Sherryl Woods - Twilight

When Juan Jesus, the youngest, had gotten too friendly with members of the toughest gang in the area, the entire family had come to Rick for guidance. Dollars had been scraped together for the tuition to a private school in Ken’s suburb. A family in Ken’s congregation had taken Juan Jesus in as one of their own on weekdays. Ken had brought him back to his family on Friday afternoons and picked him up again at dawn on Monday mornings for the trip north of town. Those days away from the hood had been the boy’s salvation.

Only Maria knew that the small pittance the family had raised was a fraction of the actual tuition. Had the others known, they would have been too proud to accept the arrangements.

Ever since discovering that Rick and Ken had chipped in to pay the rest, Maria had been coming to the program headquarters every morning to do whatever jobs needed doing. She typed. She answered phones. She cleaned. She bullied Rick into eating, when he would have forgotten. She stayed as long as he did, sometimes longer.

Unofficially, she counseled the teenage girls who trusted her with secrets they might never have shared with Rick. All in all, Rick knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal when he’d made the contribution to Juan Jesus’s education. And when Maria had her college scholarship, he guessed she would study psychology or social work and make an even greater contribution to his program, or another like it.

Now and again, when he saw the flash of passion in her eyes for Yo, Amigo’s goals, when he heard her sweet voice of reason working its magic on a potential backer, he could envision her in the state capital or in Washington, making a difference for all of the teens who seemed intent on sacrificing their youth, or their lives, to gangs. For now, he might be the brains and the drive behind Yo, Amigo, but Maria and a few others like her were its heart. Ken Miller had been its soul.

Not a day passed that Rick didn’t miss him. Not an hour passed that he didn’t contemplate his own inadvertent complicity in bringing Ken into the barrio, where he died. Not a minute passed that he didn’t want to avenge his friend’s death.

Thinking of that brought him full circle, back to the fury he’d read in Dana Miller’s eyes the night before. She was trouble, all right, and it was way past time he faced it. His warnings last night weren’t nearly enough to make her back down.

“Maria, I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said as he passed the desk where she was trying to make sense of the piles of paperwork that accumulated on a daily basis, paperwork that Rick had no patience for, even when he understood the necessity for it.

“I’ll be here,” she told him with a wry expression. “You haven’t touched this in a week. It will take me most of the day to see which is important and which could have been tossed into the trash, if only you’d bothered to read it.”

“Gracias. What would I do without you?”

She shook her head. “I cannot imagine.”

“Neither can I, nina. Neither can I.”

“Then it is good you won’t have to find out.”

“Until next fall,” he reminded her. That was when he was convinced she would have the full scholarship to Northwestern that she deserved.

“Even then, I will be here to worry you every day,” she insisted.

It was an old argument and one they wouldn’t resolve today or even tomorrow. Maria Consuela Villanueva was a woman who knew her own mind, probably had from the time she was two, Rick guessed. There had been times he regretted the age difference between them. She was barely eighteen to his thirty-four. Had she been a few years older, she might have been a good match for him. As it was, he thought of her only as the kid sister he’d never had. Even when she was at her nagging, pestering worst, he would have protected her with his life.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

He thought of the likely battle that lay ahead. Either Dana would slam the door in his face and he’d be back in no time, or she’d listen. He was counting on the latter. He held no illusions, though, that he could persuade her easily to accept his help.

“I’m out for the day,” he said, “unless there’s an emergency.”

“What constitutes an emergency this time? Fire? The arrival of the mayor? A delegation from the capital?”

“Those would do,” he agreed.

“Where will you be?”

“With Ken’s widow.” He shrugged, then added realistically, “Or nursing my wounds beside Lake Michigan with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.”

“Better you should take bandages,” she retorted.

Rick stared at her suspiciously. Something in her tone alerted him that she knew something about what had gone on here the night before. “Why would you say that?”

“People talk,” she said enigmatically.

“Maria! Spit it out. What are people saying?”

“They say that bruise on your cheek is the work of Mrs. Miller. Since it was not there when I left last night, I assume you’ve seen her since then.” She tilted her head and studied his face. “She must not have been glad to see you.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t,” Rick agreed.

“And you think today will go better?”

“Probably not.”

Maria opened a cabinet behind the desk and plucked out a handful of Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide from the stock kept on hand for the multitude of kids with minor wounds who turned up on their doorstep nearly every day. They were all too practiced at coping with major wounds as well, at least as long as it took to send for an ambulance.

“Then these may come in handy,” she said. “Of course, people say she is also a trained private eye, like Magnum.” Maria was a very big Tom Selleck fan. She thought he was even “chunkier” than Rick.

“She was a private detective,” Rick corrected. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“She knows how to use a gun, yes?”

“Very amusing, Maria. You seem to forget that I have at least a vague familiarity with guns myself.”

“The difference is that you have vowed never to touch another one. Can you say the same for Mrs. Miller?”

Rick could only say that he knew, with relative certainty, that she hadn’t had one with her the night before. She would have found some way to use it on him.

Of course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t grab a gun the second she realized who was on her doorstep. Another adrenaline rush raced through him at the prospect. Disarming her could prove to be absolutely fascinating.

4

The screeching of that damnable doorbell brought Dana to her feet at once. It had to be a stranger. No one she knew liked the sound of it any better than Kate.

“Want me to get it?” Kate offered.

“I’m still capable of answering the door,” Dana said dryly, pushing aside the virtually untouched slice of the pecan coffee cake that she had made when she could no longer sit still. “I haven’t lost all my wits yet.”

She stepped into the foyer and paused. She could see the large shape of a man through the glass panels on either side of the door. Tall, broad-shouldered and wearing an ancient football jacket from one of the Catholic high schools in Chicago, Rick Sanchez was unmistakable.

“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath.

“Dana, who is it?” Kate whispered, slipping up behind her.

“Rick Sanchez.”

“Oh, boy, is right. Has he brought the police with him?”

“I doubt that Mr. Sanchez is any fonder of the police than I am at the moment.”

“Were you counting on that when you broke into the Yo, Amigo headquarters last night?”

“No, I was counting on not getting caught,” Dana said, keeping a wary eye on the man outside.

He seemed to be growing more agitated by the minute. When he turned and leaned on the doorbell, filling the house with the squealing sound, she decided there was no point in postponing the inevitable. He was here to see her and he’d probably break down the door, if he had to. She was in no position, at the moment, to complain about a little breaking and entering on his part.