Mortal Sin (8 page)

“I’ve had years of practice. It’s not just the way a girl dresses, but the way she walks, the way she holds her body, the aura of ownership she flaunts while she’s parading around inside her own little corner of the world. These girls are very territorial. You’ll see them, night after night, walking the same beat. And in this case, I cheated.” His mouth thinned. “Her name’s Terry. She’s one of my girls. Or at least, she used to be.”

He checked his rearview mirror, yanked the steering wheel to the right. Double-parked and set his four-way flashers. Pulling a flyer from the stack Sarah held in her lap, he said grimly, “I’ll be right back.”

Terry didn’t seem surprised to see him. One glance into her eyes told him she was flying high on some illicit substance, which explained why she wasn’t shivering in the skimpy outfit she wore. She probably hadn’t even noticed the cold. It was a situation that could prove lethal. Hypothermia was a stealthy and insidious enemy, just one of many enemies lurking on these streets, waiting for the next unsuspecting victim.

“Hello, Terry,” he said.

She eyed him up and down. “Hope you’re not here to peddle any of that ‘Jesus loves you’ shit, Father, because I ain’t taking any.”

“I don’t peddle shit. I peddle second chances.”

“Yeah? Well, I already blew my second chance, so go find somebody else to pester.”

“Let me see your arm.”

“Go to hell.”

Her words were defiant, but they lacked bite. She didn’t even resist when he gently but firmly took her wrist in his hand and shoved up the sleeve of the thin jacket she wore. He studied the bruises and the needle tracks in silence, then tugged the sleeve back down and released her arm.

“It’s never too late,” he said. “I’ve told you before.”

“It was always too late, Father. But thanks for dropping by. Next time, give me a call first. We’ll have a tea party.”

Ignoring her sarcasm, he withdrew a business card from his pocket, tucked it into her hand and folded her icy fingers around it. “My cell phone number’s on the card. You can call any time, day or night. Even if you just want to talk. I’m a good listener.”

“Right.”

He held up the flyer. “I’m looking for this girl.”

She gazed dispassionately at the photo of Kit Connelly, “Yeah? So what?”

“She’s a sixteen-year-old runaway, and she’s not familiar with the city. Her aunt’s very worried about her.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“Her name’s Kit. If you see her, or hear anything about her, I’d appreciate a call. In case you lose the card, my number’s on the flyer. Remember, any time. I’m open twenty-four hours. Just like 7-Eleven.” He folded the flyer and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket.

“Yeah, right. Look, would you mind getting lost now? You’re scaring off my customers.”

He returned to the car, slammed the door behind him, and sat unmoving behind the wheel. “You okay?” Sarah said.

Instead of answering—or perhaps it was an answer of sorts—he said, “Terry spent a couple of months last summer at Donovan House. I tried desperately to get through to her, but nothing I did or said made an iota of difference. One of the other girls caught her using the second-floor bathroom as a shooting gallery. Heroin. I couldn’t allow her to stay. She could have undone months of progress we’d made with the others.”

He wondered who he was trying harder to convince, Sarah or himself. He folded his fingers around the steering wheel and sighed. “You know the old saying about one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch? It’s true. But it always breaks my heart when I have to put one of them back out onto the street.”

Softly, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. So am I. Welcome to La Vida Loca.”

The Sir Charles wasn’t much of a hotel, but for fifty bucks a night, Kit figured she was lucky to have her own bed and a toilet she didn’t have to share with anybody but the resident vermin. The yellowed porcelain hadn’t been scrubbed in a while, but at least the plumbing was in working order. The hotel slouched dejectedly on a side street near North Station, in a seedy, run-down neighborhood dotted with bars that catered primarily to winos and off-duty Big Dig construction workers. Traffic on the nearby Expressway was a constant dull roar, punctuated at regular intervals by the screech of the green line train that ran on overhead tracks above Causeway Street. The place wore an air of tired resignation, and the desk clerk had a mouthful of rotten teeth. But he took her cash without asking for an ED, and never questioned the fake name she used when she signed the register. She suspected that was because few patrons of the Sir Charles ever used their real names.

She locked herself in her room, unpacked her scanty belongings, then sat on the bed with the faded chintz spread to count her money. It was going far too quickly. She hadn’t bought much: the bag of nuts, a burger and a Coke, and a copy of the
Globe
so she could look at the classified ads. But she’d paid in advance for a week in this lovely establishment, and the fifty-dollar-a-night room charge had eaten up a significant chunk of her meager stash. By her calculations, she could stay here for seven or eight nights—depending on how much, and how often, she ate—before she ran out of money.

There had to be other options. Cleaner, cheaper options. The YWCA, for instance. Maybe a youth hostel. She wasn’t about to go near the runaway shelters. In the first place, she hadn’t run away; she’d simply left home to start living her own life. Second, the homeless shelters would probably be the first place Aunt Sarah looked for her.

Assuming her aunt even bothered to look.

It was a shame she couldn’t stay indefinitely here in this dump, because it was the last place on earth anybody would expect to find her. She would never have discovered the Sir Charles herself if she hadn’t asked some guy who was panhandling on a street corner where she could find the cheapest hotel in the neighborhood. She’d dropped fifty cents in his cup, and he’d given her directions.

There was no phone in her room, so she bundled up and walked over to North Station, where she miraculously found a pay phone that not only worked, but actually had a phone book attached. She bought a steaming cup of watery cocoa at McDonald’s, got some change from the cute guy behind the counter, and began making phone calls.

It was a waste of time. She called every youth hostel in the phone book and got the same song and dance from each of them: staying there required a paid membership, and then you still had to pay a nightly fee on top of that. It was a big rip-off. The Y was even worse; the nightly room rates were nearly as high as some of the downtown hotels. So much for that brilliant idea.

But it wasn’t the end of the world. She was young and strong and smart. For the next few nights at least, she had a roof over her head. It might not be the Waldorf, but her room was heated and the shower worked. The classified section of the
Globe
was huge. In a city the size of Boston, there were thousands of jobs. Tonight, she would read the want ads with pen in hand, circling the ones that showed the most promise. In the morning, she’d visit the theater district first. If nothing panned out there, she’d start following up on some of the ads she’d circled. Even if she had to wait tables for a living, she would get by.

“Good afternoon,” Sarah said to the nineteen-year-old who’d come out of the back room when she asked to speak to the manager. “How are y’all doing?” He was tall and gangly, with a severe case of acne, and looked as though he should be playing high school basketball instead of managing the neighborhood 7-Eleven. But the kid wore a tie and a big plastic name tag that said Manager, so it looked like he was her man.

“I’m Sarah Connelly,” she continued, “and my niece is missing.” She held up a copy of the flyer, and the kid stared unblinking at Kit’s photo, like a reptile sleeping in the sun. “Her name is Kit. She’s sixteen years old, and very pretty. Have you seen her?”

“Nope.”

He possessed all the animation of a corpse, and she was tempted to shake him just to make sure he was alive. Instead, she smiled sweetly and said, “I’d like your permission to post this in your front window.”

“Uh… ” He glanced around as though expecting the answer to drop out of the sky. “Yeah, okay. I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

Trying to forget that kids like this were tomorrow’s leaders, she taped the flyer in a conspicuous place near the front door. Back out on the street, the afternoon had grown cold as the sun sank deeper in the western sky. Sarah raised her coat collar and drew on her gloves. She’d been at this since breakfast, with just a ten-minute break for a lunch that had consisted of a cup of coffee and the world’s greasiest hamburger.

The priest had mapped out a big chunk of downtown Boston, and the two of them had divvied up the territory. Armed with a stack of flyers and a roll of Scotch tape, she’d spent the last three days plastering Kit’s face all over the sector he’d assigned her. Some of the shopkeepers she’d spoken with had been sympathetic and willing to help. Others were apathetic, even annoyed. One Chinese merchant actually shooed her away, flapping his apron and scolding her soundly with words she didn’t understand.

Her feet ached, her toes were numb from the cold, and she sorely needed a bathroom. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was nearly five. Quitting time. She paused on the sidewalk to get her bearings before heading for the Burger King where she and Clancy Donovan had agreed to meet.

She arrived ahead of him, made a quick pit stop in the ladies’ room before she bought two cups of coffee and took them to a window seat, where she could watch the activity on the street outside. Traffic was a tangled snarl at this time of day, and the sidewalks were jammed with people who strode past with brisk determination, finished with the day’s work and eager to get home for the evening. As she warmed her hands over her coffee cup, she wondered how the natives managed to tolerate this kind of cold, year after year. Winter seemed endless here in the Northeast. According to the calendar, spring was imminent, but somebody had forgotten to tell Mother Nature. Boston had to be the coldest place on earth, and March the coldest month.

In the purple shadows of dusk, she saw him coming half a block away. Head and shoulders above the crowd, Clancy Donovan moved with a distinctive, swinging stride, his long legs eating up the distance between them. He entered the restaurant and paused inside the doorway, his gaze scanning the room. She held aloft the cup of coffee she’d bought him. He saw it, rested a hand over his heart, and headed toward her. “God bless you,” he said as he squeezed into the seat opposite her and dropped his stack of flyers on the table.

“I figured you were probably freezing, too.”

“
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies
.” He peeled the plastic cover off his cup and tore open a sugar packet.

“Excuse me?”

He glanced up, smiling as he emptied the sugar packet into his coffee. “Proverbs 31:10.”

“Of course. How silly of me to not recognize the verse. How’d it go for you?”

He busied himself opening plastic creamers and dumping their contents into his coffee. Stirring, he said, “About a seventy-five percent success rate.”