Beggars in Spain

Alice had stopped the car along Highway 42. Leisha said, “This isn’t—”

“It’s a quick-guard place. ‘We have to look like we have some protection, Leisha. We don’t need to tell him anything. I’ll hurry.”

She was out in three minutes with a huge man in a cheap dark suit. He squeezed into the front seat beside Alice and said nothing at all. Alice did not introduce him.

The house was small, a little shabby, with lights on downstairs, none upstairs. The first stars shone in the north, away from Chicago. Alice said to the guard, “Get out of the car and stand here by the car door — no, more in the light — and don’t do anything unless I’m attacked in some way.” The man nodded. Alice started up the walk. Leisha scrambled out of the back seat and caught her sister two-thirds of the way to the plastic front door.

“Alice, what the hell are you doing? I have to—”

“Keep your voice down,” Alice said, glancing at the guard. “Leisha, think. You’ll be recognized. Here, near Chicago, with a Sleepless daughter — these people have looked at your picture in magazines for years. They’ve watched long-range holovids of you. They know you, They know you’re going to be a lawyer. Me they’ve never seen. I’m nobody.”

“Alice—”

“For Chrissake, get back in the car!” Alice hissed, and pounded on the front door.

Leisha drew off the walk, into the shadow of a willow tree. A man opened the door. His face was completely blank.

Alice said, “Child Protection Agency. We got a call from a little girl, this number. Let me in.”

“There’s no little girl here.”

“This is an emergency, priority one,” Alice said. “Child Protection Act 186. Let me in!”

The man, still blank-faced, glanced at the huge figure by the car. “You got a search warrant?”

“I don’t need one in a priority-one child emergency. If you don’t let me in, you’re going to have legal snarls like you never bargained for.”

Leisha clamped her lips together. No one would believe that, it was legal gobbledygook… Her lip throbbed where Alice had hit it.

The man stood aside to let Alice enter.

The guard started forward. Leisha hesitated, then let him. He entered with Alice.

Leisha waited, alone, in the dark.

In three minutes they were out, the guard carrying a child. Alice’s broad face gleamed pale in the porch light. Leisha sprang forward, opened the car door, and helped the guard ease the child inside. The guard was frowning, a slow puzzled frown shot with wariness.

Alice said, “Here. This is an extra hundred dollars. To get back to the city by yourself.”

“Hey…” the guard said, but he took the money. He stood looking after them as Alice pulled away.

“He’ll go straight to the police,” Leisha said despairingly. “He has to, or risk his union membership.”

“I know,” Alice said. “But by that time we’ll be out of the car.”

“Where?”

“At the hospital,” Alice said.

“Alice, we can’t—” Leisha didn’t finish. She turned to the back seat. “Stella? Are you conscious?”

“Yes,” said the small voice.

Leisha groped until her fingers found the rear-seat illuminator. Stella lay stretched out on the seat, her face distorted with pain. She cradled her left arm in her right. A single bruise colored her face, above the left eye. Her red hair was tangled and dirty.

“You’re Leisha Camden,” the child said, and started to cry.

“Her arm’s broken,” Alice said.

“Honey, can you…” Leisha’s throat felt thick, she had trouble getting the words out “…can you hold on till we get you to a doctor?”

“Yes,” Stella said. “Just don’t take me back there!”

“We won’t,” Leisha said. “Ever.” She glanced at Alice and saw Tony’s face.

Alice said, “There’s a community hospital about ten miles south of here.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was there once. Drug overdose,” Alice said briefly. She drove hunched over the wheel, with the face of someone thinking furiously. Leisha thought, too, trying to see a way around the legal charge of kidnapping. They probably couldn’t say the child came willingly. Stella would undoubtedly cooperate but at her age and in her condition she was probably non sui juris, her word would have no legal weight…

“Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable online.”

“Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the back seat, “here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

“I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

“You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”

“Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”

“Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the Emergency Room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.

Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

Leisha could.

But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ‘99 Cadillac — she could imagine the owner’s face if that were missing — ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hover car with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

“Hello,” Leisha said.

The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

“See that hover car over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m inside, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s blow.

“So?”

Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette and looked again at the hover car. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

“All nice and legal,” Leisha said, trying to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

“Let me see the cash.”

Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like Bruce. There had always been safety.

“Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money on the roof where you can see it.”