Afraid to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  “Already sampled; got my sugar rush for the morning.”

  His lips twisted beneath his moustache. “If she had her way, everyone here would be hopped up for the entire month of December.”

  “And twenty pounds heavier.” She made the joke, noticed that his eyes twinkled in that sexy way that always got to her, then made her way back to her desk without veering off to the lunchroom.

  She had plenty of work to do and didn’t need to think about Dan Grayson.

  Around noon, she drove home and took a crazed Roscoe out for a jog. The walking trails through a nearby park had their paths cleared of snow for the most part, so she walked him into the entrance of the park on Boxer Bluff, then started jogging, urging him to follow on the leash. The air was crisp and cold, burning a little in her lungs as she started breathing harder, but the trail was scenic, winding through the trees on the cliffs high over the river. She hadn’t bothered with her iPod or iPhone, and instead of listening to music, heard her own breathing, the slap of her running shoes on the asphalt and the rush of the Grizzly River pouring over the falls for which the town was named. The park was serene, the thick blanket of snow covering the winter grass and clinging to the boughs of the evergreen trees.

  She met a few other walkers, bundled in heavy jackets and wool hats and gloves, their breath fogging in the air.

  “On your left,” she heard as a tall, athletic runner passed her as if she were standing still, then nearly tangled in Roscoe’s leash as the rambunctious pup lunged playfully at him.

  “Hey!” the runner said angrily, his pace thrown off.

  And merry Christmas to you, too.

  Alvarez watched him disappear as snow began to fall again. The dog slowed on mile two, and by the third and final mile, Roscoe’s tongue was hanging out and he was panting. “Feel good?” Alvarez asked as they walked back to her town house and she let him inside.

  Three miles, come hell or high water, and the dog was good for the day. So tired, he spent the rest of the day in his bed until she returned at night.

  As she heated soup in the microwave, she walked through the shower and threw on her clothes. With one eye on the television news, she ate quickly while Jane Doe curled on her lap and the dog eyed her every bite. “Mine,” she reminded him when he belly-swamped across the kitchen linoleum to her and looked up with pitiful dark eyes. “You’ll get dinner when I return.”

  He thumped his tail but didn’t stop staring at her. “I’m not buying it.” After finishing her soup, she placed her dish and spoon in the dishwasher, then, as both her pets settled in for their afternoon naps, she bundled up and headed out again.

  At four o’clock on the nose, Joelle let her assistant handle the front desk and marched into the lunchroom with her red Santa’s hat with the well-worn fake white fur. Inside it, Pescoli knew were the names of everyone in the department. “Come in for the drawing!” Joelle yelled. “Secret Santa time!”

  “I thought we just did this,” she muttered under her breath to no one in particular. She’d returned to the station only minutes before and now wished her interview of the Bradshaw family had taken longer.

  “Come on, come on! You, too, Detective,” Joelle said at the doorway to Pescoli’s office.

  “This can’t be mandatory. Isn’t it violating my workplace rights or religious rights in some way?”

  “Oh, pooh!” Joelle was having none of it. “Don’t be a grinch!” She stood on a little stool in the middle of the lunchroom and seemed oblivious to the fact that other people had serious work to do. Waggling the ridiculous hat, she motioned anyone in the lunchroom closer and the assault wouldn’t stop there, Pescoli knew from experience. If someone didn’t partake, that employee was hunted down to his or her desk to draw from the hat. If that didn’t work, then a name was drawn at random and left in an envelope at the declining employee’s work area. It was an unwritten law that everyone, regardless of religious background, partake.

  “Santa Claus is nondemoninational!” Joelle had proclaimed one year when Pescoli had played the religion card.

  “You mean denominational,” Cort Brewster, the undersheriff, had corrected.

  Joelle had winked at him and wrinkled her nose, as if she were being cute—the bimbo. “Of course that’s what I meant.”

  Now, as her iPod played her Christmas carol rotation that seemed to include only Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” the sheriff himself sauntered into the lunchroom; Pescoli rolled her eyes and whispered, “Do something.”

  “I will.” To her dismay, Grayson was the first one to draw a name. “Your turn,” he said out of the side of his mouth as he checked the name on his tiny scrap of paper.

  Nigel Timmons, the dork from the lab, was up next. His thinning hair was sculpted into a faux hawk, and he’d recently given up glasses for contacts that seemed to bother him and give him a wide-eyed stare. His skin was sallow, his frame slight and he was a genius when it came to anything to do with chemistry or computers. As irritating as he was, the twenty-six-year-old was invaluable to the department and he knew it. Smirking to himself—while once again, Bing was crooning, “I’m dreaming of a ...”—Timmons withdrew a piece of paper from the hat, looked it over and read the name upon it, then, being the goof he was, placed it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Top-secret stuff,” he explained and Alvarez looked pained.

  “We’re not in sixth grade,” she said.

  “Speak for yourself.” Timmons flashed her a grin and started perusing the remainder of the day’s baked goods before snagging a cookie that he held in his mouth while he picked over the fudge and cupcakes.

  “I think Timmons had graduated from Yale by the sixth grade,” Pescoli whispered and Alvarez’s pained expression grew more intense.

  “Don’t remind me that he’s freakin’ brilliant, okay?”

  Everyone took their turn, then walked back to their desks, and Pescoli, rather than suffer Joelle’s ridicule for the second year in a row, plucked a name from the hat. Anyone but Cort Brewster, she thought, as she’d had to deal with him last year and their relationship was anything but smooth, as her son, Jeremy, and his daughter, Heidi, couldn’t quite break up. Each parent blamed the other for the kids getting into trouble. She opened the scrap of paper, and damn if it didn’t have the undersheriff’s name on it. “Sorry, it’s my own,” she said hastily, returning the label to Joelle’s hat before the receptionist could protest. Brenda Lee was rockin’ away. Quickly, Pescoli swiped another scrap and this time saw Joelle’s name on the paper. God, that was worse, but she was stuck. As it was, Joelle eyed her suspiciously, so she walked quickly back to her desk and wondered what the hell would she get a grandmother who looked like Barbie and was stuck in the sixties. God, that was half a century before.

  Pescoli didn’t have time for this nonsense. If she were going to fret about Christmas gifts, it damned well better be for her kids or Santana. Good Lord, what was she going to get him this year?

  “How about nothing?” he’d suggested when she asked him what he wanted for Christmas. “Then after I unwrap the box, you could put it on.”

  “Not funny,” she’d said but had to swallow back a smile.

  “And you’re a liar.” They’d been alone at his cabin and he’d advanced on her, then kissed her and carried her into the bedroom.

  That had been a new and heart-racing experience. She’d never been petite and, though not fat, wasn’t small. Santana hadn’t seemed to notice as he’d hauled her over the threshold and tumbled with her onto the bed, then made love to her as if she were the only woman in the universe.

  Now, her blood pumped hot just to think of it.

  Which she wouldn’t. Not at work. Nor would she examine all her motives for not moving in with him. The invitation had been open for over a year, make that close to two, but she’d resisted, preferring to play it safe. Neither of her previous marriages had been perf
ect, so she wasn’t interested in falling head over heels in love again.

  Too late, her mind told her, but she sat down in her desk chair and turned her attention to her work. Secret Santa be damned; she needed to find out if Martin Zwolski was the most unlucky person on the planet, or if he was a cold-blooded murderer who was about to slip through the cracks.

  The steeple bell was just striking the half hour as Brenda Sutherland hurried across the icy parking lot of the church. So it was eight thirty and Lorraine Mullins, the preacher’s wife, had promised that it wouldn’t run past eight. Promised.

  But then she hadn’t counted on Mildred Peeples going on and on about the costs of the new church. Mildred was ninety if she was a day, sharp as a whip and opinionated to the nth. She wasn’t about to keep on track with the Bible study meeting about the giving tree they were establishing this year and had preferred to go over, line by line, the “ridiculous” and “outrageous” costs of constructing the new church. “This is the Lord’s house,” she’d insisted, “and everyone in town, every single parishioner should give their time, money and labor into its construction. Lorraine?” she’d asked the preacher’s wife. “Did you see the estimate for the plumbing? Did you?” Her face had flushed beneath her thick powder and she’d wagged a finger at Dorie Oestergard, wife of the unfortunate contractor assigned to the job. Though it was well known that he’d cut his usual fee by 25 percent for the church, Mildred was certain he’d “padded the bills” and she’d been vocal about it. “Your husband should be ashamed of himself, Dorie. It’s highway robbery! Can’t he read his own bills?”

  That comment had elicited a gasp from Dorie, but Mildred was on a roll and didn’t stop. “If you ask me,” she’d said, “the devil’s behind this. He’s always there, y’know, Satan, he’s just over your shoulder, waiting to pounce.” Her lips had pursed for a second, and before she could rant on, another person on the committee, Jenny Kropft, had asked Mildred if she would be so kind as to give her blackberry crumb cake recipe to the cookbook the group was assembling. Mildred had been too smart not to see that she was being diverted, but had been pleased just the same.

  “Save me,” Brenda whispered now, her breath fogging in the night air as she crossed the near-empty lot and unlocked her car. This, the old church, was located high on the bluff in the hills overlooking the city. The church and parsonage had been built in the late 1880s, and though modernized over the years with indoor plumbing, electricity, forced-air heat and insulation, the buildings were still as drafty as they were charming, and the congregation was growing each year. As it was, on Sunday morning, the old choir loft was filled with parishioners, and on Easter and Christmas, there had to be an additional two services added for the once- and twice-a-year members of the flock. In the harsh Montana winters, the old buildings suffered, as did everyone inside.

  The new church was a great idea in Brenda’s mind, as was Preacher Mullins’s introduction of rock renditions of traditional songs by a couple of young musicians in the flock. Though traditionalists like Mildred might balk at the changes, if they could bring new, young blood into the church, Brenda was all for it. Maybe eventually she could convince her two teenaged boys to get up and attend services again, though she doubted it, especially with Ray, her ex-husband, setting such a stellar example of being a hedonistic, self-indulgent jerk!

  At the thought of the boys’ father, she scowled, sent up a little prayer for humility and a way to find forgiveness in her heart, then caught the anger simmering in her eyes in the reflection of her rearview mirror. “Please, give me strength,” she whispered as she shoved her old Ford Escape into gear, backed up and headed out of the church lot. The boys were with Ray tonight and she had to accept the fact that she was the one who had decided Ray Sutherland was the perfect man to father her kids. “The follies of youth,” she said under her breath and tried not to dwell on Ray and his failings as a husband and dad.

  She’d hoped to pick up a few odds and ends Christmas presents at the local pharmacy and gift shop, so she drove across the bluff to the strip mall, where she sneaked in, just before the store was to close, and grabbed a stuffed reindeer for her nephew and some plastic Christmas-themed blocks for her niece. She’d been eyeing them both for a couple of weeks, and with the coupon she’d clipped in the Sunday paper, she got two for the price of one.

  Feeling better, she paid for her purchases and thought about treating herself to a hot chocolate at the coffee shop, then thought better of it. Her job at Wild Will’s restaurant downtown didn’t cover the expenses of raising two kids on her own, so she kept her “going out” money to a minimum and partook of the fancy coffee drinks she confined to her account at the restaurant, where she got a twenty percent discount. Sandi, the owner of Wild Will’s, was generous with her employees and she’d given Brenda the job as a waitress when Ray had walked out five years earlier.

  Already the car’s interior had cooled, so she cranked up the heat and the radio that played “Christmas, all day, every day,” and hummed along as she drove toward her house. Snowflakes caught in the beams of her headlights, seeming to pirouette and dance as they fell. Through neighborhoods with plastic Santas, wicker reindeer, fresh garlands and colored lights strung on eaves and foliage, she drove as the heater finally kicked in. Her house was located close to September Creek, a few miles out of town. A little two-bedroom cabin she and Ray had bought three years into their marriage, it was beginning to show signs of age. In the divorce, she was granted ownership of the house, though she was still making payments to Ray each month and he was supposed to reciprocate with child support ... Oh, yeah, that worked. Fine on paper. She’d considered stopping the payments to him but didn’t want to deal with a lien. Though she’d hated to do it, she’d contacted a lawyer and intended, after the first of the year, to take the son of a bitch to court.

  Stop it! It’s Christmas! Again she caught her gaze in the rearview mirror and again she saw the anger that seemed to be forever lurking just beneath the surface of her gaze. It was something she was working on. A Christian woman, she believed fervently in forgiveness. She just couldn’t find it in her heart when it came to Ray.

  Someday it might happen, she thought, once she found another man to fix the sagging porch, replace the old pipes under the sink and hold her long into the night. Oh, what she wouldn’t do to find a real Prince Charming the second time around. At forty-two she wasn’t ready to give up on love.

  Well, at least not yet.

  The residential houses gave way to countryside, where snow covered the surrounding fields and drifted against the fence posts. Even the skeletal brambles and berry vines took on an unlikely serenity with the snowfall.

  As she turned off the main road, she noticed a car parked at the side of the road. Its hood was lifted, a man peering at the engine. She slowed, the beams of her headlights catching him in their glare. He waved, flagging her down, and she told herself to be careful, then she recognized him as a regular customer at the restaurant and as a member of the church.

  Slowing, she rolled down her window as he scurried through the piling snow to the driver’s side.

  “Hey,” she said. “You got a problem?”

  “Darned thing just died on me,” he said “and I left my cell phone at home. Can’t call my wife.”

  “I could call her.”

  “That would be great.” He flashed the smile she’d always found endearing. “Or maybe I should?”

  “Sure.” Turning, she reached into her bag, found her cell and said, “I know it’s about out of battery life, but it should work ...” As she straightened again, she was making certain the phone was on when she felt something cold against her neck. “Wha—” A second later, pain scorched through her body. She screamed and twitched, losing all control as he pressed the trigger on his stun gun. Dear Lord, help me, she thought, jerking and trying to scream. Her phone slipped from her palsied fingers, and horrified, she watched helplessly, unable to fight as he unlocked her door, bumping his
head on the frame and losing his hat for a second, before he hauled her into the cold weather. She tried to fight, to punch and kick and bite, but all her efforts were futile as her mind could not control her twitching, useless body.

  No, no, no! This can’t be happening.

  She trusted this man, knew him from church, and yet he was coldly throwing her into the backseat of his sedan and locking the door. She was helpless to do anything to save herself. The world was spinning, her body flopping on the vinyl of his backseat, and for a few minutes he left her alone in the frigid car only to show up, get behind the wheel and drive in the same direction she’d been heading.

  Why? Her mind screamed but she had no control of her tongue, couldn’t say a word, and listened feebly as he snapped on the radio and an instrumental version of “Silent Night” filled the interior.

  Oddly, he didn’t bother with the heater, and as the miles rolled under the car’s tires, Brenda wondered where he was taking her and, oh, God, what he planned to do to her.

  He’s a Christian man. This is just a prank, she tried to convince herself, but she knew, deep in her heart, that whatever was in store for her tonight, it wouldn’t be good. Over the strains of the Christmas carol, Mildred’s theory echoed through her mind, haunting in its precise prediction:

  The devil’s behind this!

  He’s always there, y’know, Satan, he’s just over your shoulder, waiting to pounce ...

  Chapter 3

  “I can’t,” Pescoli said into her cell phone as she eased her Jeep down the long, snow-covered drive to her house. The wheels of the Jeep cut fresh paths in the snow as she drove through the trees and across a small bridge that spanned the iced-over creek running through her few acres in the foothills outside of Grizzly Falls. When the trees parted, her headlights flashed against the front of the house. Not a single light was glowing from within. “I have a feeling both of my kids are MIA. And that would be A-G-A-I-N.” The bad feeling that had been with her most of the day, while trying to sort out what happened to Len Bradshaw, still lingered.