Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story

by Kris Nelscott

  “I’ll make it.” Linda whispered the words. “I’m just fine. Thank you.”

  I was relieved to hear her respond directly to me. But I knew she wasn’t just fine. She wasn’t protesting my presence like she had the first time I tried to take her to Chicago.

  “I’m going with you,” Valentina said to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “You need me,” she said.

  I turned toward her, trying to keep at least part of my gaze on the road. “Maybe you don’t understand. I am about to commit a felony. I don’t want you involved.”

  “Don’t,” Linda said from the back. “We’ll be all right.”

  “If I take you to a Madison hospital,” I said to Linda, “they’ll arrest you and take Annie. Do you want that?”

  “Nooo.” The reply was soft, and I wasn’t sure if it came from Linda or Annie herself.

  “Jesus,” Valentina said.

  “So,” I said to Valentina, “I’m taking you home.”

  “No,” Valentina said. “You need me. They need me. We’ll work this out. I’ll take a bus home tomorrow.”

  The truth was, I did need her. I needed her to monitor Linda’s condition. I needed her to keep Annie calm.

  I needed her to keep an eye out, to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  ***

  Three hours and one furtive gas stop later put us in Chicago at four in the morning. I drove immediately to the hospital nearest my house.

  Valentina blanched as we pulled into the parking lot. I had driven her there once, saving her life and changing it forever.

  Linda had passed out sometime along the drive, but she was breathing evenly. I had Valentina bring Annie inside. I carried Linda.

  The emergency staff took her from me, placing her on a cart. In the florescent hospital lights, it became clear that she was bruised everywhere. The cast on her arm from her previous injury was cracked and ruined. And there was dried blood around her mouth and nose.

  “What happened?” The emergency room nurse asked me. She was glaring.

  “Her husband happened,” I said, deciding not to lie about that at least. I lied about the rest, though. “She lives next door to us. I couldn’t just leave her there.”

  “Good thing you didn’t,” the nurse said, and wheeled her away.

  I stayed and filled out the paperwork, using my own apartment building as Linda’s address, and making up a last name for her. I figured the hospital would never check, and Helping Hands would cover the bills.

  Valentina took Annie to the waiting room while I worked. When I finished, I followed them there.

  They were alone in the room. Newspapers were scattered around them. Valentina had used one to cover Annie. Valentina had fallen asleep in the chair by the door, Annie on the couch near her.

  I sat down, my heart pounding.

  Now I would have to deal with my split-second decision. Obviously Linda couldn’t take the beatings any longer, and she had shot Duane in the face. Then she collapsed. Annie hadn’t known what to do or maybe was too frightened to move, until the fire alarm forced her out of the building.

  They might have been alone with that corpse for a week or more, until the neighbors reported something. Then the police would have come, charged Linda with murder, put Annie in foster care, and no one would have heard of them again.

  No one would have cared that Linda had been repeatedly beaten within an inch of her life. Her only hope would have been an insanity plea, which probably would not have worked — especially since the prosecutor would have said that she had run away from Duane before, and she clearly did not want to be with him.

  I was giving Helping Hands a hell of a burden — the damaged mother, the terrified child — but I figured we could deal with it. And if someone determined that Linda was no longer fit to care for her child, we would find Annie a good home, a sympathetic home, one that would help her grow and overcome these last few years.

  I’d seen that work. It had worked with my son Jimmy.

  Annie sighed and twitched in her sleep. The newspaper fell off her, and I picked it up, gently putting it back over her.

  Then I looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since we picked her up.

  She had an ugly bruise on her forehead. It was black and purple and it had seeped down to her nose. Something had hit her hard there.

  I felt a quick anger at Duane, and then I froze. I looked at her hand, dangling down toward the floor.

  Her thumb was bruised too. And there was a pinch mark on her index finger — the kind you got when you didn’t know how to properly hold a gun.

  My breath caught. The bruises lined up. If she had held the gun on her father, and the gun had gone off, the recoil would have sent her hands backwards, hitting her forehead with enough force to make that bruise.

  Daddy’s dead, she had said.

  And her mother was in Annie’s room, not the adults’ bedroom.

  Hiding?

  Letting her daughter defend her?

  I shivered just a little. I didn’t want to know, and I wasn’t going to ask. I had already broken enough laws for these two. I would let the experts from Helping Hands work with them — and I would never mention my suspicions.

  I had brought them here — risked at least two felony charges — so that they could stay together.

  I wasn’t going to be the one to get in the way of that.

  Valentina stirred. “How’s Linda?” she asked sleepily.

  “Badly beaten,” I said. “But they think she’ll be all right.”

  “Good.” Valentina looked at Annie. “Bastard beat her too. I had someone look at the bruise. She doesn’t have a concussion.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said.

  Valentina was still looking at the sleeping child. “Think they’ll be all right?”

  “At least now they have a chance,” I said.

  And no one could ask for more than that.

  About the Author

  Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by award-winning bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which she uses for historical mysteries.

  The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year. Kirkus chose Days of Rage as one of the top ten mysteries of the year.

  Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and Salon says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.” She is working on the next Smokey Dalton novel, and a new series about a battered women’s shelter in 1972.

  If you liked “Family Affair,” you might enjoy these Kris Nelscott works:

  Clinic

  Dangerous Road

  Guarding Lacey

  Smoke-Filled Rooms

  Thin Walls