Repairman Jack [02]-Legacies

'You've never been here?'

She shook her head. 'I usually eat lunch at my desk, and at home it's whatever I can whip up quick and easy. I don't eat out much.' Because I don't like to sit alone at a restaurant table.

He frowned. 'I just realized I should have checked first if you like garlic. If you don't, we'd better find another place.'

'I love garlic. But Mexican food isn't very—'

'This isn't Mexican. It's Spanish.'

Alicia winced. 'Of course. El Quijote. I should have known. It's just that after all those years in Southern California, any restaurant with an 'El' is automatically Mexican.'

''All those years?' I thought you were a New Yorker.'

'I was. And am again. Born and raised. But at eighteen I left for USC and stayed away for a dozen years.'

She didn't tell him that she'd looked into the University of Hawaii because it was the farthest she could get from New York and that house on Thirty-eighth Street and still be in the United States. But USC had offered her a better financial package, so she'd settled for California.

The waiter arrived.

'You've got to try the shrimp in green sauce,' Matthews said. 'Best thing on the menu— if you like garlic.'

She ordered that, plus a Diet Pepsi. He ordered a beer.

While they waited, he quizzed her about her West Coast years, and she found herself relaxing as she talked about herself. As long as he didn't ask her about her life before that. Premed, medical school, the residencies… grueling years, but good ones. She'd left New York one person and arrived in California as another. The new Alicia had no past, owed nothing to no one. As she'd stepped off the plane, she'd been reborn as a being of her own creation.

She used the arrival of their meal—a metal crock filled with plump pink shrimp nestled in a lime-green sauce—to change the subject.

'But enough about me,' she said. 'What about Floyd Stevens?'

'Taste first,' Matthews said as he spooned a generous portion onto her plate. 'You don't want to ruin a good meal with talk about scum.'

Alicia bit back a sharp retort. She hadn't come for the food, she'd come for information, dammit. Instead she forked a shrimp in half and tasted it. God, it was good. Incredibly good. Quickly she ate the other half. She hadn't realized how hungry she was.

'So,' he said. She looked up and found him watching her intensely. 'What do you think?'

'Heavenly,' she said. 'So good, in fact, that nothing you can tell me can ruin it.'

He sighed. 'Okay. Here's what I learned: Seems this isn't the first time Pretty Boy Floyd has been caught with his hands on a child. They weren't easy to find, but I dug up three past complaints about him.'

Alicia's spirits jumped. 'Then, he's got a record—a history of pedophilia. How the hell did we ever allow him in?'

'Hang on here. No record. The complaints were all dropped.'

'Dropped? All of them?'

He nodded, chewing slowly. 'Seems he's pretty well-off financially. Made a lot of money on Wall Street in the eighties and retired as a young millionaire with lots of time on his hands and a yen for kids.'

Good as the meal was, Alicia found her appetite waning. 'He buys his way out.'

'Or threatens his way out, like he's trying to do with you. He's got a shark for a lawyer. Nasty SOB who loves to go for the throat.'

'In other words, those weren't just empty threats.'

'Afraid not.'

'You're really making my day.'

'Sorry. Just thought you should know what you're up against.'

'I guess I already knew. Fineman called yesterday.'

'What he say?'

'Pretty much what you overheard. Told me I could expect to spend the next three to five years in and out of courtrooms, burning up every penny I earn in legal fees, then spending much of the rest of my working life paying off the punitive and pain-and-suffering damages he expected the court to award his client. Of course, I could avoid all that if I saw the light, realized how mistaken I was, and withdrew my complaint.'

'What a sweet guy. Goes to prove lawyers get the clients they deserve.'

Alicia leaned back and fought a wave of depression as a string of rationalizations raced through her brain: Kanessa hadn't been done any physical harm, and she didn't have enough self-awareness to have suffered any long-term psychological damage. And at least Floyd Stevens was out of the Center for good, so the kids there were safe from him. Maybe he'd been hurt and frightened enough by the beating to keep his hands to himself from now on.

The fact that she was allowing these thoughts to exist depressed Alicia even more.

'You okay?' Matthews asked.

'No.'

'Know what you're going to do?'

Alicia stared at him. 'What do you think I'm going to do?'

He met her gaze. 'I haven't known you very long, but I can't see you doing anything else but hanging in there.'

The sudden surge of warmth for this virtual stranger took Alicia by surprise. There'd never been a chance that she'd cave in—on something else, maybe, but never on anything like this—and he'd recognized that. For some unfathomable reason, she found herself smiling.

'How could you know that?'

'I don't know. I just sense it. It's part of what I find so attractive about you.'

Uh-oh. There it was, out in the open, flopping around on the table. She chose to ignore it.

'You don't think I'm crazy?' she said.

'No. I think you're principled.'

She wished it were principles. She wished it were that simple.

And then he reached across the table and covered her hand with his.

'And I want you to know that I admire you for it. And you should also know that you're not alone in this. There's still a few things I can do.'

'Like what?'

'I learned a few things in Vice. One of them was that these pedophiles don't change their spots. You can't cure them. A stretch in the joint, years of couch time with an army of shrinks, nothing changes them. The minute they think nobody's watching them—or sometimes even if they suspect they're being watched—they're out on the prowl, hunting.'

'Compulsive behavior.' Alicia knew all about it.

'Right. And that can work to our advantage.'

Our? When had it become his problem too?

Easy, she told herself. He wants to get this guy as much as you do. Don't get your back up. He wants to help. Let him.

She wondered why she found that so hard to do. Maybe because she'd been on her own for so long, taking no help from anyone, making all her own decisions, solving all her problems by herself. Was that why an offer of help seemed almost like… an intrusion?

'How?'

He smiled. 'Leave that to me.'

Alicia straightened and found herself smiling. 'You know, Will, I think I'm getting my appetite back.'

Oh, no. Had she just called him 'Will?' Where had that come from?

But it was true. She was hungry again. And she had to admit, it felt good to know she had someone on her side.