Twilight

“Big deal!” she said, adding an expletive for emphasis.

“Dana!” Kate protested.

She was clearly as shocked at hearing such language as Dana was at having uttered it. She’d learned to temper her tart tongue the day she’d fallen in love with a minister. Ken had never voiced his disapproval of her tendency to curse, but she’d seen the disappointment in his eyes whenever a particularly foul word slipped out. She’d been home less than twenty-four hours and she’d been cursing a blue streak ever since. She doubted that Kate had ever said anything harsher than darn in her life.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I can’t help it. It’s just that the thought of Rick Sanchez brings out the worst in me. He got Ken killed.”

Kate was shaking her head before Dana could complete the sentence. “You know better than that. Ken was at Yo, Amigo because that was the kind of compassionate, caring man he was. He saw the good in those kids. He wanted them to have a chance. You wouldn’t have loved him if he hadn’t tried to live up to his own ideals, if he hadn’t put himself on the front line, no matter the cost to himself. Ken believed in that program. He believed in Rick Sanchez.”

“And he died because of it,” Dana repeated. “I can’t forgive Sanchez for that. I won’t.”

“Is he the one you can’t forgive, or is it yourself?” Kate asked quietly. “Are you sure you’re not taking risks to punish yourself?”

Dana’s eyes brimmed with stinging tears, and her throat clogged up at the softly spoken question. That was the trouble with having a friend who knew your deepest, darkest secrets. All those confidences could come back to haunt you, Dana thought.

“I should never have told you,” she whispered.

“Yes, you should have,” Kate contradicted, automatically handing Dana a pristine hankie from her pocket. “If you hadn’t told me that you and Ken had fought that night, it would have eaten away at you. You have to forgive yourself, sweetie. Ken was going to Yo, Amigo that night, whether you two had argued or not. He’d made up his mind, and he was every bit as stubborn as you are. It wasn’t your fault he got killed.”

“No,” Dana agreed, clutching the handkerchief and ignoring the tears that streaked down her cheeks. “But I shouldn’t have let him leave when he was so angry. Maybe that’s what made him careless. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see that there was someone there with a gun.”

“And maybe he just got in the way of some drug-crazed kid,” Kate said. “That’s what the police think.”

“One of the kids Rick Sanchez protects,” Dana countered bitterly, bringing the argument full circle.

Kate sighed. “There’s nothing I can say to talk you out of this, is there?”

“Nothing,” Dana agreed.

Kate’s expression turned resigned. “Then tell me what I can do to help.”

“Just be my friend.”

“No, I want to do something constructive. You helped me when my life was a mess. Now it’s my turn. I can work a phone with the best of them. You’ve always said I could talk anyone into doing anything I wanted. Let me put those powers of persuasion to work for a good cause. We’ll be a team.”

Dana laughed at the excitement sparkling in her friend’s eyes. “Kate, you are not a private investigator,” she pointed out.

“Technically, neither are you.”

Dana was taken aback for a minute, until she realized that Kate was right. She had long since let her license lapse. Hopefully her skills were a bit more up-to-date, though after last night’s disaster, she had to wonder. Not that she’d ever admit to such a thing.

“What about your kids? What about the risks?” she asked, throwing Kate’s earlier arguments right back into her face.

“One’s seventeen, the other’s nineteen,” Kate said dismissively. “They barely know I exist, anyway. Besides, I’m just going to be chatting on the phone, like I always do. How much danger can there be in that?”

“Famous last words,” Dana retorted. “Are you really sure you want to help?”

“I really want to help. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

“I will,” Dana promised. Unfortunately, without any of the clues she had hoped to find at Yo, Amigo, she had no clear-cut idea just yet what the first step ought to be.

3

Rick couldn’t decide whether he’d done the right thing by calling Kate Jefferson first thing in the morning. Obviously, she and Dana Miller were close friends. He had found the slightly plump, angelic-looking blonde at the Millers’ house when he’d finally worked up the courage to stop by to see Ken’s wife and try to make peace with her. Besides, she had made him promise to call the minute Dana turned up.

Knowing how Ken’s widow felt about him and about Yo, Amigo, at first he hadn’t expected Dana to come anywhere near him—not for a long time, anyway. Only after careful thought had he realized that she was not the type of woman to let things lie. Obviously Kate knew her friend very well.

Even now his lips curved as he thought of the audacity Dana Miller had shown, first in breaking in, then in accusing him of assault when he’d tackled her. She was a handful, all right. Ken had always told him that and now he’d seen her in action firsthand.

She was going to be trouble. He knew that, too. She had the same sort of passion for her particular cause that he had for his, which put them at cross-purposes, for the moment. Oddly enough, they both wanted to find Ken’s murderer. She would destroy Yo, Amigo in the process, if she had to. He was convinced that no one connected to the program had had anything to do with the shooting.

The kids he worked with weren’t saints. Far from it. They’d been handling knives and guns and wearing gang colors starting at a frighteningly early age. Most of them had been touched by tragedy and violence more often than white, middle-class America could imagine. They’d responded the only way that made sense to them, by seeking protection in numbers, by arming themselves. Only a few had learned the lesson that violence only spawned more violence. It solved nothing. As injustices mounted and anger deepened, the violence only escalated, unless they learned another way. He’d tried to teach them that.

Even so, even knowing that his message had convinced only a handful of the teens he worked with, Rick knew in his gut that not one of them would have harmed Ken Miller. They had respected the padre, as they called him. The youngest ones had clustered around him, desperately seeking the warmth and love he radiated, the father figure he represented. The older boys grudgingly admired his straight talk and his jump shots. Ken had run circles around them on a basketball court, playing with a ferocity that had been startling in a man normally so placid.

Rick hadn’t relied solely on his gut in reaching the conclusion that no one he knew would have harmed Ken. He was a little too cynical for that. He’d asked questions, gently most of the time, forcefully when necessary. He’d laid it all out for these tough kids who were trying to find their way. One of their own was down, and he wanted to know the names of the people responsible. The future of Yo, Amigo, their future, was on the line. He believed so strongly that any one of them would have ratted out his best friend for Ken’s sake, that he would have staked his reputation and his life on it.

When no one had stepped forward with so much as a whiff of innuendo—much less a solid clue—it convinced him that his kids were innocent. That left a whole lot of unanswered questions. He was as frustrated as Dana Miller had to be. He was also convinced that the answers had to lie outside the hood.

The difference was, she was going to tear his fragile grasp on the souls of these boys to shreds trying to find those answers. She was going to put herself at risk by poking and prodding and turning up in every dangerous nook and cranny until she found something. For every boy in the program who’d respect her for trying, there were a dozen on the streets who would take advantage of her. Some would only take her money for leads that would merely take her down blind alleys. Some were capable of doing far worse.

Rick figured either he was going to have to trail along behind, protecting her, or he was going to have to find some way to join forces with her—for the program’s sake and for hers.

Of course, that meant seeing her again, trying to cut through the pain and the hatred and the anger to convince her that they were on the same side. His pulse raced predictably at the prospect. His quick rise to any challenge was both a blessing and a curse. After the way he’d responded to the woman struggling in his arms the night before, he figured this time it was downright suicidal. His body apparently didn’t have the same high moral standards his head did, standards that said a man shouldn’t be intrigued by his best friend’s wife. Ken’s death hadn’t changed that. In his eyes, Dana Miller still belonged to her late husband.

“Que pasa, Señor Rick?”

At the sound of the softly spoken question, Rick’s gaze shot up. “Maria, you have to stop sneaking up on me,” he told the teenager with the huge brown eyes and shy, dimpled smile. “My heart can’t take it.”

The shyness faded, replaced by a knowing twinkle. “Oh, I think your heart can take quite a lot, Señor Rick.”

“And how would an innocent girl like you know a thing like that?”

“The others talk,” she said, then shook her head. “As if you didn’t know that already. They think you are muy sexy, a how-do-you-say-it, a chunk?”

Rick laughed. “That’s hunk, as if you didn’t know that already. Your English only fails you when it suits your purposes.”

“No, no,” she protested. “Para me, anglais es muy difficile.”

“Maria, you were born right here in Chicago.”

Her chin rose a defiant notch. “But my parents, they speak only Spanish at home,” she protested, her expression all innocence. “I heard no English until I went to school.”

It was a common enough story in certain immigrant neighborhoods, including this one. Rick happened to know, however, that Maria could speak and understand English like a native, unless it seemed inconvenient to do so.

“The way I hear it, you were a quick study. I’ve seen all your transcripts. Straight As. That’s why the padre was trying to help you get a scholarship to college.”

At the mention of Ken, she immediately sketched a cross across her chest and her eyes turned sad. “I miss him every day,” she said softly. “He was very good to me and the others, especially my brothers.”