by David Hosp
She drew back into the bathroom, careful to keep the door from slamming, her chest heaving as she began to hyperventilate.
She stumbled back into the stall and closed the door as she tried to calm herself. Sitting down on the toilet, she forced herself to slow her breathing as she tried to think rationally, spinning out scenario after scenario as she tried to come up with a way out. She took out her phone and started to dial Cassian’s number, but an annoying electrical chime let her know that her battery was too low for service. As she put it back in her purse she cursed herself for not having charged it.
Then she heard the door open and she quickly pulled her feet off the floor, hugging her bag to her chest, listening for footsteps. She heard nothing, and a moment later the door closed again.
She held her breath for what seemed an eternity, afraid to move. Finally, she put her feet down, leaned forward, and pressed the stall door open a crack. The bathroom seemed deserted, so she stood and walked out of the stall.
She regarded the door out into the hallway with dread, though she knew she had no choice. She couldn’t stay in the ladies’ room forever.
She approached the door with trepidation, sneaking up on it slowly. She was about to open it when she heard a loud explosion and the door of one of the other stalls behind her swung open. She screamed as her knees buckled and the nerves leading to her muscles fired indecisively. She whirled toward the stall, throwing her hands to her face defensively.
“I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice gasped. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She was a student, just a little younger than Sydney. The noise she’d heard, Sydney realized, was the toilet flushing, and the other woman was now regarding Sydney like an escaped mental patient.
“That’s okay,” Sydney choked out. “I was just . . .” She didn’t bother to finish her sentence; there was really no rational way to explain her situation.
She took a deep breath and walked back to the door and pushed it open slowly. There was no one in the hallway, and after a moment’s internal debate, she exited and hurried toward the stairs.
z
Salvage walked around the floor, poking his head into empty offices and taking the time to carefully evaluate anyone he encountered. Barneton had said he was sure the Chapin girl was working on this floor—he’d just seen her near his office—and yet she was nowhere to be found. It seemed hopeless, and if he had any better leads, he’d follow them, but he was running out of options.
He was turning the corner, heading back toward the main staircase, when he heard Barneton’s voice up ahead, calling out.
“Wait! Sydney! Someone’s looking for you!”
Salvage broke immediately for the stairs, his hand already inside his coat, reaching for his gun.
z
Sydney had made it halfway to the staircase, keeping her head down and moving with determination, before she heard Barneton’s voice behind her. She turned and looked up at him.
“Wait! Sydney!” he called, moving toward her.
“I have to go,” she said tersely as she turned and headed down the stairs.
He grabbed her, though, and pulled her back. “Someone’s looking for you,” he said, peering over his shoulder and down the hallway. “I think it’s important.”
“Let go of me!” Sydney demanded, trying to pull away, but Barneton held tight. Then she looked over his shoulder and saw the blond man hurrying down the hallway toward them. Her eyes darted back and forth between Barneton and the man from the highway, until they came to rest on Barneton’s face and she had an awful thought. She stared at him for a second, searching his eyes for an answer; and then he seemed to nod, as if to suggest everything was all right.
She acted without hesitation or thought, bringing her foot up and stomping on his instep with her heel, driving it down with all her weight. He crumpled, his face twisting in agony, but his hand still clinging to her arm. She took one last look at him and then swung her heavy backpack at his head, connecting with his nose, which cracked loudly as he crumpled to the ground.
She hesitated for a moment; just long enough to see the blond man still running toward her. To Sydney’s horror, she saw a gun in his hand.
She turned and flew down the stairs, leaving Barneton heaped in pain. As she hit the main floor, the doors to three of the main lecture halls burst open and a flood of students poured into the main hallway, enveloping her. It was a lucky break for her. Although the law school year was over, most of the recent graduates took the bar preparation classes that were offered at the school. There must have been a couple hundred of them filing out into a crowded mash of bodies.
Sydney pushed her way past them, through them, in some cases over them, as she tried for an escape. She looked over her shoulder twice, and both times it seemed as though the blond man was gaining on her, though he was still twenty yards behind her. The gun was no longer visible, and Sydney hoped he wouldn’t be brazen enough to shoot her in a crowded hallway. There were no guarantees, though, so she pressed on.
As she turned her head over her shoulder again, she felt someone grab her from the front, and she spun, leading with her fists, thrashing to get away from the person’s grasp.
“Sydney! What the fuck? It’s me, Mark.”
“Mark!” she exclaimed, still moving forward as she recognized a fellow research assistant. He was huge—a former football player at Harvard who must have stood six-six and weighed well over two-fifty. She’d met him only two or three times, but she’d gotten the clear impression that he was attracted to her.
“Everything okay?” he asked, moving with her. “You look freaked.”
“Fine,” she said, still hurrying in the same direction. Then she had a thought. “Actually, no, I’m not fine. There’s a guy who’s been stalking me, and I’m trying to get away.”
“Is there anything I can do?” He leered down at her, and she noticed that he was focusing a foot or so below her eyes.
“Yes,” she replied quickly. “The guy’s right behind me.” She paused only long enough to point toward the man. “He’s the blond guy, in his forties, heading this way. Could you just, maybe, slow him down a little? I’d be so grateful I wouldn’t know how to thank you.”
Mark’s chest puffed out. “I’m sure we’ll think of something,” he said.
“Thank you so much,” she said. “We can talk about it later. I’m going to run.” She turned and headed toward a doorway that led to the stairs down into the basement.
z
Salvage fought his way through the swirling mass of students, keeping his head up as he watched Sydney head through a doorway and down another set of stairs. God, how he was tempted to pull out his gun and start clearing a path through the privileged, pampered, self-important crush of legal wannabes. It was a sign of his impatience, he recognized, though, and impatience could be deadly in his position. It was becoming more clear that he really needed to get out of the business as soon as possible. Just one more job to complete.
As he swam through the crowd over toward the stairwell where the Chapin girl had gone, a huge hand reached out in front of him and grabbed his chest.
“Where you goin’, dude?” the owner of the hand asked in a deep, menacing tone. Salvage looked up at a behemoth as he knocked the arm out of his way.
“Excuse me,” he said simply. “I’m in a hurry.” He stepped around the man.
The giant stuck his hand out again. “Let her go,” he growled, his face scrunching into a scowl that, had he not been in such a hurry, might have made Salvage laugh. He had no time to waste on this guy, though, so he decided to deal with him directly.
His arm shot out straight and lightning-quick from his side, his fist connecting squarely with the huge man’s solar plexus. The man’s face turned instantly from a scowl to a silent scream, his mouth forming a perfect circle as his eyes bulged. Salvage then took a step forward and brought his knee up between the wounded man’s legs, and the man doubled over instantly.
/> He looked up at Salvage, his eyes shocked and pleading. If they hadn’t been in a crowded hallway, Salvage probably would have put a bullet through one of those eyes just to punctuate his point. At the moment, though, he couldn’t afford the disruption. “You’re lucky,” he said quietly as he pushed past him and headed down the stairs after his prey.
Chapter Forty-six
SYDNEY WISHED she was back at Stanford—her own school. There, she would have known the best route to take to safety, the best places to hide, and the easiest ways to escape. As it was, she’d only been working at Georgetown for a few weeks, and she had only a general idea of the school’s layout.
She ran down a long hallway out toward the back of the building. She was fairly sure that it led to an exit out of the basement, from which she could get out onto the street.
The man was still behind her, she knew, but she had enough of a lead on him that if she could just find her way out of the maze of concrete hallways, she would be fine. She followed the passage down to the left—to where she thought the exit was—but it dead-ended into a set of offices. Above the door was a sign that read “Domestic Violence Legal Aid Clinic.”
Shit! She wanted to scream. She turned around and considered briefly heading back out in the direction from which she’d come, but in all likelihood that would only lead her directly back into her pursuer. She was breathing hard now, and the sweat was running down her forehead. Perhaps she could hide, or even escape through a window in the clinic’s offices.
In any case, she decided, her chances were better than confronting him alone in the hallway back behind her.
She opened the door and stepped inside.
z
Antonia Vargas sat alone at her desk in the clinic’s offices, filling out paperwork for her clients. They were primarily indigent women who lacked the resources to wrest themselves from what were generally horrific circumstances. Beaten by their spouses or significant others, and often without any means of independent support, they found their way to the clinic most often after some catastrophic—sometimes near-fatal—bout of violence. Antonia and the students she supervised provided legal advice and support free of charge, and helped the women find shelter and opportunity. It was a responsibility she took very seriously.
It was only a decade earlier that she herself had found her way into the clinic’s offices. She’d been a dancer at one of the downtown strip clubs, and her “manager” had become increasingly dissatisfied with her efforts, culminating in a broken arm after one particularly vicious scolding. Those at the clinic had helped her. She’d gone back to school to get her degree, and then, inspired by what the clinic had done for her, she’d gone on to law school. Now she devoted herself to helping others the way she’d been helped back then. In the process, she’d earned a reputation around the city as one of its fiercest women’s advocates, and a lawyer to be feared and respected in spite of her petite five-foot-two-inch frame and her shock of purple-and-pink hair that gave her the look of a refugee from a 1980s punk rock band.
She looked up when the attractive young woman burst into the offices, out of breath and clearly desperate. Antonia had worked with battered women for long enough to recognize the fear that accompanied the bruises and scratches on the woman’s face, and she was out of her chair even before the woman could speak.
“Come in, come in,” she said, leaning in to get a better look at the abrasions. “You’re in the right place, honey, I can help you.” She hadn’t seen anyone this badly beaten in months, but nothing shocked her anymore. She took the woman by the elbow and led her into one of the cubicles that the students used when school was in session. “Is he your husband, or just your boyfriend?”
The woman was out of breath, gulping air as she shook her head. “No, you don’t understand,” she gasped.
Antonia patted her hand as she shook her neon locks back and forth. “Yes, I do, honey. Believe me, I do. We can help you here. He’s not going to hurt you ever again; you have my word on that. Now, what’s your name?”
“Sydney,” she choked out, “but it’s not what you think—”
“Girl, we all make excuses for them. It’s never what anyone else thinks—except that it is. My name’s Antonia, and you gotta believe me, Sydney, he’ll never change.”
“No, no, he’s chasing me! He’s right behind me!”
In the instant that it took for the woman’s words to register, Antonia’s demeanor altered radically, transforming from that of concerned mother figure to battlefield general. “Right here?” she demanded. “Right behind you?”
“Yes,” Sydney replied.
Antonia nodded and led Sydney to another cubicle where she was concealed from the front door of the offices. “You stay here,” she ordered. She picked up the phone and dialed 911. “This is Toni Vargas at the Georgetown Domestic Violence Clinic,” she said when the operator came on. “We have a potential situation here, and we’re gonna need some help quickly.” She hung up the phone. “They know me over at the station house, and they take me seriously,” she reassured Sydney. “Someone’ll be here in a few minutes.” She got up and headed toward the door.
“Antonia?” the young woman said in a dazed voice.
“Yes, honey?”
“I think he has a gun.”
She tilted her head. “Good to know.” Then she smiled. “Relax, girl, we get this sort of thing here every now and then.”
z
Salvage slammed through the door into the clinic’s offices. He’d reholstered his gun, but his hand was inside his jacket, ready to pull it out as soon as he saw the Chapin girl again. He looked around the room and saw that it was dominated by cubicles set apart by gray industrial dividers. There weren’t too many places for her to hide in here, clearly.
“Excuse me, can I help you?”
The voice came from in front of him, and he looked down to see a tiny woman in her thirties. He might have found her attractive were it not for the spray paint on her unevenly chopped hair; in any case, he knew, he had a job to do, and no time for diversions. “No,” he said, dismissing her as he moved forward into the room. “I’m looking for someone.”
The tiny woman stepped in front of him. “Sydney?” She asked, bringing him up short. “You’re looking for Sydney, right?”
His eyes narrowed, evaluating her with new interest. “She’s here, I take it?”
“Yes, she is. But she doesn’t want to see you.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t.” He sidestepped the Technicolor dwarf and started in toward the cubicles again, but she stepped in front of him once more, cutting him off. She was nimble, he
had to give her that.
“You need to leave—now.”
He shook his head; enough was enough. He started to pull his hand out of his jacket—perhaps a bullet to the brain would change the midget’s attitude. He never got the gun out of the holster, though. Before he’d even moved his hand, she pulled
a .357 Magnum revolver from behind her back and jammed it up under his chin hard, forcing his head back. The goddamned gun was bigger than the girl holding it. “What the fuck!” Salvage yelled.
“I’ll tell you what the fuck,” the girl spat at him. “You need to listen better. We have a little saying here at the domestic violence clinic. You should commit it to memory. It goes like this: No means no, and go means go! I’m telling you to go— you understand what that means?”
“You fucking bitch!”
“Been called worse by scarier men than you. Funny thing is, though, cops take me seriously. See, we have a deal. They show up quickly when I call, and I don’t try to arrest anyone. I leave that to them. On the other hand, they know that if I have to shoot someone in self-defense, then that’s just the way it goes sometimes, y’know? So the question right now is this: do I have to shoot you?”
“Fuck you!”
She cocked the gun. “You really want those to be your last words?”
He tried to pull away, but she had the
gun thrust so far into his chin that there was little he could do. He had to distract her. “No reason to get touchy,” he said, backing away.
She kept the gun pressed deep into the soft flesh at the back of his chin. “Yes, there is. There most certainly is a reason to get touchy. Y’see, women don’t like it when you beat them. You may think it’s sexy, but it’s not. You may think it makes you a man, but it doesn’t.” She was pushing him back hard now, and he stumbled as he hit the door. “All it makes you is pathetic and weak.” She grabbed him by the collar and pulled his face down toward hers, so that their noses were almost touching. “Consider this your official notice that this clinic will be representing Sydney in any domestic violence matter she cares to bring against you. If you have anything to say to her, please don’t contact her directly. You can call me here—I’m Antonia—and I’ll relay the message. You got that?”
This was getting humiliating. On the other hand, arguing with a .357 seemed to make little sense to Salvage. “Got it,” he agreed.
“Good. One more thing,” she said. She pulled him down by his collar again and leaned into his ear. “Now that she’s my client, you ever touch her again, and I’ll fucking kill you.” She let go of him. “Now go.”
Salvage thought briefly about reaching for his gun. There was always a chance that he could knock the woman’s tiny arm away and buy enough time to free his weapon and get off a couple of shots. It was a slim chance at best, though, and if the police really were on the way already he probably wouldn’t have enough time to find the Chapin girl, kill her, and get away cleanly. As humiliating as it felt, he quickly realized that a hasty retreat was his best option.
He backed through the door slowly, and then turned and headed back down the hallway. He’d live to fight another day, and he swore to himself that the Chapin girl would pay in the end.
z
Sydney had watched the entire exchange through a crack in the cubicle where she’d been hiding. Once she was sure that the man was gone, she stuck her head up. The petite woman was still pointing her gun down the hallway, ensuring that the man wouldn’t return.
