Page 53 of Remember When We
“That bar was packed though and I knew Paul was making good money back in the day. Good money to pay staff and give his kids a good life.”
I did the calc once and figured Paul was making a good twenty g’s a month.
Lyssa working in both the salon and the bar, what the fuck kind of debt must she have to be working so hard? Looked like she worked all day too, salon then followed by the bar. I was trained to take notice. I did it naturally and something was suspicious as fuck here.
“Why didn’t you just ask her?”
I shook my head. “Nah, I was treading softly. I demanded she come back to Chicago with me and basically stepped back into her life. Didn’t want to go asking about anything more personal like debts. Actually, I hinted at it and she thought that meant I wanted to take Matthew away from her.” I was so mad at her at the time that I just allowing her to be scared that I’d do just that. But like I had said I never would. There was no way in hell that I would do something like that especially to her.
Dante sighed. “Okay, I’ll get the secret squad on it. Want me to do that?”
The secret squad, that could definitely work. I wouldn’t have the awkward task of asking her or Paul. They could just look up shit and I’d take it from there.
“Yes. That would great.”
“Cool. With that done you can keep your focus.”
I nodded, realizing with what Dante had said I really could focus. I pulled out the piece of paper Paul gave me with the details of the support groups.
I would have preferred to check out the police station, but I’d learned over the last few weeks to allow Gibbs to do his job. If Gibbs said we should go this route, much as I had my own ways of doing stuff, I’d do it his way.
“Fucking support group. It’s a good thing for the community, but I don’t know what to expect.” I grimaced.
“I don’t know what to expect either.” Dante frowned. “It just seems like checking something out to tick it off a list.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
The plan was to go there and ask the organizer questions. I knew what Dante meant though, because it could be a lost cause. In groups like that people came and went. There was always turn-over and organizers changed. It was all voluntary, so it tended to have a changeover of staff and organizers every so often. I didn’t know specifically, because the one time I tried drugs I swore I’d never do it again. I ended up on the roof of a hundred story hotel thinking I could fly. It was my friend Dante here who had got me down alive.
We were about seventeen at the time and that was the outcome of a wild party we shouldn’t have gone to.
“We’ll see what happens?” Dante raised his shoulders into a shrug.
“Yeah, let’s see what happens indeed.”
Chapter 16
Gio
* * *
It was the typical set up.
Community Centre, but this group had a room for themselves with the chairs all set out in rows like a classroom.
Of the two groups Paul had given me, this one was still in operation. The other location had closed and merged into this group.
They were called Sacred Heart Support, covered everything from drug and alcohol abuse to women who’d gone through domestic violence. There were groups running throughout the day. It was only two, we’d just sat through the lunch hour group for guys with both drug and alcohol problems. The same guy who ran the group for the specific individual problems of drugs or alcohol ran this one too. Apparently, there were different triggers and sometimes one trigger kick started the other.
I didn’t think we were going to sit through the whole thing, but it was Gibbs’ way of analyzing. I looked at him, saw his face, and realized this was part of the plan.
Today was a speech on the triggers and the organizer was a middle aged tough looking guy with a beard. He looked a little like Paul Bunyan, like a guy’s guy with the lumberjack look. He also seemed like the type of guy who’d have heart too.
We stood when he wrapped up the group and Gibbs set off to approach him first. I kind of hated when he did that, because he was the kind of guy who went with the flow of things. I just didn’t know what he was doing until he actually did it.
Just like right now.
From the way Dante rolled his eyes I could tell that it annoyed him too. We were the type of people who communicated what we were doing before taking action.
