Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Rosa was being pushed in a wheelchair to the hospital’s main exit where Jenna was waiting with a red pickup truck. It was almost ten p.m., but the paperwork for her release was finally signed, and she wasn’t staying another minute.
“What is this?” she asked. “Whose truck is this?”
Jenna had come around to help her in. Rosa still had her arm in a sling, and her ribs were wrapped to keep them from moving around as much as they normally would. But every motion hurt.
“It’s Alberto’s,” Jenna said. “He said I could have it for the day. Offered to drive, but…I didn’t know if you’d be okay with that.”
Rosa got into the passenger seat feeling as if there were knives in her chest, then tried to buckle up without twisting. Jenna got behind the wheel. “He offered to co-sign with me if I want to get a new car,” she said. “He seems…real.” She looked at Rosa hard.
“He’s a good guy,” Rosa said. “Was anyway, when I knew him. Mellower now, but…I don’t think the good ones really change.”
“But you left him, though,” Jenna said. “There had to be a reason. You told me my father didn’t want to be a father. That wasn’t true. You had no idea what he would’ve wanted, because you never told him.”
Her little girl looked too small behind the wheel of the truck.
Rosa was swamped by intense regret. “I loved him so much it scared me, honey. I was afraid I’d lose myself, and then I was afraid I’d lose you.
And I was selfish. Keeping you two apart was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.
And I’ve done some shit.” Her eyes burned with tears.
“I’m sorry, Jenna. I wish I could undo it. I’d give anything if I could undo it.”
Jenna nodded. She glanced sideways while driving, put her hand on her mom’s cheek. “I know you mean that.”
Rosa felt a vibration in her left pocket, not her right. Burner phone. She ignored it, but a few seconds later it buzzed again, and then again.
Jenna could hear the buzzing of the phone in her mother’s pocket. “Aren’t you gonna get that, Mom?”
“I…get car sick when I read in the car. Something about the brain tumor, I guess. I’ll get it when we get home.” It buzzed again, and she got an idea. “Or you can pull off and get me a decent meal to wash away the taste of all that hospital food, huh? I’m starving.”
“Anything you want, Mom,” Jenna replied with a sad laugh.
The fast-food joint on the outskirts of town was replacing its drive-through, and it was temporarily down. That would give her some privacy. “McD’s, girl,” she said, and pointed at the golden arches in the distance.
“You got it.” Jenna moved into the right lane, then pulled in. “Oh, man drive-through’s down.” She glanced at her mom, then nodded. “We’ll have to go in. Are you up to it?”
Rosa said, “Would it be awful of me to stay in the truck and make you wait on me a little? I’ve had a rough week.”
“Not even a little bit awful,” Jenna said, unbuckling her seatbelt. She picked up her wallet and exited the truck.
Rosa waved at her pretty daughter as she vanished through the glass doors, then wrested the phone from her pocket and called Diane’s burner.
“What’s happening?” she blurted as soon as Diane picked up. “I don’t have time to read a hundred frickin’ texts, I’m with Jenna. I have like two minutes.”
“It’s bad, Rosa.” Diane’s voice was messed up. Deeper than normal, and rough around the edges. “He’s…like the other one.”
“Like the other one? Whaddaya mean, like the other one?” And then it hit her, and she sucked in a breath and lowered her voice to a whisper. “You mean dead?”
“Yeah, and it’s a mess. There’s no way we can clean this. I don’t know what to do.”
“Where?”
“Hotel,” she said.
“Did you?”
“I started. The girl he had chained to a bed finished.”
“Oh my frickin’ God!” The exclamation burst from her so loudly, a passerby glanced her way. And the truck’s windows were up.
Rosa gave a little thumbs-up as they passed and asked quietly, “Help on the way?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if they should come. They’re meeting me on the roof. That’s where I am now.”
“On the roof?”
“Yeah. There’s a stairway up from the penthouse. You need a key.”
“Shouldn’t you be in the room with the… What if somebody comes?”
“I figure if hotel staff were allowed in here, they’d have known about the girl. He’s rich enough to buy privacy. But, um…”
A chill tiptoed down Rosa’s spine when she trailed off. “But what, Diane?”
“But he was having some kind of a party tonight. There were men coming to abuse that poor girl. He told her so right in front me before I—”
“Jeeziz frickin’… Where is she now?”
“Took a wad of cash from his wallet, went down in the freight elevator, and she’s getting a bus ticket home. She’s not going to say anything. Doesn’t know who I am if she did. We don’t have to worry about her. But there are men coming here tonight, and we don’t know when.”
Rosa racked her brain. Jenna was crossing the restaurant toward the exit with a large white bag. “Get his phone. Check the calendar and text messages, maybe the time is there. Open his eyes to unlock it, or face recognition won’t work.”
“God!”
“Do the phone stuff fast,” Rosa said. “You need to remove every trace of you and that girl from the scene. Do that first, before you move the body. It’s the most important thing.”
“And then what?”
“Then call me. With any luck, I’ll be on my way.”
“Rosa, you can’t—”
“Watch me.” She ended the call, dropped the phone back into her pocket and pulled out her real phone just as Jenna opened the car door, and handed the bag across. The smells wafting from it made Rosa’s stomach rumble. Salt and grease. Yum.
If there was a silver lining to being terminally ill, it was that junk food was no longer verboten, because what difference did it make?
Jenna got into the truck. Rosa opened the bag and took out its contents, a burger and fries. “None for you, babe?” She looked up as she asked it and saw that Jenna had been crying while out of her mom’s sight. Oh, she’d tried to cover it up, but her eyes were still red and a little puffy.
“Oh, baby,” Rosa said.
“I don’t want you to go, Mom.” Jenna turned and hugged her, crying softly.
“I don’t think I’ll really go anywhere. I think I’ll still be right here with you, just without my body. You know?”
Jenna sniffed, knuckled her eyes, and started the truck. “We don’t have to talk about that right now. We have lots of time yet.”
She wasn’t ready. That was okay. Rosa wasn’t ready either.
Jenna’s phone rang from a handy dash-mounted holder. She tapped answer and speaker and said, “Jenna Sandoval,” telling Rosa the call must be work-related. Maybe a hot story that would distract her from her broken heart.
“Hey, Jenna, it’s Sam, returning your call.”
Sam? Bonnie’s Sam? Detective Sam?
“Sam, hey, thanks for calling me back,” Jenna said. “I wanted to follow up with you on the disappearance of Phillip Terrence. I understand there’s evidence he was involved in child pornography?”
“Where did you hear that?” Sam’s voice had changed entirely, from friendly, to official.
“Anonymous source,” she said. “So, can we talk?”
There was a long moment of silence. Jenna eventually broke it with, “Come on, Sam, how long have we known each other? I’m not gonna do anything to jeopardize your case. I mean, I could, but I’d rather work with you. Wouldn’t you prefer that, too?”
Holy God, her daughter was a barracuda.
Sam sighed. “Meeting realtors at Harry Tony’s to sign a purchase agreement on a house. And then heading out to question a guy about our missing person.”
“Missing person as in Phillip Terrence?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah. You want to ride along? You’ll have to wait outside while I question him, but—”
“At ten p.m.?” Jenna asked, her voice high pitched. Then, “I can’t, Sam. My mom—”
“Of course she can,” Rosa said to the phone. She shot Jenna a reassuring nod. “Seriously, I’m fine. I’ll drop her off, and you can run her home after, okay?”
“You’re out of the hospital, Rosa? How are you doing?”
“Dying,” she said. “But otherwise, great. Harry Tony’s you said?” Inside her pocket out of sight, she powered off her regular cellphone, then surreptitiously dropped it into Jenna’s bag. Nobody needed to be tracking her movements tonight.
Rosa parked outside the nicest hotel in the county, wearing the clothes her kid had brought for her to wear home from the hospital because the ones she’d had on during the accident were torn and/or bloody, and had to be thrown out.
Even her purple Brooks running shoes. Jenna had brought loose, stretchy black pants with an elastic waist, a baggy t-shirt, and a sports bra, the only kind she’d owned since turning sixty.
She had a denim jacket over her shoulders, but not all the way on, because of the sling.
She looked down at her rainbow patterned Crocs and shook her head.
She couldn’t fault her kid. Jenna had no way of knowing her mom was going to try to slide through the lobby of a fancy hotel like she belonged there.
Then she saw a truck heading down the alley beside the gorgeous, turn-of-the- century brick building. The hotel had fan patterns made of the same red bricks around every arched window.
She got out of the truck, pulling her denim jacket all the way on one arm, then crossed the street.
Her ribs hurt like a bastard, but her shoulder was nice and numb.
Her head pounded. That throbbing pain was her new normal, since the hit-and-run attempt on her life.
She didn’t think the fire escape, though nicely concealed on the alley side of the building, was an option given her sling and overall weakness.
She stood in the shadows, checking through the group text messages on the burner phone while a truck driver unloaded crates, unaware of his audience.
Diane: Freight elevator goes all the way to the roof. No camera.