you can talk? I mean… telling me your age tells me nothing. Do I look like I know much about children?”
She folds her arms over her chest. “I want something else. A key.”
“A key to what? My heart? Sorry, kiddo, that’s already been snatched up. What about three hundred dollars?”
“No, a key to that place,” she says as she points at the office.
I glance over at it. “Why? Is that want he wants?”
She shakes her head, dark hair fluffing up. “No. That’s what I want.”
“You know what? I don’t care. So you have a fetish for keys. Good, great, here you go,” I say as I pull out my car keys and take the office key off the key ring and dangle it above her. She tries to reach for it but her little stubby arms can’t stretch that far. “Spill before I hand it over.”
“Okay… I was just sitting outside and he asked me to pretend to be his daughter.”
“And you didn’t go, ‘Boy, I bet this guy is a creep’?” I ask as I dangle the key in front of her. I don’t know if I’m assuming she’s like a cat and just wants to play with it because it’s shiny, but she sure does stare at it.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. He said that when we went inside, I was supposed to distract this guy named Jackson. I was supposed to ask him to take me to the bathroom or something and then when he led me away from the other guy, I was supposed to start crying about my missing mom.”
Hmm. So he wanted to use the girl as a distraction. Does that mean he wasn’t originally planning on trying to kill Jackson but just taking the laptop? “Okay. Did he give you a name?”
“David.”
“Yeah, well David’s a fake name. I need a real name.”
She shrugs.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No, just said to pretend to be his daughter.”
“You need to work harder if you want this key. What about what he drove? Did you see his car?”
“No. We walked.”
I never knew how annoying children were! I kind of want to shake her a bit but I’m pretty sure that’s frowned on, so I take a deep breath and crouch down until I’m eye level with the demon. Maybe because she’s so far down she doesn’t understand the threat level of my glare, but stooping might help so she’s head on with my narrowed eyes. “That man who was shot is someone I love very dearly. And fake David is the man who shot him. I need—”
Her eyes widen again. “Is he going to shoot me next? I don’t want to die!”
And now I have a hysterical child on my hands.
“Not if I kill him first,” I assure her.
She looks at me in pure horror when I was positive she’d be thrilled to hear that she had nothing to worry about. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Not if you tell me what I want to know,” I say, since that sounded like a good way for her to talk until she starts crying and I realize that maybe that wasn’t a good way to get her to talk.
“I… don’t… want… to… diiiiiiieee,” she says between sobs. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
Oh good god. What have I done?
She’s wheezing as she stares at me. “Please don’t kill meeeeee.”
“I’m not going to kill you!”
“You said you would if I didn’t talk and I don’t know what to talk about because I don’t know, and I just wanted the key and you’re going to killllll meeeee.”
Are children always this dramatic? I reach up and snap my fingers in front of her face to snap her out of it. Maybe children are like a switch. What I don’t realize is that lifting my arm lifts the left side of my coat, showing off one of my favorite guns.
“You have a gun! Nooooo. I’m too young to die! I haven’t even lived my life.”
“Here, shiny key. Ooh. Shiny!” I say as I toss the key at her. The key does a magnificent flip through the air before stabbing her right in the hand.
She opens her mouth in a soundless O. “My hand! Are you going to key me to death?” she asks as she holds her hands against her chest and I question what kind of guardian she has to not come in to see why the child is in hysterics.
Okay. Think. Think. It’s a child. It can’t be that hard