Read Online Thursday's Child by Teri White - Free Book Online

could be I’ve seen her around. She sure doesn’t look much like that anymore, though.”
    Gar didn’t bother to tell the girl that with her stringy, greasy hair, druggie’s pallor, and hard eyes, she wasn’t such a knockout anymore either. She probably already knew it. “Where have you maybe seen her around?”
    â€œHere, like you said.” She wanted to take the money, but he moved it out of her reach.
    â€œWhen was this that you might have seen her around here?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She sighed. “Not lately. I heard some talk that maybe she split. Went to Venice.”
    â€œVenice? Why?”
    She shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Maybe she fell in love. How the fuck should I know why?”
    â€œOkay. Thanks.” He moved the money closer.
    She plucked the bill away and shoved it out of sight in a hurry, as if afraid he might change his mind. “When you find her …”
    He gulped down the rest of his coffee, which wasn’t improved much by the fact that it was now cold. Of course, on the upside, it wasn’t much worse either. “When I find her what?”
    â€œYou going to take her back to her parents?”
    â€œThat’s the idea, yeah.”
    â€œWhat if she doesn’t want to go?”
    He crushed the empty Styrofoam cup. “Then she’ll probably just take off again.”
    She shook her head in apparent dismay. “People can be awful stupid sometimes, can’t they?”
    Gar was tired. He didn’t want to look at her face again, to have to see the naked fear and hurt that he knew would be there. Instead, feeling like an asshole, he reached into his pocket one more time and brought out a quarter. He set the coin carefully onto the counter next to the soda can. “You might want to call home sometime,” he said. “Put this away and save it for then.”
    She probably wouldn’t do it, of course. But, then again, maybe she would. Maybe.
    He gripped his cane and walked away without waiting for her to say anything else.
    Sometimes after a day that dragged on much too long, his leg would rebel. That rebellion would come in the form of a throbbing pain, often becoming so intense that he would get nauseous. When things degenerated to that point, he would have no choice but to lean all two-hundred-plus pounds onto the cane and move with aggravating slowness. He would also quietly curse the inept second-story man with the nervous trigger finger, who had put three bullets into him on a rainy night four years earlier.
    This was not exactly what Gareth Sinclair had expected to be doing in this, the forty-eighth year of his life. By now, he was supposed to be off the streets, firmly planted behind a desk someplace, elevated to a position within the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department that would not require him to tramp up and down Hollywood Boulevard in the freaking middle of the night.
    Of course, honesty forced him to recognize that when the opportunity for that desk job came along a few years earlier than expected—thanks to the intervention of one Jose Diego, nervous crook—Gar ran the other way as fast as he could. Quit the damned department. Threw it all away so that now, at his advanced age and state of physical deterioration, he was still playing the games that should have been left to a much younger man. One who was not, in the baby whore’s word, a crip.
    It had all been his choice, yeah, but on nights like this one, Gar sometimes thought that maybe he had made a very big mistake. The absolutely last thing he wanted to do now was drive to Venice and walk some more streets, talking to still more lost children. He was just damned worn out.
    But even as he limped back to his car, stuck the cane between the seats and himself behind the steering wheel, Gar knew what he was going to do. It was hell to be conscientious, especially when you were sort of past your prime. Or maybe it