“I don’t even have bus money. If I go out there alone he could kill me,” she said.
That was my downfall right there. I took pity on her the way I did time and again with Fearless. I came to a compromise in my head even though I knew that what I should do was throw her outdoors.
I made it to my feet and said, “Okay, I’ll give you a ride wherever you need to go to get away, but that’s it.”
3
ELANA DIDN’T COMPLAIN when she saw me pocket the .38.
“Might as well go out the back,” I said. “I mean, he’d probably be covering the front. Does he have any friends?”
“He was with two friends.” Elana sounded defeated. I clearly wasn’t the protector she needed.
“What’re their names?”
“What difference do that make?”
“Well, let’s go out the back door,” I said. My head was still light and my stomach was churning. I swallowed once and gazed at a piece of wall with a cabinet handle screwed on at just about waist height. The reason that Elana hadn’t found her way out was that my back door was almost invisible. It was just a rectangular slat that swung on three rusty old hinges.
My red Nash Rambler was parked against a salmon-pink stucco wall that ran the length of the alley separating the houses on the residential street behind. There was no sign of Leon, his horned car, or his nameless friends. Elana slid into the passenger’s seat and laid her head against the window. She was a picture-perfect damsel in distress.
If I were Fearless Jones I would have run headlong into the fray, taking any blows and doing anything to protect her. But I didn’t believe that even Fearless would have stood long against Leon Douglas.
I started the motor and we slid off into the afternoon.