Between Love and Duty

by Janice Kay Johnson

  But he was uncomfortably aware that a call from him could be construed as harassment, given how blunt she’d been.

  Obviously, I gave you the wrong impression. I’m correcting that now. I’m not your business.

  Oh, yeah, she couldn’t have been much clearer.

  He checked his cell phone even though he would have felt it vibrate. No missed calls. With a sigh, he unlocked the vehicle door and got in. There were probably a couple of people here who wouldn’t have minded joining him for a meal, but he wasn’t in the mood. He’d find something in the freezer at home.

  SHE KNEW THAT VOICE. Richard Hopkins. Of all the people she’d dealt with as Guardian ad Litem, he’d made her the most uncomfortable.

  “Drop your purse,” he whispered. When she didn’t unclench her fingers fast enough, the knife bit into her skin and she felt a trickle of blood run down her neck like beads of sweat. “Now.”

  The purse fell with a clunk. So much for hoping to slide her hand in and find the pepper spray.

  She tried frantically to think. The alarm would blare soon if she didn’t turn it off. Would he know that? Did it matter? Maybe he intended to kill her here and now.

  It did matter, because he nudged her toward the control panel. “Do what you have to do,” he told her. “I’ll slice your throat if that thing starts screaming.”

  Maybe it would be better if he did slice her throat now, versus taking his time about it. Jane shuddered. No. Wasn’t there a chance that he didn’t actually intend to kill her? Despite his every hint to the contrary?

  Blood, viscous and pungent, splattered and sprayed on the walls.

  A hint, Jane thought hysterically. That was like calling death “passing away.”

  She felt the bump of the phone in her pocket as he turned her. Her adrenaline surged. With Duncan on speed dial she could push only two buttons…but Richard would hear the ringing. She imagined him slamming the cell phone to the concrete floor of the garage. Having to watch her only link to the outside shatter.

  Oh God oh God oh God please help.

  Text. Could she text silently, by feel alone? Did Duncan have his phone set to ring or only to vibrate when a text came in? She’d bet on the latter. But…could she do it by feel alone? Her breath hitched in a near sob. She didn’t dare swallow. Step by terrifying step, she was being pushed to the control panel by the door leading into the house.

  What if she thought she’d succeeded in texting him but really had pushed the wrong button? Or whatever he got was incoherent? Though that would alarm him, wouldn’t it? Or what if he tossed his phone aside the way she’d seen him do when he got home and didn’t notice that it had vibrated?

  She had to try.

  She tapped the sequence of numbers on the control panel first and saw the light flash to indicate it was satisfied. They could go in, where normally she’d reset the alarm by the front door. But she wouldn’t be doing that, would she?

  Jane stumbled on the step and the blade bit deeper. In her fear, she felt it as no more than a sting. She had her right hand in her pocket, where she started pushing buttons. Oh God oh God, she’d forgotten the tiny beeps.

  “Why do you blame me?” she asked loudly. “I don’t understand. I haven’t been in the picture for years.”

  Focus. Remember what the screens look like. She thought she had clicked on a New Message screen that would go to number one on speed dial—Duncan.

  She kept talking. “You could have built a good relationship with your daughter.”

  Her thumb kept moving. She scraped her feet to drown out the tiny beeps.

  Help home

  That was surely enough. Please let that be what she’d actually typed. Send. One last small beep.

  “What was that?” Richard snarled. “Was it that damn security system? Are you trying to trick me?”

  “No.” Terror made speaking hard. “It’s off. I swear. I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Where’s your phone?” he said suddenly.

  “I don’t have one anymore here in the house.”

  “I know that!” he shouted. “Your cell phone.”

  “In…in my purse,” she whispered. “I think. Maybe in the car. Or…or it could have fallen in the trunk.”

  Oh, God, she now had a new fear. What if it rang? Pretend you didn’t know it was in your pocket. What else could she do? Hide it somewhere, if she got the chance? No, she might have a chance to use it. Another chance.

  Her eyes burned with unshed tears. Duncan, check your phone. I need you.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DUNCAN THOUGHT ABOUT MAKING a sandwich, but scanned the entrées his housekeeper had frozen for him. One label caught his eye. Creole Chicken. After a moment, he took it out, read the instructions and put it in the microwave. He’d started it whirring when his cell phone gave a little bounce on the tile countertop and hummed.

  Text message.

  Jane had never texted him. He couldn’t imagine why she would. Niall, maybe? Frowning, Duncan reached for the phone.

  His heart jumped when he saw that the message actually was from Jane. He opened it.

  Hflp homf

  What the hell…? He stared for an instant without comprehension. Then…

  Help. Oh, shit, she’d been trying to type help. Typing blind?

  Swearing, hand shaking, he dialed his brother’s phone number. Niall answered on the first ring.

  “Where are you?” Duncan demanded.

  He had a flash, remembering the way Jane teased him about never starting a conversation with hello, hey, how are you. He could hear her laughing. He bypassed fear and went straight to anguish.

  “On my way home,” Niall said. “Why?”

  “I got a text from Jane. It says ‘help home.’ I’m—God—close to fifteen minutes away.”

  He’d gathered his keys and was blundering into the garage. The door rose.

  Niall’s voice was crisp and hard. All cop. “I’m two.”

  “No siren.”

  “No siren.”

  “If the security system is on…”

  “Either way, I’ll break a goddamn window.”

  He was backing out of the garage, careening into the street. “I love her,” he said hoarsely.

  “Yeah.” Duncan had never heard the tone in his brother’s voice before. It was…gentle. “So you said.”

  Choked, Duncan got out a thank-you.

  “See you there.” Niall ended the call.

  Duncan drove like he’d never driven before, his mind consumed by fear and the realization that he couldn’t save her. Only Niall could, if they weren’t too late already.

  THE SILENCE AS RICHARD pushed her toward the stairs was unbearable.

  She asked, wishing she didn’t sound so tremulous, “What are you going to do to me?” Better to know. Wasn’t it?

  She had yet to get a good look at his face. He’d stayed behind her the whole time, knife blade to her throat. His breath was hot on her neck. Bad breath, as if he hadn’t bothered to brush his teeth in a while. Actually, he smelled, that awful fetid odor of someone who hadn’t showered in way too long.

  “What I want to do is take everything away from you, the way you did to me.” The way he talked was odd. Slightly singsong. Or maybe it was Jane’s hearing.

  She reluctantly took the first step. The angle of the knife changed. Richard wasn’t very tall, she remembered. He was having to reach up when she was a step above him. Was there any way she could take advantage of that?

  “But you don’t have anybody to take away,” he continued, sounding mad about that. He shoved. “Move! No children. I would have liked to kill your child, so you know what it feels like.”

  “Your daughter…” Don’t swallow, don’t swallow, not with a knife at your throat. “Susie’s not dead.”

  “She’s dead to me. She screamed, ‘I never want to see you again!’ To me.”

  Wow. Imagine that.

  Duncan, please.

  “As long as she’s alive,
there’s hope.” Jane winced at her own platitude. It was true, oh, yes, it was, but it still sounded like a greeting card.

  “She was everything to me. Everything.”

  Her throat hurt. How deep was he cutting? “Your children,” she gasped, “aren’t supposed to be everything.”

  “I loved her!”

  His roar made her jump.

  “You turned her against me. It was you and that bitch Joan.”

  His wife. A petite woman who, Jane remembered thinking, had been quiet and self-effacing until the day she realized her husband was looking at their daughter, touching her, wrong. And then she had become a lioness. So different from the women who refused to see, refused to believe, because it would disrupt their lives.

  “Why are we going upstairs?” she asked.

  “I want to kill you in your bedroom.”

  “I’ve cleaned it up.”

  “Did it scare you?” he asked with creepy interest.

  Why not be honest? “Yes.”

  What if she fell against him? Would her weight send them both tumbling down the stairs? But with the blade biting into her throat, all his arm would have to do was tighten momentarily.

  Reach up and grab his wrist? Jane tried to remember how strong he’d looked. He was about Hector’s height. But Hector was muscular, stocky. Richard Hopkins had been fairly slight, she thought, but then recalled that he was a runner. He’d talked once about competing in the Boston Marathon. Wiry and strong, then.

  When he leaned in to snarl in her ear, “Quit dragging your feet,” she felt the scrape of his unshaven jaw. Niall hadn’t been able to locate him. What had he been doing, hiding out in the woods up the hill from her street?

  She was getting light-headed. Hyperventilating. How long had passed? Five minutes? Twenty? She had no idea.

  She sent a plea out into the ether. Duncan.

  Only a few steps to go. Then the length of the hall. Even if help came now, Richard could so easily slit her throat before anyone could possibly reach them.

  I’m not weak, she thought. Dance had made her strong. If no one came—or if someone did—she would fight. Grab his wrist and twist away. Kick him. She had especially strong legs. Maybe she should have fought sooner.

  No—help might be on the way. It could be here. While there’s life there’s hope. An hysterical bubble of laughter tried to rise from her chest.

  They walked down the hall, shuffling their feet in tandem. He wasn’t letting any distance open between them. She was sick to her stomach now, too. It’s his breath, his odor. If she started to heave, would he back off in instinctive repulsion? It wouldn’t be all that hard to do.

  Duncan, where are you?

  DUNCAN TOOK A CORNER so fast, the SUV might have been on two wheels.

  Niall should be there by now. More than two minutes had passed. Three, four, at least. Had he gotten into the house? If it was empty, he’d have called. What was he doing?

  The light turned yellow ahead. Duncan slammed his foot down on the accelerator and tore through the intersection.

  JANE WAS STARTLED BY THE reflection in the dark window. Not sharp like in a mirror. The mirrors this man had shattered in a fit of rage. No, what she saw was shadowy, insubstantial, like a pair of ghosts.

  Only…it seemed as if something else was moving out there. Not a tree limb; the old maple in her backyard wasn’t close enough to the house. Was it another reflection? Someone behind them who’d slipped into the room?

  As if she heard a sharp, warning voice, she thought, Don’t let him notice.

  “Please,” she whispered. “If you love Susie, you’ll see I was trying to help her. Maybe I was wrong, but…but I was trying to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing?” Spittle dampened her neck. “Taking her away from her father, who loved her?”

  Had his hand relaxed the slightest bit?

  “I didn’t know,” she mumbled. Oh, but she had known. She had. “Love” shouldn’t be sick and perverted. His own daughter.

  Her eyes strained to see past the reflection in the glass. And she saw it—a face. A sudden movement. Outside? She grappled with the idea. How could anyone be looking in her second-story window? But someone was. Which meant, whatever she was going to do had to be…now.

  She reached up and grabbed Richard’s wrist and forearm. Simultaneously, the window glass exploded inward. She couldn’t get a good grip. His hand seemed to be slippery. Her vision wavered. She was screaming, pushing his hand away from her neck for all she was worth, but her legs didn’t want to support her anymore.

  “Police! Drop it!” a voice barked. Not Duncan. As if engaged in a terrible dance, Jane and Richard swayed. Was she winning? They were twirling, and then there came a crack of thunder and with his arm wrapped around her his weight bore her down. The floor ascended or she descended, Jane had no idea. It was like a kaleidoscope, spinning, and why was her face wet?

  A DRIVE THAT SHOULD HAVE taken fifteen minutes took nine.

  Duncan pulled up to the curb a block away and ran. He had almost reached Jane’s house when his cell phone rang.

  “I shot him,” Niall said baldly. “He’s dead. Jane’s…bleeding. I think she’s okay, but she went down hard and either hit her head or passed out.” He paused. “Are you close?”

  “Outside.”

  The tension in Niall’s voice scared the crap out of Duncan. Bleeding. He’d given up praying a lifetime ago, but he was doing it now.

  “Good,” Niall said. “I don’t want to take pressure off her wound. You don’t have a key, do you?”

  “No. I’m coming through a window.”

  “Open the front door for the EMTs.”

  The next-door neighbor’s kid had left a tricycle out in the front yard. Duncan grabbed it on the run, leaped onto her front porch and slammed the trike through the front window. No scream of an alarm; it had been disabled somehow. Niall? No. He must have broken a window, too. The alarm should already have been on.

  Duncan didn’t give a shit, and knew on some level that he was distracting himself. He’d never been more scared in his life than he was of what he’d find upstairs.

  He unlocked and flung open the front door. Already he could hear the distant wail of a siren. No light on in the kitchen. He took the stairs three at a time.

  Light spilled from the bedroom at the end of the hall. Jane’s bedroom. He could hear the murmur of Niall’s voice. His own steps slowed as fear swelled in him like nothing he’d ever felt before.

  “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Niall was saying. “You’re going to be fine. Hang in there, honey. Duncan needs you.” More raggedly, “Damn, I wish you’d open your eyes. Don’t even think about dying on us. No, I didn’t say that. The cut’s not that deep.”

  When Duncan went into her bedroom, blood dominated his vision. Too much blood. She was soaked in it. In his horror, he didn’t even waste a glance at the body slumped a few feet away. He hardly saw his brother, kneeling beside her, his hand seemingly wrapping her throat. It was Jane. Only Jane. Completely still.

  It looked like Niall had tried to wipe her face clean. But her hair glistened dark. Duncan heard himself groaning as he, too, fell to his knees beside her.

  “The blood’s not all hers,” his brother said. “Most of it isn’t hers. God. I had to wait until they turned. You know what head shots are like. I was so afraid of the bullet ricocheting off his skull. I got him through the temple. His head just, uh…”

  “Where’s she bleeding from?” Duncan asked, his own voice unrecognizable.

  “Neck. He had a knife to her throat. It was…blood was running down her neck.”

  The siren screamed to a stop outside. Doors slammed. Noise and voices downstairs. Niall yelled, “Up here!”

  They came, two paramedics with a stretcher and the tools of their trade. Duncan and Niall had to give way. The two, man and woman, checked her airway, asked questions about any possible head injury, cleaned up blood with wipes so they could see bette
r and applied a thick white dressing to her neck. Then they were lifting her and carrying her downstairs, moving fast.

  Duncan blundered to his feet and followed.