“Ricky’s been in here many times. Sometimes it’s to make donations, sometimes he’s helped out around our shelter by fixing things or helping in the kitchen — he bakes the most wonderful desserts — and he often just spends time here, talking. Well, listening, mostly. It’s hard for many of the women here to find a man they can trust, who they can talk to, and Ricky is a good listener. When he shows up, it’s clear he wants to be here, and he wants to help all the women and girls here however he can.”
Fuck, there’s that urge to reach out and hold him again. If only he weren’t my dead sister’s ex, if only he weren’t tied up with the Russian mob, if only he didn’t drink antifreeze.
I’d excuse a lot to feel like I could let someone in. That the person I talk to and share with, doesn’t just want to listen to me, but knows the life I lead, knows the dangers, knows the heartache that comes with failure when the people depending on you are trapped in the criminal underworld.
Someone like Vanessa.
“We need your help, Susan,” Reaper says.
“I could tell the second you showed up. You didn’t have your usual smile.” Susan pauses, looks from Reaper, to me, and back again. “What are you mixed up in now? And how can I help?”
“We need somewhere to stay where no one can find us. Somewhere private. And far away from here. It has to be away from the shelter. The people who are looking for us — I don’t want to risk them coming here.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Ricky, even if it isn’t necessary, because there’s no way I’d let anyone with the heat you must be under stay anywhere close to the shelter, either. I care about you a lot, and you’ve done so much for the people that depend on us, but I have an obligation to keep them safe, and that’s something that I take serious about everything else. What you’re asking is serious, and I’m going to need a minute to think.”
Susan turns her back to us and takes several steps away, raising her gaze to the sky.
I edge closer to Reaper. “You come here a lot? And you give them money? How? I thought you owed everything to Ruslan Volkov.”
He shrugs. “I owe him money, yeah. But sometimes I had a good night at the card tables, and it didn’t feel right to keep it all for myself, especially since I was planning on… Anyway, I wanted to do good with it and honor Vanessa’s memory. Lucky for me, I found this place. And lucky for me, they were willing to give me a shot to do something good.”
Susan is still staring skyward when a yell comes from the front door. An ear-splitting, high-pitched yell. “Ricky! Ricky’s here!”
The front door flies open and a girl, not over eight, with her long hair in a ridiculously high ponytail, wearing a blue shirt decorated with pink unicorns, and jeans that saw their better days a few years ago, comes sprinting down the sidewalk. She throws her tiny arms around Ricky’s left leg.
Moments later, another girl, just a year older at most, with short curly black hair, a plain green shirt and denim overalls, sprints from the front door to join in by hugging Reaper’s right leg.
Several other, older, faces appear in the door — women ranging from their late teens to their early fifties and sixties, all with marks of a hard life they never would have asked for in their darkest nightmares — and they smile at Ricky in a way that makes the scars and furrows of their harsh lives fade from their faces, and then come to join the young girls in greeting Reaper.
I blink for a moment, sigh, and look at Reaper — who is grinning and blushing like a proud teenage boy — with a set of eyes like I’m seeing him for the first time, a man so wholly different from everything I thought I’ve known, and then I turn to Susan, who has turned around and is looking at the both of us with a knowing smile. A smile that grows when she focuses her attention on me.
What does she know about us — about me?
And why do I feel like I already know the answer to that question?
Chapter Eighteen
Reaper
It’s hard to leave the front yard of ‘Never Again.’ Hard to disentangle Christina and Abigail from around my legs. Hard to take Kim’s hand off my shoulder — she’s clinging to it harder than usual, and I know that shaky tenacity in her grip, because I’ve felt it many times before, when my willpower was crumbling to dust against the urges, when it felt like one piece of bad news is all it would take to send me back over the edge. If we had more time, I’d pull her aside, and let her talk until every ounce of frustration, every gram of pain, every wisp of urge has released itself from her body and she can smile with that crooked, half-toothed smile that bears every evidence of her pure soul and her devilishly hard life; of her ex-husbands fists; of bad boyfriends and dealers who used her just like I used Vanessa; of months on the street before she found Susan; of the toll that life takes on you when you don’t know any better.
But there isn’t time to help her. I send a thought up to Vanessa —later, I promise, I’ll help her just like you would— and look at Susan and smile. I know my smile works on her, and Adriana and I will need every bit of help we can get to make Susan take us in. She’s no fool; she knows that if I came here seeking help, it has to be bad.
If she knew what I knew, she’d send me away screaming.
But she doesn’t know just how bad I was in those dark days where I tried to drink and gamble and bargain my life away.She’s got a kind heart, and a trusting one, too — even if she’s wary.
“What do you say, Susan? Can you help?” I say.
Still, Susan hesitates because she’s smart.
But then Abigail says, “Susan? Please?”
And so does Christina, and Kim, and Melanie, and Rachel, and Roxanna, until it’s sixteen sets of eyes staring at her, asking, pleading, for a little bit of sanctuary.
I feel like a user doing it. If Adriana’s life weren’t on the line, I wouldn’t be here. But it is, and I am.
“Fine. I have a place for you. Come on, I’ll take you to the guest suite.” She totters toward the street, to an unmarked van that ‘Never Again’ uses for some of its more discrete errands. She unlocks the door, slips in, then pokes her head out the window to yell at us. “Follow me. It’s not far. Maybe five minutes.”
