Cracked by Barbra Leslie

Danny?”
    Good question. “Because,” I said. “Because I know they didn’t have anything to do with this; it’s absolutely ludicrous. And I won’t rat these guys out.”
    “Honor amongst thieves?” Miller said, eating his churro calmly.
    “Fuck you, Detective,” I answered. “I’m a lot of things, but a thief isn’t one of them.” Inappropriate emotion, perhaps, but nothing made me more crazy than the world’s assumption that all addicts are depraved and degenerate.
    He shrugged. “You know what they say? About how you can tell an addict is lying?” He swallowed the last bite. He looked at Darren and me, who were staring at him. “His lips are moving. Or in this case, hers.”
    “Go fuck yourself, Detective. Or better yet, stop hanging around here and do your job. Find our nephews.”
    He stood up and grabbed his notebook, shoved it back into his pocket. “Are you telling me that you are not cooperating with this investigation?”
    “No,” I answered honestly. “I just don’t want to rat out my only sources. Toronto will be pretty dry when I get back there, if I do.”
    Miller started out of the room. “Wouldn’t that be a shame,” he said over his shoulder. Darren got up from his stool and gave me a sad, disappointed look, then followed Miller out of the room.
    Whereupon I took my coffee mug, poured the dregs into the sink, and smashed it as hard as I could onto the tile floor. Marta came running.
    “Sorry, Marta,” I said to her. “Sorry.” She looked at me, then down at the floor.
    “You sad?” she asked me, getting the broom. I hadn’t moved.
    “Yes, Marta, I am sad,” I answered. “But now I’m something else. I’m mad.”
    I hugged her one more time, whispered another apology into her ear, and left the room.

6
    I snuck back up to my room to grab my purse. Detectives Miller and French, along with two other men in plain clothes who I could only assume were also law enforcement of some variety, were talking very seriously with Darren. They didn’t seem to notice me pass the doorway on my way to the stairway. Upstairs, I grabbed my purse and checked my wallet. Great. Nothing but two credit cards that I just hadn’t gotten around to cutting up. When collection agencies are after you for non-payment, credit card companies tend not to let you use their cards much anymore. And my debit card. It was possible that my monthly support money from Jack had gone into the bank. I couldn’t remember the date. I could never remember the date.
    I definitely needed some cash. A girl needs her walking-around money, my mother used to say. Pin money, she called it. Except in this case, it was my money I was going to need to get around and start doing what I had to do. I couldn’t sit around here any longer, waiting for something to happen. Ginger had died at a motel called the Sunny Jim in Santa Ana. As far as I was concerned, this was the place to start. I knew there would be cops swarming the place. But if the woman who had kidnapped the boys was impersonating me, then I was going to jump in. Bad enough that Ginger had been killed. Bad enough? The worst thing I could imagine happening had happened, and in some moments I felt as though I was sleepwalking through a nightmare.
    But now Ginger’s boys had been taken, and my name had been used to do it. It had to be up to me. I owed it to Ginger. On a million different levels, I owed it to her. She loved me so much she had, if Fred was telling the truth, travelled some distance down the path I was on, to know what I was going through. To feel my pain better, to help me? I would never really know. Maybe when this was all over and if I didn’t make it through whatever happened, I would see Ginger again, and I would know everything. I hoped so. I hoped that would be the outcome, at that moment – find the boys, kill the people who were doing this, and whether in that act or from continuing on the trajectory I was on, I could die too. And just maybe