Legacies

6.

Alicia wasn't hungry, so she put off lunch. She liked this quiet time when no IV-therapy sessions were scheduled for the clinic and the day-care kids were having lunch; the staff and volunteers who weren't with the kids were out grabbing a quick bite. Usually she stayed in her office and caught up on her paperwork. But today she was restless.

And she didn't know why. It wasn't because of Hector—the little guy with the "mad buth cut" seemed to be responding to the antibiotic. She simply had to move.

She left her cluttered desk and took a stroll through the empty halls, lost in thought, wondering what to do next. Wait for Jack, or make another contact? She'd scraped up the name of someone else. Should she—?

She stopped. She'd heard a sound… almost like a whimper. She stood frozen, her body tingling as she listened.

And then she heard it again, fainter. And then a low voice, whispering… from somewhere around the corner…

Moving on tiptoe, and glad she was wearing sneakers, Alicia peeked around the corner and saw…

An empty hall.

She was beginning to think she'd imagined the noises when she heard the whisper again… coming from a hall closet just a few feet away. The door was cracked open, and the voice was definitely male…

"See? Didn't I tell you it wouldn't hurt? There now… doesn't that feel nice?"

Biting back a surge of bile that almost choked her, Alicia reached for the door. She watched her hand tremble like a leaf in a gale as it neared the knob. She forced it to grip it and pull.

And then she saw them, like a flash picture: a middle-aged white man—a volunteer she'd seen around recently but didn't know by name yet—blinking in the sudden light, his hand down the pants of a little black girl, no more than four years old—Kanessa Jackson.

And then the light exploded around her, as if her world suddenly became an overexposed video in which she heard her voice shouting, screaming, with glaring light everywhere as she spun into a wild 180-degree pan, stopping at a fire hose and chemical extinguisher recessed in the wall. Her hands pulling open the glass door, grabbing the canister and turning, swinging it at the man, watching him duck but not soon enough, catching him on the side of his head, watching him try to stumble in one direction as Kanessa ran in the other, following him, beating him on his head, his back, beating him down, and then bludgeoning him until—

"Alicia! Alicia, my God, you'll kill him!"

She felt hands grabbing her arms, restraining her, but she didn't want to stop. She wanted to kill him. She wanted him dead.

"Alicia, please!"

Raymond's voice. She stopped struggling. She looked down at the bloody man, cowering and whimpering beneath her. And suddenly she wanted to be sick. She stumbled back but did not release her grip on the fire extinguisher.

"Call 911!" she gasped.

"Why?" Raymond said. "What happened?"

She glanced at Raymond and saw the shock and concern in his eyes. He'd never seen her like this. Of course not. No one had. She'd never been like this. And it wasn't over. Blood lust still pounded in her ears like a war drum. Alicia didn't know who was more afraid—the creep on the floor, Raymond, or herself.

"Get the cops!" she said. "I want this perv out of here and locked up! Now!"

"Okay!" Raymond said, backing away, "but just be cool, okay, Alicia? Just be cool."

"And find Kanessa Jackson. Have one of the nurses check her over. Make sure she's all right."

As Raymond moved off, she turned back to the creep. The sick feeling waned as rage flared again.

"And you," she said through her teeth. It took all her restraint to keep from taking a few more swings at him. "You stay right where you are, or so help me God, I'll kill you."