Hidden Steel (8 page)

Wuhggh!
He landed on his back on the gym mat, blinking painfully up at the wiry black woman who’d put him there.

She put her hands on her hips and gave him a critical eye. “Mr. Steve, honey, you ain’t payin’ the least attention to this class this morning.”

“Head in the clouds,” came the murmured agreement from the background.

“Bet it’s that woman.”

His ears still rang, but Steve knew that particular comment could only come from the young single mother who’d been trying to catch his attention since she joined the class. Gaynell.

“How—” he started.

Dawnisha, the student who’d taken him down, now helped pull him to his feet—as wiry in her strength as Mickey. “What, you think we spend all our time sittin’ in front of soaps when we’re not here? Those kids talk, Mr. Steve. You got some woman stayin’ here, and she knows how to take care of herself. That’s what we hear.”

Nods and affirming noises followed this pronouncement. Steve grabbed a moment by brushing himself off, straightening his red
Steve’s Gym
T-shirt, pushing hair out of his eyes.

Gaynell came to stand next to Dawnisha. “I think she’s got something to do with those cars cruisin’ this neighborhood yesterday, what do you think?”

Suddenly Steve was surrounded. Women in brightly colored gym clothes and scarves, too much spandex where there shouldn’t be any at all.

“I hear she didn’t look good.”

“I hear she’s fine.”

“I hear she don’t look like she belongs on the street, no matter how many old clothes you put on her.”

“I hear she fainted.”

“Those men don’t belong here, neither. Not in those smooth rides.”

“My Tajo says you oughta watch it with that one. She trouble.”

Steve briefly covered his face with his hands. This was a kind of self-defense he’d never mastered. “Air,” he groaned dramatically. “I need air.”

“There, there,” Dawnisha said. She was the oldest, with four children and a night shift job at the nearest 24-hour walk-in clinic. “You just in over your head, that’s all.”

Steve widened his fingers just enough to glare at her. When she laughed, he dropped his hands altogether. “Seriously,” he said. “I think she’s in trouble.”

Someone couldn’t resist a mutter. “I think she
is
trouble.”

He wished he could have ignored that. “That’s the problem.” He looked at them all, found them interested … found them concerned. Faces of color, mostly. His own olive complexion wasn’t the lightest here, but it was close. “It’s both. She—” He stopped, beset by the memory of her expression as the letter opener sagged in the wall, by her earlier realization of how close she’d come to hurting Malik. By her struggle to deal with her situation—never answering his questions less than honestly, even if that meant telling him she couldn’t answer them at all. Never veering away from direct eye contact. Not letting her pride get in the way of asking for help.

“There, you see?” Dawnisha said. “He’s a goner.”

“I think I have to ask her to leave,” he blurted.

The general clamor to greet this eloquent declaration gave him just enough time to imagine Mickey’s reaction to such a request—disappointment, maybe fear, but acceptance. No begging or pleading, not after she’d already made her request to stay. She’d just look at him with those bright, direct eyes of hers, and—

Since when did he think he knew her that well?

“He’s right,” Gaynell said. “She’s in some kind of big trouble, and that makes her a problem for
us
. Me, I got enough problems already. This place is the one place we can count on. We send our kids here. Them homeless people … they need this place, too. She get in the way of all that, we don’t watch out for ourselves.”

Dawnisha turned on her a look of complete understanding—not of the sympathetic sort. “And where would
we
be, if that’s the way this place was run? Where would our kids be, and the young men Steve is keeping off the streets? They work to pay for their classes—that teaches them something too. And helps pay our bills besides.” She raked Gaynell with a scowl. “You just not wantin’ any competition.”

“Bitch!” Gaynell gasped, as the other women nodded emphatic and bristly agreement with Dawnisha’s words.

“Whoa, ladies!” Steve’s panic wasn’t the least faked. He could—and had—handled himself out there on the streets. A few hard knocks in pursuit of his brother had set him on his own path of learning, and eventually led him here. The gym, his work, his life—all built on hard experience.

But he wanted nothing to do with group of angry women. Not once the
bitch
word started flying.

“Chill, woman,” Dawnisha told Gaynell, putting her down with a look that reminded Steve that she, too, had come out of hard days on the street. That and her total lack of concern as she turned her back on the woman and put hands on hips to give Steve a look he’d thought reserved for local teenagers. “You just frightened.”

“
Hey
,” he said, dignity wounded.

“Honey, you ain’t scared for us, you just running scared for your own self. There’s somethin’ about this girl reaches you. Think it don’t show on your face? You chase her off for our sakes, and you don’t got to take any chances.”

Warmth flooded his face—embarrassment that these women knew him this well, shame that some part of him thought she might be right. “This gym has to stay a safe place.”

Dawnisha crossed her arms over her thin chest with some finality. “Then you’ll just have to find a way,” she said. “You keep it safe. You let this girl find herself here.”

At that they let it drop, and he drew them off into play-acting encounters on the street—the wallet throw away. Problem with these ladies wasn’t that they’d panic—problem was that some of them were so tough, they didn’t hit the
run away
button when needed. So he passed out “wallets” of duct-taped cardboard and they practiced accosting one another, then throwing their wallets for their “muggers” to chase after while they ran away. Steve egged them on into the drama of it, play-acting in high shrieking voices, lots of arm-waving and personal woe. Might as well have fun with the wicked world.

When class was over, they gathered up the wallets and handed them to Dawnisha, who dumped them on the counter behind the freebies barrel. There Steve had a mini-fridge, and he was stuck in the middle of a long pull on a bottle of water as Dawnisha walked by. Just as well. When she admonished him, “You think on it,” he wouldn’t have had anything to say anyway.

Because he
was
thinking on it. Had
been
thinking on it. Had more than enough time to accept the truth of her words.

Mickey scared the crap out of him.

In the middle of her confusion and fear, she’d gone dancing with a broom. She met his gaze without reservation—she sucked him right into her, right through the walls he’d carefully and deliberately built. If she stayed here, it would only continue to happen.

And yet he knew what she was. What he’d go through if he let her in.

You just frightened
, Dawnisha had told him.

Terrified, more like it.

And of course they’d all been right. This place of safety … it had never discriminated. If Mickey lashed out when threatened, then he’d make sure she wasn’t threatened. If there were indeed men cruising the streets in search of her, he’d find out what they wanted—find out if they were on her side, maybe even looking to take her home. He doubted it—he trusted the kids, and his own gut reaction when he’d seen that slowly gliding vehicle—but if they weren’t on her side, then she could hide inside the gym until they gave up.

It was what he did.

Frightened or not.

So he took a deep breath, stuck the water back in the fridge, and went back to see if Mickey was awake. And then he stood in the office door, sledgehammered by what he found.

Awake, yes.

Awake, tidied up, and gone.

He didn’t have to search the back rooms to know that gone was
gone.
She’d left the sheets neatly piled on the cot to be washed. She’d taken the flannel shirt she’d scrounged the evening before, even though it was another hot day.

And beyond that, he just
knew
. She’d seen the look on his face when he’d found the letter opener in the wall. She’d seen his doubt.

And she’d gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 7

Options.

Not many of those.

Mickey pondered them nonetheless.

There was the library. First she’d have to get there, of course, but once inside … air conditioning, and a week’s worth of papers. She could skim for whatever hadn’t made it onto the web version. Anyone missing a young woman about yay tall?

But she’d rather get cleaned up first—get herself squared away. And there were other options to ponder. Turning herself into the authorities, for one. If they didn’t know who she was, they could probably find out.

Yeah, and what if you’ve got worse crimes on your rap sheet than knowing all the Barry Manilow hits?

Which she did, apparently. They’d certainly come to her with ease, humming through her brain as she’d taken back streets and alleys away from Steve’s gym toward the center of town, munching the remains of the pizza.

She winced at that.
Sorry, Steve. I guess that’s what they really call eat and run.

At least she’d found a trashcan for the pizza box.

So still no authorities—no more now than when she’d stopped Steve from calling them. Not until she had no choice—until she knew for sure whether she was the cause of Naia’s problem, or her only hope. She had to keep herself footloose and ready to move in case she remembered something.

She shook off the doubt, and turned her thoughts toward more constructive paths. No cops, no clinic … not yet with the library. Maybe she just needed to take some precious time to scope out some safe places here on the street. To get herself some working funds. Just the rest of the day, that’s all. And then …

A final option occurred to her, one that slotted neatly after plan number one—scope out a new safe place—and might possibly lead to answers for plan number three.

Find the building. The place that had been her prison, and held the only for-sure clues to her situation. Possibly still held the people who’d imprisoned her.

And this time she wasn’t unarmed. Wasn’t sick, wasn’t weak, wasn’t confused. This time she had some idea of her abilities.

Yeah, when up against a kid and an unresisting wall.

Still.

After a moment she realized that the very idea of hunting the place should have surprised her—should have filled her with fear and doubt.

The very idea didn’t.

She suspected that imaginary rap sheet might have something to it after all. But as she rose from the cement block in the back corner of a the parking lot that had been her thinking spot, heading for plan number one—scope out a new safe place—she found herself humming
Copacabana
with a dramatically cheerful air.

* * * * *

“You don’t belong here!”

That voice was rough and insistent, and Mickey reversed course out of the cardboard box she’d been inspecting. She’d found herself beneath the overpass, drawn by a hazy memory of stumbling over the pedestrian path above the nearby river.

The man she currently faced could have been another of their victims. Confused, angry, his demeanor set to “belligerent.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Is this your box?”

“No,” he said, and brushed away a bug that wasn’t there. “But it’s not yours!” Bad hair, bad teeth, bad breath, bad manners.

“You’re right,” she said. “But I was thinking of hanging out over there.” She nodded at an area near the riverbank. “Nice culvert there, doesn’t look like it’s being used.”

He snorted. “‘Cause it floods in the wet.”

“It’s the dry,” she told him. “And I’ll only be there a few days.” At most. If that. She just wanted a bolt hole …

His laugh was true amusement, something of his original personality peeking out. “That’s what they all say, darlin’. That’s what they all say.”

* * * * *

Mickey earned the good will of her neighbors by sharing the bounty from her raid on Steve’s fruit, cheerfully explaining her source.

“Oh,
Steve
,” said a worn woman whom Mickey suspected was less than ten years older than her own thirty-two but looked about sixty. Meth had ravaged her features and her teeth. “He’s something, Steve is. His brother used to be one of us, you know. Mosquito really used to hang with him.”

“I had the feeling.” But Mickey didn’t ask for details, because it felt strangely like prying … and because she thought she probably knew the important parts already. Except … “He’s dead, right?”

“You done took this food from a dead man?” Her first contact, the man called Mosquito, spoke around a giant bite of pear.

For an unpleasant moment she thought he would spit the masticated fruit at her feet. “No, no, no,” she said quickly. “Steve’s
brother
. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Long time,” said the meth woman. “Looong time. Steve used to haunt our places. Mooning around with those calf eyes of his, trying to drag Zander back home. Finally gave up. Some of us belong out here.”

“It’s our own choice,” a man muttered from behind the battered, flattened cardboard box he’d brought with him, always keeping it as a shield between Mickey and himself—though one hand had appeared to receive the half-apple she’d pressed into it.

“Zander got himself stabbed.” The meth woman waved in a vague, unidentifiable direction. “Went out to Mugsville. There’s always someone at bat there.” She laughed, pleased with her chance to use what was obviously a tried and true line.

“Damn
bugs
,” Mosquito snapped, and stomped away, waving his hands at his face.

“He got a bug thing,” meth woman said, as if it needed explanation. “Not so bad, otherwise.”

“Mugsville?” Mickey asked, though she had a good idea.

“Well, hell, honey, you know.” The woman tucked her hands into her belt, which happened to be a couple of plastic grocery bags twisted and tied around her waist. “Muggers. They don’t care how little we got, they want it. And it’s kind of uptown, so we don’t belong there anyway. I think Zander was hunting out his folks—they liked the little theaters. But there’s this line—the rich folk stay on their side, we stay on ours. Problem is …we know that line a lot better than some of them do. There’s always fresh meat for them as wants it.”