“She asked you to leave,” Aaron told him. “You better listen. Or is your hearing aid low on batteries?”
“What’s that, sonny?” Bo Williams cupped one hand to his ear. “You said I should stay?”
“I said that… Oof!”
He socked Aaron in the gut, driving two large rings into his belly. With his innards nearly coming up his throat, Aaron doubled over. Bo Williams hammered his other fist into the small of his back. Aaron dropped on all fours like a humbled dog.
“Some choice of man you got. I tell you what, if he were in prison, he’d be on his knees like this all day,” he told Moni with a hearty laugh.
Aaron coughed and wobbled back to his feet. He weakly raised his hands into a boxing pose, but he left his hands so wide that Moni’s father could have driven a truck down the middle straight to his jaw.
“Aaron, you don’t have to do this,” Moni pleaded. If he couldn’t stop her father, at least he could save himself. Moni couldn’t carry another victim of his abuse on her conscience.
“Aw, come on girl. Give the boy a chance,” her father said as he pulled out his keychain. He held a key in his fist like a spike. “I haven’t done one of these in a while.”
Her father jabbed the key toward Aaron’s throat. The young man fell backward with his feet flailing. He smacked down on his back. With his leg extended above him, Aaron’s foot landed square on Bo William’s nuts. Moni’s father doubled over and groaned. He tried cursing him, but his contorted purple face couldn’t squeeze any words out.
Finally someone shut that oaf up. Thank God.
Moni took a step toward the bookcase with her gun on it, but stopped herself. Her father wouldn’t let this keep him away forever. He would remember what she did when he returned.
“You should probably go and have that checked out, dad,” Moni said while her father clasped his package with both hands as if he were smothering a fire.
“And I think you better check out of here before I dish out another round of whoop ass.” Aaron sprang up and posed like a guy who had won a fight with a manly strike rather than desperate blow any four-year-old could have landed.
Her father tried straightening his posture into a fighting stance but his aging body couldn’t recover so quickly. His vulnerability depressed Moni. She wished he had such a weakness years ago when she was a girl. Her slaps and kicks had never hurt him. They only made him cackle and hit her back harder.
This time, Moni’s father had been sapped of his fight-for one day at least. He slinked out the doorway and away from the house, but left his daughter with a chilling farewell. “If I have to live on the street, I’ll have plenty of time to think. You’ll be on my mind, Moni, and so will that darlin’ granddaughter of mine.”
Moni couldn’t slam the door behind him fast enough. She threw her arms around Aaron. She had found a loyal soldier. Not a smart one, but one that would stand by her and, as an added bonus, was plenty cute. She combed her hand through his golden waves of hair and rubbed her nose on his neck.
Aaron giggled from her touch. “I guess that means thanks. What is that, cat language?”
“Meow. Meow.” Moni purred as she ran her fingers delicately down the back of his neck. “That means, ‘You were like a lion out there, big boy.’”
“Meow,” said Tropic the cat for real as he snuck out of the bedroom on the prowl for the source of the pizza smell. They traded smiles.
“Come on, against that old man? Mr. so-called Prison Brawler with his scary set of keys. Oh no, he’s going to unlock me!” Aaron crossed his hands over his neck and stuck out his tongue.
Moni backed off from him with her face as serious as a Norman Rockwell painting. “My dad served time. And he’s put more than a few people in the hospital.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Moni shook her head. Aaron’s eyes widened. He rubbed the spot on his belly where her father had punched him. “No wonder he hits so freaking hard. Thanks for warning me.”
“If I would have warned you, would you have run away and left us?” asked Moni with a glance toward Mariella, who stood with her back to the bookshelf watching them curiously.
“Now I know you’re jiving with me,” Aaron said in his best street talk as he crossed his arms all thuggish. “You know I wouldn’t bail on you and the little boo. I stayed for your gun-toting ex and a killer snake. Why would I leave for pops the ex-con? For real Moni, you may want to tone it down a bit. Your posse is totally whack.”
“Whack? That word is so nineties,” Moni said. Aaron shrugged as he apparently realized he hadn’t swept her off her feet just yet. If only he knew that she didn’t care about the way he spoke or how tough he looked. His actions spoke loudly enough. “Believe me, I didn’t ask for all this trouble. It just finds me. And it finds Mariella too. Put the two of us together and, well, you know.”
They simultaneously looked at the girl for a reaction. Mariella kept shifting her eyes between them and scanning the outside of the house through the window. It looked like she had a feeling that trouble still had a beat out on them.
“I better hang around for a while tonight,” Aaron said as he gazed out the window into the darkness. Moni took his arm and leaned her head on his shoulders, where she felt the tight muscles that he had honed from swimming in the choppy sea. “You never know what’s out there.”
Chapter 27
He nearly handcuffed himself inside his own unmarked patrol car when he saw Monique Williams invite her child abusing old man into her home. Clyde Harrison couldn’t believe that she would expose the little girl she guarded so vigorously to a kid beater. This is the woman who let Nina Skillings, his partner on the homicide investigation team, get cannon-balled into a wall during a car chase because she wouldn’t put Mariella at risk.
If she had started taking gambles like this with the girl yesterday, Nina would be walking around fine. Why’d she have to pick today to shoot craps with the child’s life?
He turned his radio off and listened closely for shouting. Then he remembered that the girl couldn’t shout or scream. She couldn’t call for help. Harrison grabbed the door latch. He stopped himself. Lead detective Sneed had put him on surveillance so he could gather evidence on Moni’s treatment of the girl. He shouldn’t make his presence known unless the Lagoon Watcher shows up for the last living witness to his murders, Sneed had told him. As the minutes rolled by and the child abuser didn’t leave, Harrison doubted those orders would chain him down much longer.
Gazing down the street from behind the tinted windows of his Buick sedan, Harrison eyed the old taped together Camaro that Moni’s father had parked halfway on her overgrown lawn. He plugged in the license plate number and confirmed that Bo Williams shouldn’t be within a thousand feet of children-and for good reason. After bloodying up a 13-year-old, he raised hell in jail and got cited for more than a dozen fights. Most of them were with skinny kids barely old enough to be behind bars.
Cracking his knuckles as he stared at Bo Williams’ ugly mug on the computer, Harrison knew he’d enjoy turning the tables on that shithead. Since he already had enough proof of Moni’s mistreatment to make a judge remove the girl, he saw no need for waiting by while the kid got smacked around.
I’ll give them five more minutes. If he doesn’t come out of there, I’m dragging his ass out.
Harrison had 30 seconds left on his countdown when the surf rat showed up at her house. He recognized Aaron Hughes from the task force meetings.
“A little extra-curricular activity between you two, eh,” Harrison said to himself. “Well, you’re in for a surprise kid.”
Much to Harrison’s amazement, it was the ex-con and not the beach bum who limped out of there. It looked like the Williams family’s crown jewels had been smashed. So much for fighting like a man, Harrison thought. At least the kid had made his job a whole lot easier. Harrison snapped photos of Bo Williams hobbling into his car and leaving. Combined with the photos of the child abuser strolling straight in to meet the girl, Harrison figured he had built a pretty damning case again Moni. He e-mailed the photos to Sneed and then dialed him up.