Free Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time by M.P. Wright Page A

here, man. Where’d you git it? You been selling ganja?” Vic asked suspiciously.
    While we ate breakfast, I told Vic about my meeting with Linney on Monday evening, the money, and being followed by the guy I got into the fight with. I sat with a mug of strong coffee, warming my hands while my cousin listened in silence to the details I recanted.
    “So, let me git this straight. Some big honky follows your ass from Clifton then beats you with a sap. Then you’re kicked across the street by a police car, and the fifty notes in your pocket they don’t touch. Someting stinks ’bout it all, brother.”
    Vic was on a roll and he had a point.
    “JT, the ting you need to be asking yourself is why the Babylon are interested in you meeting up with that old Jamaican bastard. You think on ’bout that befo’ you start worrying ’bout anyting else.”
    Vic ran me a hot bath and I soaked my aching body before shaving myself with an unsteady hand. I stretched out in the tub and enjoyed the soothing heat of the water on my limbs. Getting cleaned up had made me feel a little more human again. I put my towel round my waist and returned to my bedroom with Loretta Harris’s comment last night about Stella Hopkins being a whore rolling round in my head.
    After slowly changing into a fresh shirt and jeans, I sat in my armchair in the bedroom and struggled to bend over to put on my socks, my beat-up body smarting with each movement I made. Loretta arrived just after eleven with my clothes from last night washed and ironed. Carnell had taken my shoes with him, dried them out and polished them within an inch of their life, buffing away the white tidemarks that the snow had created and leaving a shining gleam on them.
    Loretta kissed Vic on the cheek before coming in and sitting down next to me on the edge of the bed, running her red-nailed fingers across my scalp and rubbing my neck before speaking.
    “How you feelin’, JT? You sure looking better than you did, lover.”
    “I’m good, Loretta, good. Thanks fo’ cleaning up my stuff.”
    The humility in my voice caused her cheeks to flush.
    “You needn’t thank me, JT. I know you’d do it fo’ me an’ Carnell.”
    She smiled and took my hand in hers as she spoke. I looked up towards her and lightly squeezed her fingers. It was a simple gesture of gratitude, which was all I could muster at that moment.
    “Loretta, what you said last night ’bout that missing girl, Stella Hopkins, being a whore. What you mean by it?”
    “What’s to mean, JT? Last weekend I was with Jocelyn Charles in the Prince o’ Wales. She’s one of Papa Anansi’s girls.” Loretta grimaced as she spoke the pimp’s name. “Anyhow, we git to talking ’bout how that Stella girl had gone missing and that Jocelyn had seen her at a party she was working at.”
    “You happen to know where I can find Jocelyn?” I asked.
    “Baby, if you wanting somebody to hook up with to keep you warm at night, I can think o’ somebody a little more righteous than Jocelyn.”
    “I’m sure you can, Mrs Harris, but I kinda need to speak to her urgently.”
    “You can try the Speed Bird club, she normally in there most nights filling herself with rum when she ain’t selling her pokey.”
    She got up to leave and turned towards me. The sensual beauty was gone from her face, replaced by worry and fear. Her eyes were telling me what her lips could not. If she had spoken, she’d have told me to stay well clear of Papa Anansi and his girls.
    I sat and listened as Loretta spoke to Vic in hushed tones out in the kitchen.
    After a short while she called out her farewell to me from the hallway and said that Carnell would be coming around later to collect my bloodied sheets and bedding so that she could launder them. I felt I had given a good friend the unnecessary burden of having to worry about me and that my decision to enter a nocturnal domain where only iniquity resided had been the most unwise of choices.
    Vic returned to my