“Deal.”
“So, can I ask you something?” Dawn felt awkward, unsure of her words.
“Sure, anything.”
“You didn’t hesitate back there. Was that just all about your training or was it something inside of you that switched on? Something supernatural. I was just wondering, since your whole family are first responders.”
He blew out a breath. “I never really thought about it that way before. Sure, the training prepares you and makes you ready for action. But in the moment when it happens, we just kind of know it’s up to us. I don’t think it’s anything supernatural. I think some people are just made that way, and some aren’t. Does that make sense?”
Dawn nodded. “Yeah, I think it does. But some people are afraid they might be sued if something goes wrong, or that their involvement might be unwelcome.”
“Maybe that’s where the training comes in. When you’re faced with a situation where someone’s life hangs in the balance, you don’t stop to think about consequences. You just do what you have to do, because you can.”
“That makes sense, I guess.” She’d never known people who approached life that way. To her, doing what had to be done meant looking out for number one. Even she was guilty of that. Well, except for Annette.
Now, that meaning had shifted for her. She was no longer just thinking about herself. She had Rita and the community at large to think about. Maybe her karma had been altered too. And finding Mandy was part of it.
Chapter 11
“C’mon, Pink Unicorn, help me out here.”
It was early on Saturday morning, and Dawn was sitting up in bed, holding Mandy’s unicorn in her lap. She’d done everything Minerva had told her to do, the breathing exercises and meditation, over several days. So today, she would try again. She didn’t have to rush to the community center, because they were closed for a couple of weeks for renovations. So she had time to concentrate and focus.
It had been almost a week since she’d had her last vision. She wanted—needed—something to happen. Was this how detectives felt when they were on a case and trying to locate a missing person or solve a murder? It must be maddening.
She wanted it to happen now. But her empath abilities didn’t work on demand. She knew that, but it was still frustrating.
Luca was being super supportive, in addition to his usual cute and sexy self. They’d gone out for pizza last week—their first official date—and then texted the rest of the week. She knew she should be patient, but she couldn’t wait to see him again.
“Okay, time to concentrate.” Dawn closed her eyes and began taking deep breaths. She held the unicorn close as she relaxed, clearing her mind of all the stuff that pinged around every day…
I feel you, Mandy. I know you’re out there. Show me where you are.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Mandy…tell me…show me…
Everything was dark. Pitch-black. Dawn kept taking deep breaths, kept holding onto the unicorn until she saw a flash of light. It was like a window blind pulling up. Dawn saw a wall in a small room. A mop leaned against the wall, and beside it was an old, faded poster of Bettie Page.
Dawn gasped and her eyes flew open. “I know where she is!”
* * *
“The kid’s asleep.”
“I don’t care if she’s asleep. We need to fix this problem.”
Ice Spider scratched the back of his neck as he leaned against his truck in the parking lot behind a burned-out warehouse.
Sergeant Butts was pacing back and forth. “Drive up to Canada and dump the kid in front of some church. She’ll get adopted by a nice Canadian family, and we’ll be rid of the problem.”
Yeah, like Ice was going to spend hours driving up to the border with a kid in his trunk and get nabbed by Customs. No way. The kid was his insurance policy. No way in hell he would let her out of his sight. He wasn’t going to take the fall for the woman’s death. He was the one taking care of the girl. Keeping her alive. Butts wouldn’t. Ice and his gang were heroes. The kid stayed with him or his boys.
Butts was one mean SOB, but Ice wasn’t afraid of him. He’d never been afraid of anyone except his father when he was a kid. The man who sired him and raised him for the first ten years of his life was a brutal sociopath who murdered two prostitutes he was pimping before the cops caught him and put him behind bars. The cops had no idea when they burst into Drey Douglas’s dump of a home on Keene Street East that he had a son hiding in a secret hole in the back of a closet. A crawl space the boy had created to hide from his father’s rampant rages.
