Mimi's Demons

Chapter 16:The One Who Was Not a Thief, and the One Who Was

Duke woke up to a little, oily-haired girl lit by candlelight, holding his hand and squinting at his fingertips. Her clothes looked drained by time and damp, and a short two-layer stack of multi-colored totes took up the wall behind her.

Not the weirdest thing to wake up to, but definitely up there.

"If you're looking for jewelry, I'm sure they already took that."

She jumped, dropping his hand in the process. Her eyes looked too big for her face.

"I'm not looking for jewelry," she squeaked.

"Oh," he glanced at the short wall of totes—lidless totes, and the pipes running along the ceiling. "You look like you would need it." Did the kid live here?

She gave him a flat look. "A kid trying to pawn off jewelry just gets the cops called on you."

A corner of his mouth rose. Right she was. "You speaking from experience?"

She sniffed. "No." That was a lie. He hadn't met too many children in his life, but they all couldn't lie worth beans, at least to his perceptive eye. "How are you able to talk like that with a cup out of your gut?"

"A cup?" He glanced down and made a move to sit up, but instantly flopped back down with a puff of pain. He just managed to rein in his face from showing it when he remembered this was a girl who looked like she was nine at the very most. What would pride do him here?

At the thought of his pride, a montage of memories flooded back in. The meeting, the narc, Omen Four bleeding over the front wheel of the car, a sawed off shotgun smashing his car window.

"Oh yeah," he muttered. "That happened."

"What happened?"

"None of your business, kid." His hands swatted along his pant legs, shaking a bit as they found his pocket and slipped inside for his phone. He wasn't too surprised to see the screen smashed, only thankful that it still worked.

As he tapped open his most trusted number and held it to his ear, he took another good look at the girl. She didn't look too emaciated, but there was definitely a look of neglect to her stringy strands of brown hair. The room had a certain...smell as well. The smell of something well lived in.

"Where are your parents?"

She scowled. "Not here, obviously."

"Do they live here?"

"No."

The line picked up. "Sir? Thank god, are you okay?"

"I'm not currently being shot at," he let a hand trace across his stomach, feeling out the layer of bandages. If there were no parents, does that mean this kid had...? "Can you follow my signal here?"

"Where are you?"

He looked at the kid. "Where are we?"

She rattled off an address tagged with, "It's on the first basement floor of the abandoned parking garage," with a tone he imagined kids recited their times tables with.

After giving the address and a generalized state of his health (he was conscious, that was good), he turned off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket.

"So, kid, you live here?"

Her too-big eyes narrowed. "Doesn't matter to someone like you, right?"

That gave him pause. Did this kid know him? No. Kids didn't just know him.

"Someone like me?" he tried.

"Someone bad," she said, and her eyes flicked to the closed door next to his head.