elana hadn’t found her way out was that my back door was almost invisible. It was just a rectangular slat that swung on three rusty old
