Present Danger (14 page)

Mary’s eyes were round with amazement. “Jeez,” she said admiringly, “you sure do lead an interesting life.”

Aunie’s bark of laughter was tinged with hysteria.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about not getting your affair with him either,” Mary advised. “Did you see his face when you opened your coat? He looked at you like you were the reincarnation of his hottest wet dream.”

“He didn’t!”

“Yeah, yeah, he did. This is the second time I’ve seen the two of you together, and both times there’s been this atmosphere around you like some big electrical storm brewing. He might say he doesn’t want an affair with you, but I’d lay odds that right about now he’s chafing something fierce over the thought of you having one with someone else.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Aunie replied with total honesty, but acknowledged to herself that the thought was immensely cheering. “In any case, let’s forget about him and just have a good time.”

And they did. The bar Mary had picked was dim
and atmospheric, the drinks strong, the band good if loud, and the men flatteringly attentive. Her feet were sore from dancing, her throat hoarse from shouting to be heard over the music, and she freely admitted she was a tiny bit inebriated by the time the taxi dropped Mary at her car and then pulled up in front of Aunie’s apartment house. She paid the driver and climbed out of the cab.

Humming off-tune, she executed an intricate dance step up the walk. Suddenly she tripped over an unseen object and in her quest to keep her balance dropped her purse. It fell to the walk, scattering its contents.

“Well, shit,” she muttered. Squatting down, she began to retrieve the strewn contents. The lipstick had rolled down the walk; her brush was lying against the door. She began to giggle as she plucked stray change and bills off the ground and stuffed them back into her evening bag. “ID, ID, ID,” she whispered to herself as the Georgia driver’s license she used for identification continued to elude her. “Wherefore art thou, IDeo … ahah!” It had slipped off the walk and was resting near the trunk of the rhododendron. “Slippery little beggar,” she murmured and reached for it. Depositing it in her bag, she rose to her feet, staggering slightly as the alcohol in her system shifted her center of gravity. “Whoops.” It might be prudent, she decided tipsily, to get inside and go to bed before someone caught her making a spectacle of herself. She’d hate for either Lola or James to see her in this condition. In truth she didn’t often drink, but undoubtedly after the way she’d blown bubbles in her wine the night Wesley was acquitted, she’d have a hard time convincing them it was a fact. Not, at any rate, if they could see her now. Instead, they would probably think she was the worst sort of lush.

She was inserting her key in the lock when the early-morning silence was broken by the sound of a car a few blocks away traveling much too fast for the narrow, residential streets. The sound grew, obviously heading at dangerously high speed in this direction. Then suddenly it was roaring up the block. Aunie had extracted her key from the lock and was opening the door, but her head whipped around just as the car screeched to a halt in the street directly in front of the apartment house. The passenger door opened and she caught just the briefest glimpse of two large men before a body was roughly shoved out of the car. Something rude was yelled; glass exploded against the curb, the door was pulled closed with a slam, and the car picked up speed again. It roared away as the person so summarily discarded rolled twice across the grass parking strip before flopping to a standstill.

Oh, my Gawd. Aunie stared in horror at the inert form. Her first impulse was to rouse James or Otis, but bleary logic demanded she at least check the person to determine what sort of aid was needed She forced herself to move, ashamed that her first thought was not compassion for the injured’s plight but rather embarrassment for herself, knowing James was going to learn she’d drunk too much after all. She propped open the front door with her evening bag and made her way down the walk, approaching the body cautiously.

The person moaned deep in his throat as Aunie squatted down next to him, giving her the first indication he was male. It had all happened so fast, but when the car’s interior light had blinked on she had glimpsed a flash of thick, straight blond hair, which she’d mistakenly thought feminine. Even curled facedown in the fetal position, however, she could see
there was too much bulk, too much breadth of shoulder for this to be a woman. She reached out and grasped a leather-covered shoulder, rolling the man onto his back. The texture of the jacket beneath her hand registered familiarly the merest instant before she saw the man’s face, half obscured by a wing of loose blond hair.

Oh, God. Aunie’s hand flew reflexively to her breast. It was James and he’d been badly beaten.

James knew he was in the wrong frame of mind for a return to the old neighborhood even as he headed there. He harbored a passionate dislike of the Terrace in general and its dark alleys where drug deals went down twenty-four hours a day in particular; yet here he was, heading for that very destination in the wake of a frantic call from Paul.

He cruised the streets slowly, looking for his brother. God, he’d worked so hard to get away from this place. The day he had finally saved enough money to move out, he’d sworn he’d never be back. It was a promise he’d been forced to break again and again, for his brothers didn’t seem to share his abhorrence for the project. Bobby with his loan sharks and Paul with his drug buys, his dealings in stolen merchandise, had drawn James back more times than he could count. Someone had to extricate them from whatever mess they were currently embroiled in, and if he
didn’t do it, who would? Other than him, there was only Will, who unfortunately was more inclined to think with his dick than his brain. James shook his head at the thought of his younger brother being responsible for anyone. Hell, Will needed to be rescued nearly as often as the other two, although in his defense James had to admit that
he
at least usually managed to get into trouble in a less dangerous part of town.

James’s resentment of his brothers’ propensity for drawing him into their never-ending predicaments had been growing steadily over the past year. They wouldn’t grow up, which effectively prevented him from outgrowing his background. And
that
had long been one of his fiercest ambitions.

But he also loved them. In the back of his mind there lurked memories of a time before the advent of the Jackson family into his life, memories of a time when Bobby and Paul in particular were all that had stood between him and the dark influence of the streets. He loved them; he hated them for what they were doing to his life and their own. No matter which direction he approached it from, however, the bottom line always came down to the fact that he had to do whatever needed to be done to keep them safe. They were his family.

Blocking out any thoughts that didn’t directly apply to his reasons for being there had always been James’s first rule of survival when he entered the Terrace. Lack of attention could be deadly in this part of town, but tonight he found it difficult to command the necessary concentration. Was Aunie home yet? he wondered. Maybe she’d met someone with whom she could instigate that red-hot affair. Christ, he hadn’t been able to get that damned dress out of his mind,
and she’d been out in public in it all night long. Guys must have been hitting on her right and left.

He’d been restlessly prowling through the rooms of his home when Paul’s call had interrupted him. Even now, when he should be focusing every ounce of concentration on finding his brother, his mind was only partly attuned to locating him. His thoughts kept drifting back to his second-floor apartment where he’d been pacing for hours, haunting the windows overlooking the street. It grated on him to know he’d been waiting and watching for the arrival of the taxi that would bring her home.

His headlights, as he slowly cruised the streets, swept across dark corners and illuminated the hollow-eyed denizens of the night. Prostitutes in stiletto heels, fake furs, and overblown hair styles leaned into car windows or lounged against storefront walls; pimps decked out in garish colors and rich fabrics cruised by, driving pricy cars; junkies with nervous mannerisms cut deals with their contrastingly imperturbable suppliers. So far, however, he’d hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of his brother. He wondered just what the hell kind of mess Paul had gotten himself into this time. He’d merely said he needed help, had given him a general location where he could be found, and had hung up.

Then suddenly he was there, easing out of an alley as James pulled up to a light. He pulled open the passenger door and climbed in. “Hit it, Jimmy,” he directed, looking uneasily over his shoulder. “We gotta get out of here.”

James was in no mood to take orders. He draped his forearm over the steering wheel and turned to face his brother. “What the hell’s goin’ on?” he demanded.

“I’ll tell ya as soon as we’re outta here, okay?
Move.
”

James had just put the Jeep in gear when a car came roaring up on his tail, headlights off. “Oh, shit,” Paul whispered as the driver’s door was wrenched open and James was hauled from the seat. Another face appeared at his window. Swiftly, he punched down the lock on his side, slid over into the driver’s seat, and ground the ignition to start the car that had stalled when James’s foot was jerked from the clutch. “Bobby’s,” he yelled and roared off into the night.

That left James facing two very large, very muscular, no-neck men, and one look was all he needed to know he was way out of his league on this one. He’d faced enforcers before, but these two had the emotionless eyes of professionals. Enforcers from Hell, he decided with dark humor. He’d never dealt with pros before and there was a difference to this situation that he intuitively recognized. Twisted humor and fast talking weren’t going to get him out of it; neither was tough language nor an intimation of violence. These two looked right at home with violence; they looked, in fact, as though they’d been weaned on it, and he had a sinking feeling that nothing short of a semiautomatic would be capable of slowing them down.

Which he didn’t have.
And,
he was working blind, not having the first inkling what Paul had been up to. Son of a fuckin’ bitch. He was dead.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled at his adversaries. “Hey.”

Okay, the cocky attitude was probably a mistake, he thought as the one with the stubbled skull hauled him off the ground where his partner’s punch had landed him. He was jerked to his feet by his ponytail,
his head craned back to a painful degree. Jesus. He wasn’t exactly a lightweight himself, but these two were practically as wide as they were tall and every inch of them was solid muscle.

“Doan speak ‘less yer spoken to and doan give us no shit, you long-haired freak,” said the one with the intricately shaven pattern in his close-cropped black hair. “Unnerstand?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d the weasel go?”

“I don’t know …” This time the blow doubled him over, but the knee to his jaw straightened him right back up again. He sagged in Stubble-skull’s grasp and gingerly touched his tongue to a loosened front tooth.
Let them leave my hands alone,
was all he could think.
Oh God, they can do anything else. Just let them leave my hands alone.

“I
said,
where’d the weasel go?”

“I don’t know what the fuck’s goin’ on,” James answered truthfully. “He gave me a call to pick him up and I’d just done so when you two showed up. What’d he do?”

“Tried to rip off his dealer, freak.”

Oh, wonderful, he really was dead. “I don’t know anything about…” Stubble-skull took a giant step backward and gave him a vicious knee-punch to the kidneys.

“Lookit all this pretty blond hair,” the man said in his gravelly voice. “I think we got us a girly-boy, Butch.”

Butch, James thought blearily. Jesus, it figured.

His head was yanked back so hard the rubber band holding his hair clubbed at the nape of his neck split. He looked up into Stubble-skull’s eyes and what he saw there did not reassure him. “You a split-tail, boy?”

“No.”

Fancy-cut’s foot kicked him swiftly in the crotch and James sagged completely within the hold of the man behind him. Nausea rushed up his throat. “How ‘bout that,” Fancy-cut murmured. “Boy sure enough does have balls. Who woulda thunk it? Course, he ain’t gonna feel much like dancin’ with the ladies tonight.”

They worked him over with systematic thoroughness after that, removed his wallet from his hip pocket, then stuffed him in their car. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of his surroundings. He was surprised, therefore, when he peered through one slitted eye and recognized his own neighborhood. The two hoods were passing a pint of Cutty Sark back and forth and listening to a country-and-western station on the car stereo.

“This here was in the nature of a warnin’, freak,” Stubble-skull said as they roared up his block. “Tell
the
weasel he’s a dead man, he ever tries to do what he did again. We even see him on our turf, he’s gonna get the same as you.” The car slammed to a stop, throwing James against the dash. The door was opened, and the next thing he knew, James was sailing toward the curb. He passed out cold the instant he hit the parking strip.

Soft hands were cautiously brushing his hair from his face when he came to. “James?” a softly accented voice whispered. “Jimmy? Oh, gawd.” He felt the soft-skinned fingers move down to his throat and press against his pulse. “Please, please, please,” he heard her whisper. “Wake up. James, can you heah me?”

He pried open one eyelid. There were two Aunies
hovering over him, their coats open to showcase that damned short dress that hugged her curves like a second skin. Slowly, the two images coalesced into one. He licked his split lip, tasting blood. “Aunie?” He felt ridiculously pleased that she hadn’t gone home with some stranger after all.

“Oh, James, thank God you’re awake! Wait heah, I’m goin’ to get Otis. No, Otis is at work. Ah’ll call an ambulance. Anyhow, I’ll be right back. Don’t try to move.” She started to rise to her feet, but James’s hand reached out and gripped a handful of her coat, staying her.

“No ambulance,” he croaked. “Just help me get up to my apartment.”

“Don’t be foolish, James,” she argued heatedly. “You need medical attention. Now let me go—”

“No.” His fist tightened on her coat and she nearly toppled on top of him. “Help me up.”

“Jim-meee,” she moaned in protest, unconsciously using the name his brothers and Otis generally used. “At least let me get Lola to help.”

“There’s no sense wakin’ her up. We can do this.”

“Gawd, you’re stubborn.” She squatted down as he gingerly pushed himself to a sitting position and maneuvered her shoulder under his armpit. It was a struggle, but she finally got him to his feet where he swayed weakly, sweating freely and swearing. Standing, the top of her shoulder only came to his diaphragm, so she wrapped her right arm around his waist, looped his left arm over her shoulder and held him in place by gripping his big, rawboned wrist in her left hand. Inch by agonizing inch, they shuffled up the walk and through the door.

Aunie leaned him against the wall while she retrieved her purse from where it had been propping
open the exterior door. She hung the evening bag around her neck by its golden chain and approached James. His eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily. “How’re you doin’?” she whispered anxiously.

One eye opened a crack, showing the merest glimmer of moss green behind its swollen purple lid. “I love your accent.”

Aunie swallowed an hysterical urge to giggle. “Do you?” she managed to reply. “My mama always said it made me sound downright common.”

James made a rude noise and in his pain forgot his policy of never criticizing another’s family. “Your mama sounds like a real pain in the ass,” he said roughly and reached for her. “Ready to tackle the stairs?”

“I think so. The question is are
you?”

“Yeah. Might as well get it over with. You gonna be able to navigate in those heels?”

Aunie looked down at her four-inch spikes. “Oh. Maybe I’d better remove them. I’d hate to be responsible for toppling us down the stairs.” She took them off and stuffed them in her coat pockets.

With her shoes removed, the top of her shoulders only came to his abdomen but she followed the same procedure as before, arm around his waist, his arm over her shoulder, securing him by her grip on his wrist. James’s strength was deserting him fast and he leaned on her more heavily with every step they climbed. They were both perspiring by the time they neared the top of the stairs. Suddenly, he started to overbalance and Aunie threw her weight at his torso to direct him into the wall rather than allowing him to tumble headlong down the flight of thinly carpeted steps. They banged up against the wall and James groaned low in his throat as every muscle in his body
protested the twin battering of being caught between her resilient weight and the ungiving plaster surface. “God,” he said between his teeth. “And here I always thought you were such a lightweight.”

“I’m sorry,” she wailed, stepping back to relieve him of her weight but gripping his biceps and pressing them into the wall to keep him upright. She tried to evaluate his condition by the expression on his face. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Give me a second to catch my breath.”

“I swear I’ll never drink again,” Aunie muttered to herself. “Never, never, never.”

James tipped his chin into his neck and peered down at her. “You been hitting the bottle again, Magnolia?”

“Honestly, James, I’m not ordinarily much of a drinker,” she avowed. If he’d thought he could have gotten away with it without inflicting a great deal of pain on his abused mouth, he would have grinned at her big owl eyes as she stared up at him with such solemn sincerity. “You’ve just caught me in a couple of weak moments.”

“Nobody thinks you’re a lush, sugar. That is … you did use a glass this time, didn’t you?”

“Oh! You are such a
pig!”
She laughed throatily and spontaneously swung a playful punch at his chest. Remembering his injuries just in the nick of time, she pulled her punch before contact was made. “Think you can make it the last few steps?”

“Yeah.” He cautiously straightened and drew a fortifying breath. “Let’s go.”

They were at his door before he remembered his lack of keys. Propped weakly against the wall, eyes closed, he swore with creative fluency for several moments. “Paul gets my keys, my car … I get his
beating. That son of a bitch; I think I’m gonna kill him myself.” He rolled his head and opened one eye to peer at Aunie. “I’m sorry, Magnolia. I guess you’ll have to wake up Lola after all.”

Aunie bit her lip in indecision. Then, resigned, she slipped to his side once again and assumed the position. “C’mon,” she said wearily and led him down the hall to her door.