“Yes sir.”
At least that! “For how long?” he asked her.
Janita wished to God it was more. “Four years, sir.”
“Four years? That’s all?” Hawk couldn’t believe it.
Minka laughed and shook his head. “I told you.”
Hawk looked at his father. “Pop, how on earth could you have hired a security firm where the seasoned vet has only four years of experience?!”
“It was your mother’s doing,” William fired back. “When I suggested she needed to have a bodyguard, she wouldn’t hear of it. Her driver was quite enough. But I insisted. And that’s when she insisted that if she had to have a bodyguard, she wanted a black-owned security company to get the contract. And I could not talk her out of it. Even when I discovered there were no black firms in Brackenridge except for this girl’s firm. And you know your mother. She didn’t want a firm from Nashville nor Memphis. Oh no! She insisted it had to be a local firm from right here in town. And unfortunately,” he said as his face became even more distressed, “I allowed it. Lord help me, but I allowed it.”
Janita and Von glanced at each other. Mr. Webster was acting as if hiring them was the worst thing ever.
“There was nonetheless a bidding process,” William continued. “You never hand your business over to anybody without them fighting for the right. And she bid accordingly.”
“He means she bid dirt cheap,” said Minka, whose sarcasm even Janita could see masked his pain.
“And they got the job,” William continued, giving Minka a cold look. “I had no idea it was just the two of them.”
Hawk knew it was admirable of his mother to want to help a small, black-owned business. But this was her safety they were talking about! His father should have overruled her the way he overruled everything else she did that bordered on insanity. But he needed the facts. “Tell me what happened,” he said to Janita.
Janita swallowed hard. Even though she could tell he was disappointed with her too, he at least wasn’t nasty with it. Or accusatory. He seemed to want to understand it better.
It also didn’t hurt that he had the most strikingly beautiful brown eyes. She remembered how they bore into her when they first met. Looking into such kind, beautiful eyes gave her courage. “We picked her up for the wedding rehearsal. But then she said she felt like a new dress today and ordered us to take her to Ellen’s Boutique.”
Nobody was surprised by that. Spur of the moment was their mother’s stock and trade.
“So we took her to Ellen’s clothing store on Sunset. She was in the VIP dressing room trying on different dresses. I stepped away from the door for only a few minutes.”
“You stepped away?” asked Hawk.
“Only for a few minutes. I could still see the door from where I was standing. But then I heard a loud scream. When I ran into that dressing room, she was already gone. That’s when I discovered that the wall behind the vanity had a hole somebody had hammered through. So I crawled through that hole and ended up on the other side in the alley. And that’s when I saw the getaway van. I tried to take out the tires, but it got away.”
“You shot at that van with our mother onboard?” asked a stunned Hawk.
“She did,” said Minka. “Which is further proof why father should have overruled this hiring decision.”
“Amen to that,” Babs agreed.
But Hawk was still staring at Janita. “You heard me? You shot at that van with my mother onboard?”
Janita nodded. And suddenly he saw her pain. She looked as if she wanted to cry she was so troubled by what happened. “Yes sir,” she said.
“We did all we could do, sir,” Von stepped up to defend his sister.
But Nat shot him right back down. “Like hell you did!” he yelled out. “There should have been a sweep of that dressing room before our mother went into it.”
“I did do a sweep of that whole place before your mother went inside,” Von insisted. “And my sister did a sweep of that dressing room too.”
“Well you both failed miserably, didn’t you?” Nat fired back. “You incompetent assholes!”
Hawk was about to tell his brother that that was enough, but Janita’s emotions took over. “You don’t think we know we messed up? We messed up! There’s no two ways about that. I should have been in that dressing room with your mother the whole time. I should have stayed in there. I should have searched behind that vanity and then I would have seen . . .”
She had to stop herself to fight back the tears. Hawk was staring unblinkingly at her.
But Janita found the strength not to cry, so she kept talking. “I made mistakes. There’s no way around that. I’m sorry, but I made some serious, egregious mistakes.”
