The minute she opened her eyes, she knew everything was wrong.
The coarse pavement on which she half sat, half lay. The iron stairs disappearing up the side of the cinder block building above. The row of padlocked doors, each with no number, no window. The Dumpster she leaned against. The crumpled cardboard boxes. The dark crevices. The pervading stink of rot and abandoned hope. All wrong.
And the rain. Half sleet. Cold. Icy. Miserable.
Wrong.
She tried sitting straighter and felt a sharp pain in her left shoulder. She rubbed it with numb fingers. The tattered sleeve of her red-and-black plaid coat alarmed her. She checked out the rest of her clothing. No hat. That explained the rain dripping off the end of her nose. Grungy gray pants, no socks, brown boots that looked and felt as though they belonged to someone else, a man, maybe.
She got to her feet, her bare toes rubbing against the wet leather. She ached, head to toe.
What was she doing dressed this way? What was she doing in this alley?
Another question knocked her back against the Dumpster.
Who was she?
Panic pushed the air out of her lungs, left her gasping. She racked the recesses of her memory, pleading with the synapses to wake up. Give me a name, a purpose, a home, something…anything, she begged. Moments passed and she found herself still lost in a fog as murky and unfathomable as the gray puddles at her feet.
Lost, inside and out.
She looked up and down the gloomy alley. No answers, but one end looked brighter than the other and the light drew her. Within a few halting steps, an uneven edge of worn pavement caught the toe of her boot and sent her plummeting to the ground. She landed in a heap, one cheek imbedded in gravel, the other pelted by biting rain. For a while, she lacked the drive, the energy, the will to move. Eventually, survival instincts kicked in and she struggled back to her feet.
Gray mud dripped off the front of her coat. A new tear in her pants rubbed against a matching slash in her knee as she staggered forward. Reaching the light at the end of the alley became a goal of tantamount importance. Salvation lay in the light.
The sound of footsteps from behind startled her and she stumbled to one side of the alley, cowering near a short flight of cement steps all but obscured by soggy drifts of wet newspaper. The approaching figure evolved into a man with a stride so menacing she couldn’t look away though she yearned to do so. Her heart thundered in her chest as he came abreast.
Rain hammered the brim of his hat, the shoulders of his black mackintosh. Pausing, he stared straight at her, eyes as dark and flat as the shadows from which he’d materialized. If she’d harbored even a glimmer of hope that she could turn to this man for aid, it died in that instant.
And then he moved off toward the coveted light at the end of the alley. Shivering as rivulets of freezing water found their way between her shoulder blades, she fled in the other direction, toward the dark end of the alley, toward an obscurity as far-reaching as the vacuum inside her head.
TRAVIS H. MACBETH, known to everyone but his favorite aunt as Mac, was sick of the rain. The fact that the new year had just begun and the bulk of winter lay ahead didn’t help. Welcome to Billington, Indiana, January-style.
He should be home tallying up nice, dry numbers and sipping something hot and fortifying instead of slogging through the wet, cold evening.
It had all started out so straightforward. Help an old friend’s father collect data in his bid for the next mayoral race. Maybe do some good, maybe shake up the status quo, maybe, if he was really lucky, help give the boot to both the current mayor and Police Chief Barry.
What Mac hadn’t figured on were his own compulsions.
At thirty-seven, a private detective with at least two careers behind him, shouldn’t he be wise enough to avoid situations like this one?
As he sloshed through the sludge, the answer was clear—apparently not.
Of course, he didn’t need to make the rounds of Billington’s less desirable localities. No one made him walk this dusk patrol and, in fact, he’d been warned by his former partner on the police force that his presence down here annoyed the hell out of the reigning powers that be. Of course, he already knew this. He had the citations for breaking laws no one else even knew existed to prove it.
As for the street people he encountered? Night after night, the same weary faces regarded him with the same indifference. His presence here warmed no one’s heart, least of all his own.
He knew it, he just couldn’t seem to stop himself.
As he approached the alley right before Broadhurst, he slowed his pace. Inside a soggy paper sack, he carried a giant roast beef and Swiss cheese hoagie. He wondered if Jake would be waiting for his sandwich in such horrible weather. On the other hand, where else did the old man have to go? Jake wasn’t a homeless shelter kind of guy.
So every night on his walk, Mac made it a point to mosey this direction and bring the old boozer a sandwich, one packed with as much protein and as many calories as possible. Jake seemed to appreciate the gesture, so there went Mac’s earlier speculation that no one cared if he patrolled these back streets.
Jake cared. Well, probably.
A man had to settle for what he could get.
From his peripheral vision, Mac saw a dark shape charge from the mouth of the heavily shadowed alley. He braced himself for an attempted mugging, then he recognized Jake’s coat, a red-and-black hunters plaid that always looked out of place buried in the city. He relaxed. Big mistake. The old man plowed into him so hard it rocked Mac on his feet.
“Damn it, Jake, what in the hell’s going on?” Mac growled as he grabbed bony shoulders and twisted the slight figure away from him. The deli sack bounced against the old man’s chest as Jake wrapped a muscular arm around his attacker’s throat, tight enough to stop further aggression, not so tight as to hurt him. “Since when do you assault people? And jeez, man, what in the world did you tangle with? No offense, but you stink.”
As he spoke, he moved the two of them into the weak light of a street lamp and was surprised to see how dark the top of Jake’s gray head looked. From the front it had always appeared so gray.
Jake went slack.
“That’s better,” Mac said. If turned loose, would Jake attack the next passerby? Mac looked up and down the abandoned street and admitted there likely wouldn’t be a next passerby, not on this wild winter night.
Old Jake suddenly grumbled a half dozen words in a voice that shook Mac down to his shoes.
“Jake? Is that my name? Jake?”
Mac withdrew his arm as he backed away. That wasn’t Jake’s alcohol-soaked slur.
He found himself staring into the dazed eyes of a young woman in her early twenties. Short black hair lay plastered against her head. Large blue eyes dominated her face though high cheekbones and a surprisingly sensual mouth demanded their share of attention, as well. She seemed half child, half woman, a rather beguiling combination marred only by blue-tinged lips and the aura of fear mingled with shock that hovered around her like the wavering
