Thursday's Child by Teri White Page B

“Solicitin’? Why, sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just standing here eating a hot dog. Is there any law against that?”
    â€œNo law,” he said, although he knew and she knew that no girl—or boy, for that matter—would be standing in this place, at this time of the night, unless she or he was trying very hard to hustle up some cash.
    Gar had ordered some coffee. It finally arrived and he stirred it with the skinny plastic stick provided by the sleepy counterman. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want to talk.”
    â€œUh-huh.” A sudden light came into her eyes. “Like, how do I know that my parents didn’t hire you to find me and drag me back there?”
    Before answering, he risked a sip of the coffee, which tasted pretty much the way you would expect coffee at a twenty-four-hour hot-dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard to taste. Luckily, a man who was a cop for nearly twenty years acquired many skills, not the least of which was the ability to swallow any foul brew that called itself coffee. “No,” he said. “Your folks didn’t hire me.”
    The light was gone from her eyes as quickly as it had appeared. “Yeah, well, it’s a damned good thing, ’cause I wouldn’t go anyway. Fuck them, is what I say.”
    Absurdly, Gar felt as if he should apologize to the girl for the fact that he wasn’t looking for her. But such an apology would be pointless, as he knew from painful experience, because it would only piss her off so much that she might not give him any information at all. Assuming that she had any to give, of course, which was a pretty big assumption to make. None of the dozen or so kids he had talked to over the course of what was becoming a very long evening had known anything. Or, if they had, nobody was talking.
    She picked up a can of orange soda and drank. As she set the can down again, her eyes seemed for the first time to notice the black ebony cane at his side. “So, what’re you, like a crip or something?”
    â€œSomething like that, yeah. I’m looking for a girl named Tammi McClure.”
    â€œDon’t know her,” she said immediately.
    Deniability was as important to these street kids as it was to the idiots in the White House. If you made sure not to know what was going on, how could you possibly be blamed for anything? The place to be these days was as far out of the loop as you could get.
    Gar reached into another pocket, this time coming out with the photo that Mrs. McClure had given him. “Maybe if you look at this,” he suggested. “I heard that maybe she was turning tricks in this neighborhood recently.”
    â€œI don’t know anything about that.” The girl finished her hot dog before reaching out to take the photograph from him. At once, her face brightened. “Hey, you want to hear something really wild?”
    Maybe his luck was turning. “What’s that?”
    â€œI had this same dress once,” she said in a dreamy voice. “The exactly same dress, except that mine was yellow, not pink.” She held the picture out at arm’s length, tilting it, and pursing her lips critically. “It was much prettier in yellow.”
    â€œYou must have been a real knockout,” Gar said quietly.
    â€œYeah.” She gnawed at her upper lip for a moment and then tossed the photo down onto the counter. “I don’t know the bitch.”
    Gar quickly removed the picture from a puddle of some unknown liquid. The denial didn’t ring true for some reason; or maybe he was just naturally suspicious. He took out a ten-spot and fingered it suggestively. “You absolutely sure about that, honey?”
    She looked at the bill, then at the photo again. The instinctive desire not to get involved warred with her need for the money, and after a brief struggle, need won out, as it usually did. “Well, it