by Stacy Gail
The more he thought about it, the less he liked the people who raised Angel. They were idiots when it came to taking care of her. For God’s sake, she was a beautiful woman who was obviously all alone, who weighed no more than a hundred pounds or so, and she was being made to handle inspectors, movers and painters all by herself, in a city notorious for its high crime rate, for a house that wasn’t even hers.
Fucking.
Idiots.
His jaw tightened as he pocketed the keys of the van and headed to the back. If he ever met her parents, out of courtesy to Angel he would try to be on his best behavior. But he also knew himself very well, and he had no illusions. If anything happened to her, or if they ever stepped a foot out of line when it came to her safety, it wasn’t going to be pretty. He had no problem with reading them the riot act for putting their girl in danger by making her deal with their shit.
Thank God Angel had wised up when she was still a kid in high school, and abandoned that particular ship as soon as she possibly could. It used to worry him that she was clearly alone in the world and left to fend for herself at such a young age. But now he had the whole picture, and he was proud of everything she’d accomplished on her own. She’d had the smarts to recognize that her home life wasn’t right for her, so she hadn’t fucked around in getting out. His lady knew what was good for her and what wasn’t.
And she’d chosen him. To support, and to slap back into place when he was going off the rails. She’d chosen him.
God, she was amazing.
Laptop bag in hand, he rang the bell and waited, then again when nothing happened. After a few minutes he texted Scout to make sure he had the right address and time, then cussed a blue streak under his breath when she texted back with the assurance that he was right where he needed to be.
One more minute of leaning on the doorbell made him come to the inescapable conclusion that he was there, but his client wasn’t.
After ten minutes went by, he called Scout. “We never talked about how long I’m supposed to wait around for the no-shows on this gig,” he said by way of greeting when Scout picked up. “There’s no one here, and I’m not loving the idea of spending the entire allotted time sitting in this guy’s driveway.”
“I’d say give it another five before taking off.” She sounded as irritated as he felt, and he could hear how hard she was hitting her keyboard as she spoke. “Man, I just don’t get it. Our first concierge gig busted by some loser space-case who forgot their appointment. Sorry about this, Twist.”
How novel. For once Scout wasn’t pissed off at him. It was enough to make him smile. “No worries on my end. These guys pay in advance because of this very possibility, so for the next three hours I’m getting paid to do nothing.”
“Lucky you. Maybe you and Angel can figure out how to spend that free time of yours.”
“Now there’s an idea.” There was nothing in the world he’d like better, God knew. And steering clear of her had been a total bust, since she’d accurately pointed out that backing off to keep her safe had actually left her alone and vulnerable. If anything, he should count his damn blessings that nothing had happened to her while he’d been stuck in stupid-mode, thinking that the only thing he’d brought to Angel’s door was trouble. Whether or not he was at fault for her being harassed, whether or not an ex-con like him was good enough for her—that was all just irrelevant shit. The only thing that mattered now was that he made Angel’s life as safe for her as possible.
And if he had to spend every single second in her company in order to do that, he could think of worse things.
“Scout, Angel’s back today working full-time, right?”
“Yep, and she’s got a full slate, plus I’m going to make her spend some time on my rainbow ankle wrap, so don’t get any bright ideas about sneaking off for some workplace hanky-panky.”
Damn. “What time does she—” His phone beeped, and he quickly glanced at the screen. “Hold on, Angel’s calling. Let me merge her into this convo.” With a few taps on the screen of his smartphone, he put it back to his ear. “Angel?”
“Still me,” Scout said.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know, I just merged my calls so the three of us could discuss scheduling, or at least I think I did. Angel, you there, babe?”
Low murmuring voices sounded, echoing hollowly to him, but what he could make out turned his blood to ice.
Slipping her phone into the pouch pocket of her pullover hoodie, Angel led the way to the kitchen, and the house’s obvious emptiness crushed her. With every step she took, the nerves in her back burned with vulnerability, and again she questioned the decision of going into an empty house with a man who, at first glance fit the security guard’s description of the person who’d put a note on her car at House Of Payne.
But he also didn’t fit the description, she told herself yet again, if only to silence her clamoring instincts. Sure, Walt was a tall white guy who moved like his feet would break if he stepped wrong. But for crying out loud, he was in the same age bracket as her grandfather and drove an expensive late-model pickup truck. Not exactly the kind of person she pictured as being the stalker type.
And he knew about the pantry doorframe, another point in his favor. Only she, Twist and the handyman knew about having the doorframe replaced. Not even her parents had been told about it. But Walt knew. That had to mean he was nothing scarier than the handyman her mother had originally hired to get things done around the house.
But still, every instinct she had was screaming at her.
“This is quite a place you’ve got here.” Walt looked around appreciatively, lugging his red and black toolbox with him. “Do you mind if I put my box up on your counter? The thing is, I’ve got a trick back to begin with, and my rheumatism decided to act up today on top of that.”
“Please, go right ahead.” She could outrun him, she thought, watching him take care not to chip the counter as he set his toolbox down. She could totally outrun him… unless he pulled out a gun from that box. Nobody could outrun a bullet. “Actually, if you’re not feeling up to this, I’d be more than happy to reschedule this project for another day.” Like, two days past never sounded about right.
“You do have a kind heart, Ms. Taylor—it matches how you look. But I’m hopeful this won’t take very long.”
“Call me Angel.” After all, they should be on a first-name basis if he was going to murder her.
Walt obviously knew her name, logic told her stampeding nerves, tamping them down from the edge of hysteria. Her letter writer had addressed her as “young lady.” Whoever wrote the notes didn’t know her name.
Unless he’d done his research and found it out. Hell, he could have even read her name off the mail already in her mailbox when he’d slipped his poisoned little note inside. If she was stalking someone she didn’t really know, that was what she would do.
Wonderful. Now she was figuring out how to be a better stalker.
Humming under his breath, Walt snapped open the fastenings of his toolbox, lifted the lid and fished out a tape measure instead of the Uzi her imagination had assured her was there. Then he turned to the pantry door and opened it. “Hm. Cinnamon.”
“My mom spilled a bottle in there once.” This is ridiculous, she decided, her hands like ice in the hoodie’s pouch pocket. She needed to calm the hell down and put some distance between herself and handyman Walt, instead of hanging around like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered. “Well, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to sing out. I need to go outside and wait for my friend and his family, who’s scheduled to show up any minute, as well as the movers that should be rolling in.” There. More people—or more witnesses—were expected, so that should tell Walt he couldn’t get away with anything sinister.
Either that, or it would make him speed up his timetable.
That monster tortured my girl for hours…
She swallowed and cursed her brain for not being at all helpful when it came to keeping her c
alm.
Walt glanced at her before he flicked on the pantry light. “I don’t mind the company, and it’s a might chilly out there, with the wind kicking up off the lake. I do believe summer has finally decided to leave us behind.”
Weather. She could talk about the weather. “Yep.”
Or maybe not.
“Well, look at this.” With a delighted smile Walt ran a big, gnarled hand over the frame marked with her growth chart. “My goodness. This right here is a labor of love. No wonder you wanted to preserve it. You know, I did this very thing with my son when he was growing up.”
“Did you?” She edged closer to the door while trying to prod her frozen brain into doing something other than lying there like a slug. “I’ve recently learned that my family may have done the chart a bit differently than other families. In addition to birthdays, we also recorded big life events. But I like the way we did it—it was a nice walk down Memory Lane, reviewing all the milestones during my childhood.”
“I’m sure it was. I remember trying to get my son to hold still long enough to get a proper measurement, but since it was during his birthday celebration and he was usually hopped up on sugar, I think herding cats would have been easier.” The wrinkles in his brow worked themselves deeper as he contemplated the markings before him. “I don’t know if he even remembers making a growth chart with me and his mother, God rest her soul. Or if it would even occur to him to try and preserve it the way you’re doing.” His preoccupied gaze turned her way, and for a moment there was such sadness in his eyes it wouldn’t have surprised her if he began to weep. “Your parents are very lucky to have such a gentle-hearted child like you. They must be so proud of you.”
Not really. “I hope they feel they did a decent job in raising me. Decent enough, anyway, that they can go ahead and move to another part of the country and begin the next phase of their life without worrying about me.”
“So you think they’ll stop worrying about you, little miss? Oh no,” he chuckled, turning to take a quick width measurement of the frame, wrote it down with a carpenter’s pencil on a pad he dug out of his work shirt’s breast pocket, then did the same with the length. “It doesn’t work that way, no sirree. Once you have a kid, that worry sets in and it’s there for life. So don’t hold it against your parents if they pop up from time to time to make sure you’re still chugging along on the right track.”
She couldn’t help but think that if that was the case, she should probably be thankful her parents had honored her desire for distance and stayed well clear of her, except for Christmas and a call on her birthday. “I’ll keep that in mind. I should go and—”
“Anything can get a good kid heading down a bad set of tracks,” Walt went on, taking the time to stuff the notepad and pencil back into his pocket. “There’s peer pressure, of course, and experimentation with drugs and booze. Through his teen years, I was always real worried about my boy falling into that hell. My dad was a no-good drunk, and they say they now know that the addictive personality is in the blood. So I lectured daily on the evils of all that stuff, thinking that if I could get him to avoid that pitfall, he’d be okay.”
“Did it work?” Angel asked, then wanted to slap herself for being an inherently nice person with polite manners.
“It worked.” He nodded and dumped the tape measure into his box before pulling out a hammer and a small crowbar with a wicked thin blade on one end. “I was very proud that he avoided that one pitfall.”
She sidled another few inches toward the door. The tape measure wasn’t nearly as intimidating as a hammer and crowbar “That’s great.”
“I just forgot to warn him about all the other pitfalls there are out there. Pitfalls like a bad influence, and running around with the wrong crowd. That’s one of the toughest things to shield your child from, because you can’t be with them twenty-four hours a day. Even a gentle little soul like you can fall into that pitfall if you’re not careful, or you don’t have someone who’s doing their best to look out for you.”
Her eyes were on the hands that held the hammer and crowbar while her instincts kept kicking at her to move. “I’m not easily influenced.” But she was easily freaked out, and right now she didn’t like that he was closer to the two ways out of the kitchen than she was—through the door leading to the main part of the house and through the butler’s pantry that fed into the dining room.
“Oh, trust me. When it comes to the likes of a real predator, you’re nothing but a tiny little morsel. Easy prey.” He bent and with careful precision wedged the crowbar’s blade between the wooden frame and the wall, and hit it with the flat of the hammer. “And then what happens?” Whack. “All your parents’ hopes and dreams, gone.” Whack. “Your own promising future, gone.” Whack. “Your father, wondering where he went wrong.” Whack. “Your mother, so heartbroken she can’t go on.” Whack. “All because someone came along and corrupted everything you had built your life around—your child.”
Each strike grew more violent, and most of the wooden frame bearing the big moments of her life popped free from the wall. The upper part of it was still attached, and that was where Walt slid the crowbar up to, though it came to a stop right at Twist’s caricature of her.
She took another tiny step toward the door. “I need to wait outside for my friend and the movers, so—”
“Twist.” Walt read the name, a flat monotone, and tapped the blade of the crowbar to the signature. “Twist.”
From inside her pouch pocket, Angel palmed her phone, turned slightly away from Walt to shield her movements and carefully worked the passcode. When the screen lit up she lost no time in touching the phone icon, then froze when Walt turned to her. “What kind of name is Twist, anyway? That’s not the sort of name you bear with pride.”
Out of memory and making sure she didn’t lose eye contact with him, she hit what she hoped was redial and stuffed the phone back in the hoodie’s pocket. “Actually, Twist is someone I know. He’s an artist, as you can see. His mother named him after the Charles Dickens hero, Oliver Twist, so—”
“This Twist,” he said in that same deadened tone as he gestured with the crowbar toward the signature, “is no hero, girl. He’s no poor little orphan boy with a heart of gold, and he sure as hell is no artist to be spotlighted on TV the way he is. The man you call Twist is the most evil thing I have ever come into contact with. He will corrupt and yes, twist anything and everything he comes into contact with. So in this, he is aptly named.”
Her mouth went dry.
Her heart paused in her chest.
The world screamed to a devastating halt as her skin iced over.
Damn it. She should have listened to her instincts.
“It is you, after all.” She looked right at him while out of the corner of her eye measured the distance between her and the door, and him. It would be close. Too close, and with him holding a hammer and a crowbar his reach was extended. Maybe she could outrun him, but if he’d been lying about his bad back and rheumatism… “You’re my pen pal.”
“I am your guardian angel.” He enunciated the last two words like this was a very important point he had to make her understand. “The man you’re keeping company with, the man you and the whole blasted city calls Twist…you don’t know who he really is.”
“But you do?” Twist had been right, was all she could think. He really had been the focus all along. But that fact didn’t make her feel any safer, not when Walt had gone from a kindly grandfather type to showing her his Charles Manson crazy-eyes impersonation in approximately half a second.
“Oh, you can bet that I know him. Far better than you.” To her alarm, his fist clenched hard around the hammer, before he raised it like he was looking to smash any errant nail he could find. “I hadn’t seen or thought about him in years, but when I saw him being a big shot on the TV news, right after they showed the report of that poor little girl in Garfield Park… that’s when I knew. I don’t hold much with signs from God, that’s a bun
ch of bull you’ll hear from religious kooks. But as I sat there watching it all unfold on TV, suddenly everything became so crystal-clear to me.”
The mention of that horrible beating death of a kid in the park made her look to the hammer and crowbar he held. “It made what clear?”
“Oliver Santiago was the one who started it all. He was the beginning of my boy’s end. Of my family’s end.”
And he thought religious people who believed in signs were kooks. “Walt—if that’s even your real name—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want you to leave this house. Right now.”
Something of her tone or expression must have gotten through to him, because he backed up half a step, holding up both hands that still held what she considered to be dangerous weapons. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, all right? I’m on your side, I promise you that. My name really is Walt Hildebrandt, and I understand you don’t know what I’m talking about. Why would you? I’m sure Santiago hasn’t told you the truth about his past, so naturally you don’t know the kind of danger you’re in.”
“I believe I do.” Pointedly she stared at the crowbar.
He looked at it too, then dropped it in the toolbox as if it had suddenly gotten too hot to hold. But the hammer he kept. “I’m trying to look out for you.”
“Walt—”
“Did you know he went to prison for a violent crime?”
“Yes.” It was ridiculous, the satisfaction she took in his blink of surprise. “Twist would never hide anything like that from me.”
His jaw knotted, a clear sign that he didn’t like that vote of confidence one bit. “Did he tell you what he went down for?”
“He went after a horrible monster for masquerading as a friend—a monster who savagely raped and beat Twist’s little sister nearly to death.”
“No. No.” Walt slammed the hammer into the pantry door, splintering a panel. She yelped because she couldn’t help it and her fear was starting to reach critical mass. “My son was innocent, do you understand?”
