by Blake Pierce
Carrie chewed the fingernail on her right thumb for a moment, thinking it over. Wasn’t it obvious already that she was who he was asking for? If she wasn’t, she would have said no and put the phone down. She’d as good as confirmed it already, at least as far as it mattered if someone was trying to track her down. So maybe it was the tax thing. Maybe she could get a little extra money in the bank. It wasn’t long now until winter. She could do with a little extra cash, something to keep the heating on longer during the weekends when she was home.
“Yes,” she said, at length. “That’s me. Look, just call back tomorrow, okay? I’m about to go to bed.”
“I can’t do that, Carrie.”
Carrie froze, her thumbnail halfway back to her mouth. His voice had changed, she could swear it. It was deeper now. Less polite. Like a mask had been taken off. “Why not?” she asked, cursing mentally. She shouldn’t have told him her name. This was it, wasn’t it? He was going to tell her how much she owed and how much she’d better have ready in the morning, or they’d take everything. Not that it mattered. She didn’t have anything worth taking.
“Because I’m right outside your door.”
Carrie’s head sharply jerked toward the door. No. He couldn’t be. Had she heard that right?
“What?” she asked, praying for him to repeat it so she could hear how she’d gotten it wrong.
Instead, a series of beeps rang out from the handset, signaling that the call had been ended.
Carrie pulled the phone away from her head and stared at it, hoping it would give her some kind of answer. There was nothing. She rested it down on the kitchen counter for a moment, trying to think. What was going on here? Some kind of prank?
Maybe she’d misheard him. Maybe he said “I can do that,” and then just confirmed it and ended the call. How could she have messed those words up? Was that possible? No, she played the words back in her head and they still sounded the same.
He’d said he was outside.
Carrie sprang into action, grabbing a knife from the kitchen and then lunging toward the front door and checking the lock. It was intact, and when she looked through the peephole, she didn’t see a thing. She swallowed hard and pulled lightly at the chain, making sure it was properly engaged. No one would be coming through that door unless she opened it.
Carrie made a conscious effort to breathe, realizing she had been holding it to try and listen. There wasn’t a sound out there. No one else was around. She was on her own. Wasn’t she?
She lifted up a shaking hand to the door and set her eye to the peephole again, straining to make anything out in the dark corridor. The light that should have been opposite her door had blown a bulb weeks ago, and the landlord had made no move to replace it. Carrie swallowed again on her dry throat, pressing close against the door as she strained to see.
Through the pressure of the wood against her fingertips, she could feel her own heartbeat, rapid and wild.
Carrie turned, putting her back against the door for a moment. There wasn’t any other way in, was there…?
The windows?
She rushed through the apartment, checking them one by one. Bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. All of them were locked, and the blinds and curtains were closed. She didn’t want to open them and look out, in case of what she might see.
Carrie hesitated, glancing around her small space. Despite the fact that she had checked everything, she still felt unsure. The call had sent shivers down her spine, and the longer she thought about it, the more they increased. How had he known her name? If it was just a prank call, she might have accepted that he knew her surname, even her first name. But her middle name? He didn’t get that from the phone book.
Come to think of it, she wasn’t even in the phone book. Did people still use phone books these days?
Carrie put her cell phone down on the bed for a moment, reaching up to double-check the bedroom window frame, pushing at the handle to reassure herself that it wouldn’t give easily. It stayed solid, and she stepped back with a little relief. No one was getting in here.
She returned to the kitchen with a determined stride, trying to feel more confident than she really did. Her dinner was still sitting on the counter. She needed to eat, to shower, to get ready for bed. All of this nonsense about the prank call—it was just nonsense. Just a prank. She couldn’t let it derail her whole evening.
She almost managed to convince herself that she believed it. Carrie set down the knife and picked up her mac and cheese, moving it to the other side of the table where she preferred to eat. But her hands shook so badly as she set it down, she nearly spilled some of the creamy cheese sauce over the edge of the tray.
A soft sound outside had her on alert again, her body going stiff. It was only a second later that she heard the smash of broken glass, a symphony of tinkling as it fell to the ground in the bedroom.
In the bedroom. Where she’d left her cell phone.
A strangled cry caught in Carrie’s throat as she lunged for the landline, still sitting on the counter where she had put it down. She dialed with fingers that were thick with fear and shaking, her own breath coming out in sobs as she hit the wrong digit and had to clear the number to start again. He was inside the house. Then she pressed the phone to her ear, breathing raggedly.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“There’s—there’s someone in my house!” Carrie wailed, all too aware that saying those words would alert him to where she was. “Please—you have to send—”
“Ma’am, are you able to get out of the house? Ma’am?”
The operator was talking to herself. Carrie was staring forward, frozen, the phone clutched in her hand still but falling away from her ear. He was there, right in front of her, tall and menacing. She had no idea who he was. But he was looking at her in that way, dark eyes boring into her from under a sweep of dark hair, and she knew, just knew, he wasn’t there for anything good.
He wasn’t even wearing a mask. Wasn’t he worried about her identifying him to the police, if he wasn’t wearing a mask?
Carrie’s heart stuttered in her chest as she realized he didn’t intend for her to be alive to tell them.
“Ma’am, please stay on the line. We’ll be sending someone out to you as soon as possible. Are you there, ma’am? Can you tell me any more details?”
The voice faded out as Carrie lowered the phone, her whole body shaking and her breath coming out in whimpers as she stared at him. He was moving slowly toward her, inch by inch. Her body felt frozen. She managed to back up just a couple of steps, but then her spine hit the fridge, and she was trapped.
She didn’t say anything and neither did he. They faced each other silently, him ever advancing, her frozen and shaking and unable to do a thing. Her mind was almost blank with fear and she couldn’t force herself to move. It was as if she was a butterfly trapped to a piece of card with a pin.
She thought he would continue moving slowly forward forever, but then he lunged, clearing the space between them so quickly she barely had a moment to react. She screamed, just once, but she couldn’t move fast enough to stop him. He wrenched the phone from her grip, and she thought he would hang it up. But even as she flailed to get it back, he made a quick move of his arm, flicking the cord around her neck. The ice in her veins turned to acid as she felt the wire against her skin, lying over her windpipe.
She made to dash forward, to go past him through the tiny space between his arm and the counter, a futile but desperate attempt. He stepped aside and she dashed free, just for a moment—before the cord caught her and pulled her back, coughing already, a tight line branded into her neck where the cable lay.
Carrie’s hands flew up and scrabbled at the cord, but somehow, now, it was too tight to move. She couldn’t get her fingers underneath it. Something was behind her, supporting her—a body—his warm body, pressing against her back and using her body weight against her. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get a single gasp of air. Sh
e fought against the cord madly, her fingers scoring lines in her own flesh, glancing off the cord every time and never budging it a millimeter. She kicked the floor, feeling him pull her away from it, the weight on her neck only increasing as she was lifted up into the air.
Carrie thought she heard something, someone asking her an urgent question. She couldn’t process it. She tried to scream, but the air wouldn’t come into her lungs. All she could do was make a desperate gurgle, kicking out with her legs and trying to catch onto the cabinets. She only hurt her shins and knees. In front of her she could see the kitchen, the tiny space with its rickety table and the lone tray of mac and cheese, still waiting for her. She was so tired. There were blank dots dancing in her vision, more of them every moment.
Her fingers fell slack on the cord, then down at her sides. Carrie tried to breathe in one last time, but failed to find any air. The black dots multiplied, covering everything, and the last thing she knew before her final spasm left her body was black.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Ah, there she is!” Nate exclaimed, as Laura walked into the bullpen inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was crowded with desks and agents, most of them occupied with their own calls and computer screens. A few of them looked up and grinned at her, and a couple even clapped a few times, which only increased her sense of anxiety. She just wanted to get in and get her paperwork done, and avoid any awkward questions about how she’d found the girl.
“Here I am,” Laura replied, without any of his cheer. She tucked her hair behind her ears, hoping Nate would lower his voice. She hated being watched, being the center of attention.
“A coffee for the Bureau’s finest child rescuer,” Nate said, handing her a cup bearing the logo of a local chain. Not, thankfully, the office’s own machine. If he had tried to give her that, she would have thrown it down the sink.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it from him and taking a sip immediately to hide her face. It was only divine providence that it wasn’t burning hot. She swallowed the bitter liquid quickly, gesturing behind Nate toward their respective desks. She hoped he would take the hint.
Nate turned and led her across the room between desks stacked high with haphazard paperwork, waving a goodbye to the agent he’d been engaged in conversation with closer to the door. “So, good night’s sleep?”
“Perfect,” Laura replied. Truth be told, she’d slept the sleep of the dead. Yes, she had Amy’s fate playing on her mind—but that wasn’t enough to keep her up. Not after the exhaustion of three visions, a dead run across a field and up a hill, a physical fight with the kidnapper, and then digging Amy out of the box. It had taken all of her power to stay awake for long enough to get home and into bed. She’d woken up with a start, though, immediately filled with anxiety that someone was going to know.
It was always like this after a successful case. The fear that someone would question her methods. That they would ask a question she couldn’t answer.
“Great. You might need it.” Nate flashed her a grin as he reached their adjacent desks near the back of the cramped, busy room and lifted up a manila folder. “Paperwork.”
Laura groaned. “What is this? Payback from the boss? Extra filing?”
“Maybe,” Nate said, and laughed. “No, it’s just the standard stuff. I already started mine. Report on the events of the day, the forms to assess whether we’ve been through any trauma that might make us a liability, et cetera, et cetera. You know the drill. Might take us the rest of the morning, but it’s boring enough.”
“What a relief,” Laura sighed, putting her purse down beside the desk and her coffee cup on it. The hum of conversation in the room was already almost overwhelming, and she had no doubt it would be worse as the day drew on. The bullpen was chaotic, the space too small for so many agents in the square, uniform building of their headquarters. “If there’s one thing I love about paperwork, it’s when it’s boring.”
Nate laughed. “Here,” he said, handing a sheaf of loose papers from inside the folder to her. Their fingers brushed as she took it, and just for a moment, she felt a chill rising from the point where their skin was in contact.
Laura froze.
She’d felt that same chill with just one person before. It wasn’t quite a whole vision, not yet. It was something more distant than that. An early warning.
It was the shadow of death.
Laura couldn’t find a way to describe it, the way she might explain it to another person. It wasn’t a color. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t something she could see, but then, it wasn’t a feeling either. It was somehow physical and yet intangible.
The first time she saw it, it was hovering over her dad.
“You okay there?” Nate asked, regarding her with a puzzled frown.
“Yeah,” Laura said, quickly sitting and placing the papers on her desk. “Clearly, I haven’t had enough coffee yet. Which my thoughtful partner has already seen fit to solve, so thanks again for that.”
Nate chuckled as he took his own seat, grabbing up a pen and going back to work.
Laura pretended to sip at her coffee and study the first page, but really she was looking over the top of her lid at Nate. She was trying to think, trying to quell the rising panic that was threatening to choke off her throat. She had never sensed death around him before. She’d had visions where he was present, yes—but in the course of a crime that they were both investigating. Never on a personal level. She’d never sensed that he was even in danger.
It was hard to imagine him ever being in danger, as well-built and tall as he was. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves now, one big hand cradling the pen as he looked down at the form he was working on.
There was no way he could be in danger. No way. And yet…
Laura swallowed a gulp of coffee past the lump in her throat and looked down, focusing her eyes on the paper. Some of it she could fill in by automatic habit, not needing to think. Her name, her ID, the date. That left her mind free to reel, to try to cope with what she’d just felt.
When she saw that shadow of death over her dad, it had been long before his diagnosis. Maybe before he’d even been sick—she had no way of knowing. But she’d felt that sick kind of resonance in the air around him whenever they touched. It had gotten so she shied away from him, shutting herself up in her room so she didn’t have to see it.
Then she had touched him one day and seen him lying in a bed hooked up to a drip on a cancer ward, and she’d known.
She’d been so terrified of what she’d seen that she’d never said a word. How could she? She couldn’t tell her parents that she’d had a vision of her father dying from cancer. Not after all the therapy they’d made her go through to stop her “hallucinations.”
But now she was faced with the same problem. Something was going to happen to Nate, and it was going to kill her, too, because how could it not? They had been partners for so long, and he was the only person she really trusted. The only person who really seemed to trust her. The only one she could rely on. She needed him. More than that, she wanted him to be around. He was strong, capable, reassuring. The one constant that never changed.
And he was going to die. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, he was going to die, and she was going to know how. Unless she avoided touching him for the entire rest of their career together, which seemed unlikely.
So, could she keep it from him? Right up until the moment he died?
Or would she be able to intervene?
Laura drained the rest of her coffee in one go and set about attacking the rest of the paperwork. She couldn’t deal with this right now. She had things to do. Responsibilities. If she didn’t get this done, people were going to ask why. She could digest this later, when she was back at home on her own. She could grieve for him then, and figure out what she was going to do. Not now. Not in the middle of the office.
“Hey, heroes!” That was Jones, a short and squat agent with dark hair, walking by them to reach his desk at the very back
of the room. “Come down from cloud nine yet?”
“This paperwork brought me down to earth like an anvil,” Nate joked, turning to look over his shoulder as Jones passed through.
“That was good work, though,” Jones said, raising his coffee to his lips and sipping before lifting it in Laura’s direction. His heavy brows jumped up and down at the same time. “You too, Frost. Pretty glad you were there, to be honest. I couldn’t stand the thought of that kid dying out there in that box.”
“Oh, you’ve got a son around that age, haven’t you?” Nate said. “Yeah, that must have been tough. It was bad enough for me to think about it, and I don’t have kids.”
“Believe me, whole world changes when you’ve got ’em,” Jones said, shaking his head, one hand on his hip. “Ain’t that right, Laura?”
Laura stiffened even more than she already was. “Sure,” she said, her tone flat and brittle.
“Jones,” Nate hissed, making a flapping motion at him.
“Oh, sorry,” Jones said, wincing as he sat down. He wasn’t the most socially adept agent in the room, even when he was the only one in the room. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Laura sighed. There was so much on her shoulders. It felt like the weight of the whole world. Her daughter. The governor and what he was going to do to Amy. And now Nate. At least she didn’t have another case to work on just yet. A little break might help her to get her mind around a few things.
The phone on Nate’s desk burst into life, emitting a shrill ring before he snatched up the receiver. “Agent Lavoie,” he said, his expression going serious as he listened.
Laura watched him with concern. The call he was on right now—was that what led to the end of his life?
Every little thing, she realized. She was going to be analyzing every little thing now. Every sign that something might not be right. Every call was going to make her jump out of her skin. Every case would be a potential danger. She didn’t want to lose Nate. He was a good partner. A good friend.
