Twilight. Sherryl Woods

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

      “He loved you all. He wanted you to succeed.”

      Maria perched uneasily on the edge of the chair opposite Rick’s desk. She folded her hands in her lap in the pose of a proper young lady, but it was only seconds before she began to fidget nervously. “What do you think will happen now? Will they find the person who killed him? They don’t seem to try very hard anymore.”

      Rick couldn’t deny that. It was one reason he could understand Dana Miller’s determination to take matters into her own hands. “I don’t know whether the police have given up,” he told Maria honestly. “But I haven’t.”

      “Do you have any leads?”

      “No, but I think someone knew exactly what he was doing that night.” It was the first time he had voiced that particular opinion, but he was forced to temper it by acknowledging the other possibility, the one Dana Miller and the police shared. “On the other hand, if the killer is from the hood, I’ll find him.”

      Maria looked shocked. “You think one of us could have harmed him?”

      “No one in the program,” he said firmly. “But others, who knows? Others believe anything is possible here. The only way to prove them wrong is to find the person responsible. Have you heard anything, Maria? Anything at all? Is anyone bragging a little.”

      “Who would brag about such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.

      “We both know there are people who would like to see the program fail, who would gloat if we lost our funding. They might even commit murder to bring us down.”

      “But why? What you do here СКАЧАТЬ