Annie Reed is the award-winning author of more short stories than she can count. A great many of them are mysteries, although she writes in a wide variety of genres. Her stories appear regularly in Pulphouse Fiction Magazine and Mystery, Crime and Mayhem. This is her third appearance in a row in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, with her stories “Little City Blues” and “The Promise” appearing in the 2022 and 2023 volumes. Reed is a multiple Derringer finalist, and her short fiction has also been selected for inclusion in study materials for Japanese college entrance exams. She writes novels as well. Her latest is Road of No Return. She lives in Northern Nevada.
The kid had one of Antonia’s old business cards.
He was standing on the concrete walkway outside her second-floor apartment door, waiting for her. He was wearing the unofficial uniform of teenagers who lived on the street: dark hoodie with the hood pulled up over a baseball cap and old jeans. He had on dark boots that probably came from Goodwill or one of the local charities, which told her he didn’t have enough money to buy a name-brand pair of athletic shoes.
The hoodie was zipped up, and she was willing to bet he had on a few layers of T-shirts underneath. It was nearly midnight, and the night was cold and wet. It had been raining steadily since she went on shift at the diner at four that afternoon.
She was soaked from her five-block walk home after her shift ended, and she was wearing an old, supposedly waterproof parka that covered the layers of secondhand sweaters she wore over her waitress uniform, not a hoodie.
As she climbed the stairs to the second floor, her knees barking at her thanks to the damp cold, she closed her hand around the can of pepper spray she kept in the pocket of her parka. The kid didn’t look dangerous—she’d known too many street kids in her time to assume they were all out to hurt everyone they ran into—but better safe than sorry. It was a hard-earned lesson.
Her neighbor had strung Christmas lights around her front window and had managed to wrap more holiday lights around the rusted banister leading up to the second floor. The lights had large bulbs, the size that had been popular when Antonia was a kid, only these were LEDs, not the old-fashioned glass bulbs that shattered when the neighborhood kids hurled them at the sidewalk.
The overhead lights that were supposed to illuminate the second floor’s exterior walkway had been burned out for months. The Christmas lights made her neighbor’s apartment look like an oasis of holiday cheer in the midst of a dark, damp cave. Antonia was too tired and wet and sore to have much in the way of holiday spirit, and she didn’t have enough extra money to splurge on lights she’d only use once a year.
Her neighbor’s Christmas lights not only let her see the kid waiting by her door, now they let her get a decent look at his face. Seventeen, she thought, or a small eighteen. The older she got, the harder it was for her to pinpoint the age of anyone under twenty. He was fine boned with huge dark eyes in a too-thin face. He held out her business card like it was a golden ticket that would get him the hell out of whatever trouble had him waiting for her in the middle of the night.
And he was in trouble. He had bruises blooming on one cheekbone. A fresh scab crossed the bridge of his nose, another one cut across his chin. Both were ragged enough that they might heal into scars he’d carry for the rest of his life, but none of the injuries she could see were life-threatening.
He must have been waiting for her for a while. The overhang above the second-story walkway provided some protection from the weather. His clothes were damp but not slick with rain like hers, and the lank hair sticking out from beneath his hoodie wasn’t dripping wet. Either he had more patience than most teenagers she’d known, or he had nowhere else to go. She was betting on the latter.
“What do you want?” she asked when she reached the top of the stairs.
“They said you could help.” The hand holding her business card trembled, either from the cold or from sudden doubt.
She didn’t ask who they were. She knew. They were any one of a hundred nameless kids who’d fallen between the cracks of a well-intentioned system that didn’t always live up to its lofty ideals.
She used to hand out her business cards like they were candy. “You have any problems or you need anything, you call me,” she’d said.
And they had.
So many kids, so many problems adjusting to living on their own in a world no one had prepared them for. She’d tried to help them all. She’d cared for them like the mother so many of them never had, and she’d cried over each and every one of her failures.
On their behalf, she’d butted heads with bureaucrats who hadn’t cared. With administrators who put in their time but never read the reports she’d “filed or responded to the requests she’d made or acted on her recommendations.
She’d kept at it, because the kids weren’t just names on a piece of paper or numbers on a spreadsheet or line items in a budget already strained to the breaking point. They were people, and people always mattered.
She’d kept at it until it ate her up inside. Until doing the job broke her.
“Please, Ms. Gonzales,” the kid said. “I already tried, and I couldn’t … I’m not strong enough. They won’t listen to me.”
I’m not that person anymore, she wanted to scream. Hadn’t she already done enough? Hadn’t she already given enough?
Couldn’t they just leave her alone?
“I can’t help you,” she said. “You’re resourceful. You found me, and I’m not easy to find.” She turned away from him. “You’ll figure out how to get by.”
Her feet hurt, and her hip, the one that had been so badly damaged it had to be replaced, ached with the damp cold. It had taken more effort than it should have to climb the concrete stairs. She needed a hot bath, and then she needed about ten hours’ sleep before she faced the next shift at the diner.
At least tips had been good tonight. Tips were always good around the holidays. It was like some little part of most people still believed in Santa Claus, and they wanted him to know they were good one month out of the year.
She’d just slid her key into the lock on her front door when the kid spoke again.
“It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for my wife. If you can’t help us, they’re going to kill her.”
*
The kid—he said his name was Aaron—was asleep on her couch. Antonia sat in her secondhand armchair, a garage sale find, and while her neighbor’s Christmas lights cast colorful patterns on her threadbare drapes, she considered what—if anything—she could or should do about Aaron and his wife.
After she’d let him inside her apartment, she’d fixed him a can of chicken noodle soup and a PB&J sandwich. While he ate, he’d told her his story.
He was eighteen, he said, and he’d started out life as Amelia. His family had kicked him out at fourteen when he’d finally screwed up the courage to tell them he was trans.
He’d survived on his own for a while on the streets until he’d been picked up by the cops, and from there he’d ended up in the foster system.
“Everybody always called me by my dead name,” he said, “but nobody cared that I wouldn’t dress like a girl.”
Most of the fosters Antonia had worked with were good people. They opened their homes to troubled kids—kids who’d been abandoned or orphaned or been taken away from unfit parents—and they did the best they could. But there were always fosters who were just in it for the paycheck and who treated the kids like commodities. Antonia had worked hard to weed out fosters like that, but her reports never seemed to generate any traction. As long as the kids weren’t abused—and Antonia had never been able to prove actual abuse—the fosters were never booted out of the system.
Aaron had ended up with a series of fosters who’d basically treated him like livestock. No care, no love, just a place to sleep and eat and get a new change of clothes every few months. A few were outright hostile, although he claimed none of them had ever punished him because he was trans.
By the time he turned eighteen, he’d wanted out, even though he could have stayed in the system longer. The whole foster experience had soured him so badly that he hadn’t talked to anyone about the programs available to help him adjust to life on his own. He hadn’t trusted anyone associated with the foster system, which told Antonia just how desperate he was. The business card he thought would save him was for Maria Gonzales, a caseworker in the foster system.
Antonia’s former name. Her dead name, she supposed, just as much as Amelia was Aaron’s.
Her job had been to help kids like Aaron transition to life outside foster care. The program had funds—limited, yes, but available—to help foster kids with college tuition, housing, career counseling. All the things parents might do for their own children. She’d even acted as a liaison between foster kids and potential employers.
Aaron’d had trouble finding a job, even a part-time fast-food job. He had no prior work experience and no permanent address. Thanks to a flyer posted on a streetlight, he’d finally found a job working in a drafty warehouse putting together cheap trinkets, the kind sold to tourists. He worked ten hours a day and was paid in cash at the end of every shift.
Most of the workers were street kids like himself, none younger than sixteen, no one older than twenty. A great many of them had foreign accents and knew very little English.
Aaron’s wife was one of those kids.
“Sonia,” he said. “She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”
He said she didn’t mind that he was trans. He told her he planned to get reassignment surgery as soon as he’d saved up enough money.
“She said she’d help me,” he said. “That she’d give me some of the money she made. No one’s ever offered to do something like that for me.”
She said she was eighteen too. She hadn’t been born in this country, but she knew a lot of English and was learning more every day.
Soon they started spending every off hour together. Most nights they stayed in one of the homeless shelters in the city—when they could find available space—or in one of the homeless encampments when no shelter space was available. They talked about getting married someday after Aaron had his surgery, and they both agreed to work as hard as they could at the warehouse to make that day happen sooner.
But it turned out they couldn’t wait. Antonia wasn’t surprised. Teenagers, even patient ones, could only wait just so long for things they really wanted.
One night they found a street preacher outside a strip club and asked if he would marry them. He’d said some words over them, had them kiss each other, and told them they were married.
Antonia didn’t mention that the marriage likely wasn’t legal for any number of reasons. Their marriage wasn’t the problem.
The trouble had started when one of the adults who supervised the kids working in the warehouse offered Sonia a different job.
“He told her it would mean more money,” Aaron had said, “so she took it. To help me.”
The different job was in a locked back room. Aaron had asked if he could work back there too—more money sounded good to him, no matter what the work was—but the man had told him no. The back room was only for girls. None of the other workers were allowed back there, and the only entrance was guarded by a serious-looking man with a gun.
Aaron said he’d asked Sonia what she did in that room, but she wouldn’t tell him. Whatever it was, it made her sad.
“No amount of money was worth that,” he’d told Antonia, “so I told her we should just quit and go somewhere else. Find other jobs, you know?”
But Sonia wouldn’t leave.
“She said she was working off a debt to the people we worked for. I told her I would pay it for her—I had all that money I’d saved up for my surgery, and she was saving up to help me—but she said it wouldn’t be enough. Not to try because it would get her in trouble. But she was so sad, and I love her, and …”
He didn’t need to say the rest. Antonia knew what must have happened. He’d tried to stand up for the woman he loved, and he’d been beaten for his efforts.
“They told me to forget about her. They called me ‘boy’ like it was some cuss word, the worst one they could think of.” He’d swiped at his cheek with the back of one hand. “They told me they owned her until she was done paying her debt. They won’t even let her leave now. I guess they’re afraid we’ll run away.”
Antonia knew these kind of people. Aaron was lucky all he’d gotten was a beating. It could have been much, much worse.
He’d finished the soup and sandwich she’d made for him. By that time he was almost falling asleep at the little two-person table she usually ate at alone in her kitchen. She’d told him to take the sofa for the rest of the night, that she needed time to think things through.
She’d covered him with a blanket before she sat down in her secondhand chair and stared at the soft glow of her neighbor’s colorful Christmas lights shining through her threadbare drapes. The lights brought back memories of the Christmases she’d had as a child. Back when she’d been safe and warm and well loved, and the hardest thing in her life come December was waiting for Christmas Day to actually get there so she could see what Santa had left for her.
She’d always had a family when she was a kid. Her parents had stayed together even in tough times, although she hadn’t realized exactly how lean some of those years had been until she was much older. She’d been an only child who’d wanted a brother or sister but never had one. She could have ended up spoiled, she supposed, except her parents always took her shopping every year to buy one new toy and leave it in one of the donation bins near the front of the toy store on their way out.
“For children who aren’t as lucky as you,” her mother told her.
The lesson, hard at first for a child who was certain she deserved to get all the toys in the world for her very own, eventually sunk in. Picking out a new toy for someone else and leaving it behind became easier to do the older she got. Christmas wasn’t all about receiving. It was about giving too. About making sure kids who had less than she did knew that someone somewhere cared about them.
That lesson was probably why she’d gone into social work in the first place and had accepted a position working with foster kids.
That’s what kept her in the job so long that she’d eventually burned out.
But still she didn’t leave until after she’d had a run-in with a man who exploited young men the way the adults Aaron and Sonia worked for exploited teenagers who lived on the streets, and especially the ones who were in this country illegally. Big Man D, as he called himself, was the king of his very own kingdom, a shadow world that existed out of sight of most people who lived and worked in the city.
She’d tried to help some of the older teenagers he recruited—foster kids who were trying to use the resources available to them to break away from this man’s influence—but she’d failed. Big Man D caught wind of what she was doing and decided to teach a lesson to any of his people about what happened to anyone who crossed him.
One of his lieutenants had followed her home one night and attacked her in the foyer of her building. He’d beaten her badly, sliced up her belly and the skin over her ribs, and then thrown her down the concrete steps leading up to the entrance to her building.
The only reason she was still alive was because one of her neighbors had come home just in time to see her land on the sidewalk. He’d called the police, and Big Man D’s lieutenant had fled.
Antonia had spent a week in the hospital. Her hip had been shattered so badly it had to be replaced, her left arm had been broken in three places, and one of her broken ribs had punctured a lung. She still had scars from the knife wounds that she tried not to look at every time she took a bath.
The message his lieutenant had delivered that night was unmistakable: stay the hell out of my business.
She had. She’d not only quit her job, she’d quit her life. She’d used some of her shadier connections to obtain a new identity. For all intents and purposes, Maria Gonzales—the woman she’d been, the name on her old business card—was dead. Antonia Merin was a waitress who kept her nose out of other people’s business, and she never, ever messed with anyone associated with Big Man D.
Until now.
She couldn’t turn Aaron away. He was in love, probably for the first time in his life, and he wouldn’t stop trying to get to his wife. The men at the warehouse would end up killing him. To them, he was no more a person than he’d been to the fosters who’d treated him like a commodity. They’d probably dump his body somewhere as a warning to everyone else not to mess with them. Antonia would never forgive herself if that happened.
If she didn’t help him, no one else would. Not the cops, not the administrators who’d never listened to her. Not the bureaucrats who’d tell her Aaron had blown his window to avail himself of any help the foster system could provide to kids who turned eighteen. To them, Aaron was just a number on a spreadsheet. Hell, some of them might even be paid to look the other way.
She couldn’t go against the men at the warehouse on her own. She wasn’t a killer. She didn’t even own a gun. And without a threat like that, she was just one stupid old woman who still thought she could change the world.
She needed help, and there was really only one person who could help her. One person with enough clout to make the men at the warehouse listen.
The man who’d tried to have her killed.
Big Man D.
*
She left a note for Aaron on the coffee table in front of the sofa where he slept. She told him she’d be back and to stay put. That she’d have news for him when she got back, but he was not to try to do anything else himself.
She only hoped he’d listen to her. He’d never had an adult go to bat for him in his short life, and he might not entirely trust her now. Especially since she hadn’t told him what she planned to do.
The sun wasn’t up yet when she got herself a cup of coffee from a twenty-four-hour corner grocery store one block over. The store had made an attempt to decorate for the season—tattered cardboard cutouts of a smiling white Santa who looked straight out of a Coca-Cola ad were pasted onto the front windows beneath the security bars, a two-foot aluminum tree sat on the counter next to a plastic jar of pepperoni sticks, and a few paper snowflakes were suspended from the stained acoustical tile ceiling—but the results looked shabby instead of festive. Like someone had rummaged through the junk from a dead person’s storage shed and grabbed whatever was free.
An old, dark-skinned man sat on a stool behind the front counter. He was skin and bones beneath a worn flannel shirt and yellowed undershirt. He rang up Antonia’s coffee, and she handed him a five dollar bill and told him to keep the change.
He inclined his head just the slightest as a thank you and scraped the change into the tip jar. He had a fringe of curly white hair around his skull and white stubble on his cheeks. His one nod to the holidays was the black-skinned Santa Claus pin he wore on the navy-blue vest that identified him as an employee.
“You know where the man is these days?” she asked him.
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“The Big Man,” she said.
Now he shook his head. “You don’t want to be messing with him, sister, not if you gotta ask where he’s at. If he don’t know you, he don’t want to know you, you know what I mean?”
“He knows me,” she said, which was true. “It’s just been awhile.” Also true.
She caught movement behind her. She turned her head in time to see two teenagers, both Black, emerge from one of the store’s narrow aisles and head toward the door. Both of them were wearing black hoodies with the hoods pulled up over black watch caps. Long silver chains hung from their pockets and were attached to their belt loops.
One of them nodded at the old man behind the counter. “Catch you later, Pops,” he said.
Pops didn’t answer back. He just watched them carry a paper bag out of the store. Neither of the teenagers had paid, and the old man—Pops—didn’t try to stop them.
“Tell you what,” Pops said to Antonia after the door banged shut behind the teenagers. “You know where Silven’s is?”
Silven’s was an unlicensed dance club that operated off a back alley eight blocks away. Back when Antonia had been Maria Gonzales, the gang unit used to raid Silven’s on a regular basis. She would usually be assigned to work with any of the street kids who’d been caught in the club and who hadn’t given the cops any reason to arrest them and send them off to juvie.
“I used to,” she said, and gave the old man the name of the alley. At least the name the alley had been called years ago.
“You ain’t lying when you said it’s been awhile,” Pops said. “The kids call that alley Kingdom Road now because the king calls it home.” He glanced at a round security mirror over Antonia’s head, probably to make sure they were alone. He still leaned forward toward Antonia and lowered his voice. “I hear tell there’s a door at the end of that alley, got a faded old dragon sticker on it. If the man’s anywhere, that’s where he’ll be.”
That didn’t make sense. The last place a man like Big Man D would hang out would be next to a club that got raided all the time.
“Next to Silven’s?” she asked. “You sure?”
“I know what you’re thinking, but no one raids the club anymore. The kids tell me the man cleaned the place up.”
“You believe them?”
Pops leaned back and shifted his butt on the stool. “I believe the cops don’t raid there anymore, and that’s all I care to believe. Now I think you’ve about used up the rest of that five you gave me, so I’ll wish you a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year, you hear?”
She did. She thanked him and took her coffee. She had an eight-block walk in front of her, but at least the city streets were still just wet. Christmas was a week away, and the prospects of snow before then were slim. She’d loved the few years the city got snow for Christmas when she’d been a kid. It made everything look so pretty, at least for a little while. Now that she was older—much older—and had to walk everywhere, snow was more an annoyance than anything else. But the rain made everything look dirty and damp, especially the garbage that always seemed to accumulate in the gutters and at the base of the buildings.
She made it three blocks before a black SUV pulled up to the curb alongside her. The back door opened and one of the teenagers she’d seen in the corner grocery store got out.
She dropped her coffee and fumbled for the pepper spray in the pocket of her parka, but her fingers were stiff from the damp. The teenager got to her just as she was pulling the canister free. He knocked it from her hand, and the canister clattered to the street.
“Don’t be doing that, Granny,” the kid said. “It ain’t polite, or don’t you know that?”
Granny. Just like the guy behind the counter had been Pops. Anonymous names meant to depersonalize. The kid was just a teenager, but he was stone cold. He’d just as soon wring her neck as talk to her, but someone else was pulling his strings.
The kid ushered her to the back of the SUV and opened the door. No light came on inside the car when the door opened, and the sun wasn’t up yet, so she couldn’t see inside. It didn’t matter. She already knew who waited for her.
“I hear you been looking for me,” Big Man D said. “Why don’t you climb in my office, and we can have a talk.”
*
Big Man D got his name naturally. He was three-hundred-fifty pounds at least, and most of it was muscle. He must have been well over six feet tall, the way his legs seemed to fill all available space in the back of the SUV.
Antonia had never seen him in real life, only in surveillance photographs taken by the gang unit, and he’d looked monstrously big then.
In person?
He sucked all the air out of the SUV, or at least that’s how it seemed to her. She was having trouble breathing, and all the old injuries hurt. The scars on her ribs and belly where his lieutenant had knifed her burned, and her hip was screaming.
The kid had slammed the SUV’s door behind her, and the driver took off before Antonia could think about bailing out of the SUV. If she could even move fast enough to hurl herself out of the SUV before Big Man D latched onto her with one meaty hand and pulled her back inside.
This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? To talk to the man?
She just hadn’t planned on having the conversation in a moving SUV but in a building with an escape route where she had a chance of surviving the encounter.
“What’s your name, Granny?” Big Man asked.
Again with Granny. “You knew me as Maria Gonzales.” Her dead name sounded strange after not using it for years, but she wasn’t about to give him the name she went by now.
He whistled low. “Man, I thought you were dead. How come I ain’t heard you still around here?” As he said that last bit, he glanced at the man in the front passenger seat, a skinny Black man in a charcoal overcoat darker than his skin.
“She dropped off the radar,” the man said. “Quit messing around your business, D. She got the message.” He shrugged. “We let her alone.”
Those last words chilled Antonia to the bone. They knew where she was, who she’d become. They could have reached out to her at any time. Killed her on her way home from work if they wanted to, and make it look like a random mugging. But they’d let her alone because she’d left them alone.
She had to say what she’d come here to tell the Big Man—D, his lieutenant had called him—just the right way. Make him understand she wasn’t the one messing in his business now.
At least she hoped it wasn’t his business. She’d find out soon enough if the sweatshop where Aaron and Sonia worked was one of his subsidiaries.
The driver made a left at the next intersection. They were headed to the heart of D’s territory, they had to be. There was little traffic on the streets—too early yet for commuters who’d be arriving in the city by train, and nobody drove into the city, parking being as expensive as it was. D’s eyes glittered in the scant light from streetlights and stoplights as he turned his gaze back to her.
“So I got to wonder why you here,” D said.
She started to speak, and realized she’d have to clear her throat first. When she tried again, her voice came out steadier than she’d thought it would.
“Because I found out someone else was messing in your business,” she said. “Working out of a warehouse in your territory—”
“Whole city’s my territory,” he said, interrupting her. “My kingdom be vast, my holdings many.”
“They’re using kids to prep drugs for distribution,” she said.
She didn’t know that for sure, but from what Aaron had told her, that’s what made sense to her. The girls weren’t being prostituted, not in a locked back room where no one was allowed to go. But grown men who exploited children always thought girls were easier to intimidate. Teenage boys, with all those hormones raging through them, would be too hard to control.
“Street kids,” she said. “Immigrants.” She didn’t say illegal; the whole damn operation was illegal. “I thought you should know.”
D went very still. He was still staring at her, but he was like a big black hole, taking everything in and letting nothing show.
His lieutenant had turned around enough in his seat that he was looking directly at D. He wasn’t as careful with his expression. He was clearly concerned, and she’d bet it wasn’t just because of what she’d said. He was worried about how his boss would react.
Which meant they hadn’t known about the operation in the warehouse.
“Why?” D asked her. “Why you tell me this?”
Now came the tricky part. She couldn’t schmooze this man. Flatter him and lie to him in the hopes he’d give her what she wanted. He’d see through the bullshit. With a man like him, she had to stick to the truth.
“I want to get two of the kids out,” she said. “I want to get all of the kids out, but I’ll settle for two. I can’t do that on my own.”
“And you can’t sic the cops on them ’cause ICE come down on those kids like the wrath of God.” D laughed, an ugly, self-indulgent sound that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up and shivers that had nothing to do with the cold run down her spine. “So you find me ’cause you know I be protecting my kingdom from people don’t think they need the king’s okay to set up their little business.”
Now he nodded his massive head. He’d shaved his skull clean since the last surveillance photos she’d seen. His scalp had little bumps and indentations and an old scar over one ear that she saw when the SUV passed beneath a stoplight.
“You thought right,” he said when he stopped laughing. “You give my man here the location of this warehouse and the names of the kids, and we’ll get your kids out.”
“In one piece,” she said, knowing she was pushing her luck. “These kids aren’t part of—”
He held up a hand, interrupting her again. “These kids, they ain’t innocents or they wouldn’t work sticking that shit in whatever they’re packing it into.”
She disagreed with that. Street kids did what they had to do to survive, just like the homeless did, but she wasn’t going to argue with him.
She’d told him she wanted two kids out because she was pretty sure Aaron would be gone by the time she got back. And if he wasn’t? If he’d actually waited for her? Then D’s men could get another boy out. Another one who was smart enough to tell D’s men his name was Aaron.
“You bring me this information, I get your kids out,” D said. “Then what? You gonna snitch to the cops ’bout what we gotta do?”
He was telling her they’d terminate the warehouse operation in a lethal way. She knew her life depended on her answer, if not now, then later. But she couldn’t lie.
“No kids die,” she said, “I don’t say anything to anybody.”
She didn’t have to say the rest. If any kids died, she’d go to the cops. Tell them it was D’s men who did whatever he was going to do to the men who ran the warehouse operation. Who kept kids like Sonia working behind locked doors guarded by men with guns.
If D let her live that long.
He went quiet again, and she knew he was thinking things through. A man like D had a lot of assets. No doubt some of them he could burn, others he couldn’t. He was the king, and the king was planning to go to war.
All because a former foster kid loved his wife and couldn’t leave her behind.
As far as Antonia was concerned, the reason was worth the cost.
“Must be the damn season,” D said. “All this shit about good cheer and your fellow man rotted my brain.” He shook his head and slapped his thigh. The slap sounded like a rifle shot. “Rudolph and all that shit,” he said again. “And one old lady who came back from the dead. If that ain’t Christmas, I don’t know what is.”
He held out his hand to her, the intent clear. She hesitated only a moment before she took it to shake on their deal.
But before he let her go, he pulled her in close. Close enough that she could smell onions and fried food on his breath.
“You mess with me on this, you better disappear for good this time, you understand, Antonia?”
Hearing her new name coming from that mountain of a man shook her to her core, but she didn’t let it show.
“I don’t go back on my deals,” she said. “And we just made one.”
A deal with the devil. The lesser of two evils. All the old sayings went through her brain, but she kept looking him in the eye. She wanted him to know she meant what she said.
He laughed again as he let go of her hand. “I like you, Granny, I do. You tell me where to let you out, and my man here, he take you there.”
She could tell them to take her home and they’d do that. It would save her a long walk through the cold, dark streets, but she didn’t want to do that. Even though they knew where she lived, she didn’t want them anywhere near her apartment. She needed her little illusions of safety. She needed her anonymity, even if it was false.
She needed her hope.
And she needed to get out of this SUV before she lost the fragile hold she had on her nerves.
“Here’s fine,” she said.
The SUV pulled over to the curb in front of a bus stop, and the man in the front passenger seat got out to open her door.
He gave her his hand to help her climb down from the back seat. She thought about ignoring it, then thought about how the kid—one of D’s runners, no doubt—had knocked the can of pepper spray from her hand. How he’d told her it wasn’t polite. When you were in the presence of a king, politeness mattered.
She took D’s lieutenant’s hand and let him help her down. Big Man D didn’t say anything else to her, but his lieutenant wished her a Merry Christmas. She said it back automatically just like she said it to all her customers at the diner.
As the SUV pulled away, its taillights flashing red in the predawn darkness, her knees finally gave out. She sat down heavily on the bus stop bench, amazed that she was still alive. Frightened by what she’d just set in motion. And scared most of all for the kids that would be caught in the middle.
Big Man D hadn’t promised his men wouldn’t hurt the kids, but he knew the stakes. So did she. She hoped she hadn’t just shook hands on her own death warrant, but if Aaron and Sonia got out alive—if all the kids got out alive—it would be worth it.
She had to believe it would be worth it.
She was still trying to convince herself when a city bus pulled to a stop and she climbed on, ready for the bus to take her back home.
*
Christmas Day dawned bright and cold.
Antonia sat by herself at her kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, reading yet another report on her old laptop about a gangland shooting the night before. Police had been called to an abandoned warehouse shortly after midnight only to find the bodies of four adults, all killed execution style. Unnamed sources told reporters that the warehouse had been used as a distribution center for fentanyl, but police refused to comment on the ongoing investigation.
No one had seen the shooters, they’d only seen teenagers fleeing the scene.
None of the reports Antonia had read said anything about teenagers being among the dead.
Big Man D had been good to his word. He’d shut the operation down without killing any of the teenagers the men kept locked in the warehouse overnight.
Antonia hoped that Aaron had finally been reunited with Sonia. He’d been gone, of course, when she finally got back to her apartment from her nerve-racking meeting with Big Man D. Aaron hadn’t left her a note, but he had locked up her apartment on his way out.
She felt empty and a little sad. She’d only been thanked occasionally by the kids she’d helped back when she’d been known by her dead name. She shouldn’t have expected anything more from Aaron. Kids like Aaron lived according to their own rules, and street kids only had one rule: stay alive.
She shouldn’t be drinking coffee this late—or this early, depending on how she looked at it. The diner had closed up early the night before, and she’d been back at her apartment before eleven. No snow had fallen on Christmas Eve, so no white Christmas. But her neighbor had a fully lit Christmas tree now in her living room window that was neatly framed by all the Christmas lights. It reminded Antonia of home and her parents, both long dead now, and how they’d stayed up late on Christmas Eve drinking hot chocolate and listening to her dad read the last few pages of The Polar Express.
Instead of going to bed, she’d bought a copy of The Polar Express online and read it on her computer. That’s how she’d found out about the warehouse shooting. It had been headline news when she’d gone to turn her computer off and go to bed.
She really should go to bed. She was going to be dead on her feet tonight at the diner if she didn’t get at least a few hours’ sleep.
The soft knock on her door came as a surprise. She wrapped her sweater around herself as she went to peek out her threadbare drapes.
A teenager stood in front of her door. It wasn’t Aaron but a slight young girl in a puffy hooded coat that needed washing.
Antonia’s breath caught in her throat. Was this Sonia?
She opened the door as far as the security chain allowed.
The girl had vivid blue eyes and the kind of smooth complexion a teenager shouldn’t have if she lived on the street without benefit of all the creams and cleansers advertisers insisted were necessary to keep skin clear and healthy. Her hair was long and ash blonde, and when she smiled at Antonia, the smile lit up her entire face.
Aaron had been right. She was the prettiest girl Antonia had seen in a long time.
“Ms. Gonzales?” the girl said.
“Just a minute.” Antonia closed the door only long enough to remove the security chain. This time she opened the door wider. “That’s me,” she said. “Or who I used to be. And you’re Sonia?”
The girl looked confused, but she nodded. “I don’t understand ‘used to be,’” she said. “My English is getting better, but I have trouble with …” She paused for a moment. “Idioms,” she finally said. “Aaron, he teaches me, and I’m trying to learn.”
“I think you’re doing great,” Antonia said, and she meant it.
Sonia shifted to glance over her shoulder. Antonia saw Aaron standing at the base of the stairs, keeping watch on the street.
“We’re leaving,” Sonia said. “Going to a new city. We have enough money for bus fare, and Aaron, he says we’ll be safe if we start over new somewhere else.”
That might not be true. Antonia hoped it would be, but she’d helped them as much as she could. The foster system wouldn’t help them at all, and Big Man D had been right about one thing. If Sonia was undocumented, ICE would deport her in a heartbeat.
“We wanted to wish you Merry Christmas and to thank you,” Sonia said.
“That’s nice, but it’s not—”
Antonia was going to say it wasn’t necessary, but Sonia interrupted her by surprising her with a hug. Strong and tight, like she didn’t want to let Antonia go.
Antonia patted the girl’s thin back, surprised at the moisture that sprang to her eyes. “You both take care of each other for me. That will be thanks enough.”
“We will,” Sonia said, finally pulling away.
Antonia gave her a serious look. “Promise?”
Sonia nodded. “Aaron, he take good care of me. He’s good husband.”
She turned and smiled at him. The expression that stole over his face was nothing short of breathtaking.
Sonia left without another word, but Aaron gave Antonia a wave before they both disappeared down the street.
Antonia shivered as she shut her front door. The walls in her apartment building were thin, and from her neighbor’s apartment, she heard the first notes of a familiar Christmas carol.
Maybe she’d make herself a mug of hot chocolate before she went to bed. She might even go to a few shops and see what decorations went on sale tomorrow. She might even find an artificial tree on clearance. She could put it away for next year. Decorate it and put it in her window.
Create a second oasis of holiday cheer in the dark cave of her neighborhood.
It wasn’t like she had to hide from Big Man D and his lieutenants anymore. She wouldn’t go back to using her dead name, but she could finally start living a real life.
If that wasn’t a Christmas miracle, she didn’t know what was.
*Often an image becomes the initial spark for a story. It’s usually a picture I see online somewhere, but in the case of “Dead Names” it was something I saw while I was driving one rainy December night: a single strand of Christmas lights illuminating a portion of the second-story railing of a rundown apartment building. No other part of the complex had any holiday decorations. No Christmas trees in apartment windows, no wreaths on doors. Even most of the lights in the complex’s parking lot had burned out.
When I sat down to write a hardboiled story for an anthology invite, I couldn’t get the image of those Christmas lights out of my mind. The holidays aren’t an easy time for everyone, but someone in that apartment complex was trying. Even if it was only the one strand of lights they’d wound around an iron railing, they were trying. When everything seems dark and bleak and hopeless, sometimes trying is the best anyone can do. That thought, along with the image of those lights, gave me the start to this story.