Chapter 2
Her mouth became so dry she couldn’t work up a thimbleful of spit. This hadn’t been a good idea. But she’d wanted her boy to have some kind of a childhood, one that didn’t revolve around always being on the run and constantly changing names.
“John,” she said so softly only the boy could hear her. She slid the box of McDonaldland cookies into her shoulder bag and caught up her boy’s backpack. “Let’s go.”
Most kids would have objected, whined that they wanted to stay for the face painting or the goody bags, but John wasn’t like most kids.
John had put his apple pie in a pocket. He took his backpack from her and was quiet until they left the McDonald’s. “I’m sorry, Ma. I don’t know what it was about him…”
“It’s all right.” She could hear the tears in his voice, but she knew if she glanced at him his eyes behind the fake glasses he wore would be dry.
“No, it isn’t.”
“We’ll talk about it when we get home.”
In spite of how shaken she was, she stayed alert. Things weren’t going to end well for her; she’d accepted that fact from the day she’d taken the baby from his Isolette in the institute where she’d worked. But she was going to make sure this remarkable little boy survived.
She’d had help; how could she have managed otherwise? The girl who became Delilah Carson had been in the foster home Jeanette had been shunted to, and they’d grown to be the sisters they didn’t have in real life. “You’re a babe in the woods, aren’t you?” Del had observed shortly after they’d met, and the nickname stuck.
Of course Del, being the older, was booted out of the system about a year after, but they’d stayed in touch, and when Babe found herself in this situation, who else was there to turn to?
Del came through for her. She’d contacted some rent boys who worked out of a stable in Pennsylvania, made sure funds were delivered to Babe every month. The boys…young men, really…would pass her on the street and slip an envelope into her hand or her pocket or into the carriage she’d pushed in the early days, when John—his name had been Davy then—was still a baby.
It continued, even after Del had been murdered this past winter. Babe’s lower lip quivered. She knew what Del did for a living—a whore by any other name was still a whore—but Del had assured her it wasn’t that bad. Most of her clients were just sad and lonely people. “I’m like a therapist, Babe.” And she’d winked and hugged her.
Del hadn’t deserved to die that way, cut to ribbons by a boyfriend so high on “China White” cut with a fentanyl analog that after he’d killed her, he’d thrown himself off the roof of Del’s condo and splattered his brains all over the concrete below.
Had it been the result of helping her and the boy? God, she hoped not. She didn’t think she’d be able to live with herself if that was how it was.
* * * *
She and John climbed the stairs to the second floor of the run-down boarding house she’d found in Anacostia, and they walked quietly down the corridor.
She stared at the door of 2C and began shaking again. The jamb was splintered.
“What’s going on here, Ms. Little?” The landlord seemed to have popped up out of nowhere.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Murchison. It’s…uh…it’s a nice day, isn’t it?”
“Not for you. You didn’t answer me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. John and I were at a party for one of the little boys in his class, and we’ve just come home.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m talking about, missy. The three big men who broke that lock to get into your apartment. And who did this.” He curled back his lips, revealing the fact that two teeth were missing. She shied back, barely managing to keep from pissing her pants.
Oh God. Oh, crap. “Oh,” was all she allowed herself to say. They’d found her? How had they found her? She didn’t bother asking what they’d wanted. She knew: the little boy who stood so silently beside her. “What…what did you tell them?”
“It could be I told them no one fitting your description or the boy’s live here.”
She knew better than to trust the way he phrased that, but she had to ask. “Did you?”
“Why would I, when by doing that, it could have put not only my life but the lives of my tenants in jeopardy?”
“Which of course is of the utmost concern to you.”
“You bet your sweet ass, cutes.” He grinned around the dried blood between his teeth. This hadn’t happened too long ago. Could the men have spotted her and John as they entered the boarding house? But she hadn’t seen anything—car or people—that looked out of place.