Divorced, Desperate and Deceived

by Christie Craig

  She ran through the laundry room and turned the knob. It was locked. With shaking hands, she turned the catch and yanked at the door. Still locked. Double shit!

  Another turn lock was above the doorknob. She gave it a violent twist and tried the door again, but it didn’t budge. Maybe she’d locked one and unlocked the other, but she didn’t want to wait around to keep trying combinations. Heart pounding, she went in search of a window.

  She had no more than stepped out of the laundry room when all hell broke loose again in the living room. She heard booming voices and more gunfire. There was no mistaking it this time. People were shooting in Stan’s living room. She dove into the bathroom and shut the door.

  Dashing to the window, she slung her purse over her shoulder and put every bit of elbow grease she had into opening the window. The damn thing didn’t budge. She ran her hand on top to see if it had a turn lock. Nothing. Was it painted shut or just too damn old to work? Not that the reason mattered. She had to get the hell out of Dodge.

  More popping sounds echoed through the house. Each threatened to take her back to when she was eight.

  Taking short, about-to-pass-out breaths, she considered hiding. But the shower curtain was clear. What kind of weirdo bought a clear shower curtain?

  She yanked open the closet, but with shelves lining the back, she wouldn’t fit. The hamper? Too small. Under the sink with the condoms? She yanked open the doors. Too small. And there was nowhere else. Nowhere to hide.

  More voices. More gunshots. Was Stan, her leading fantasy man, shot? Not that it mattered, because she was not going to be using him again. Bring on Matthew! Stan Bradley was a cheater! But the idea of him being harmed, shot, killed, slammed against her brain and had her hyperventilating. And suddenly she realized she was screaming, which might lead the psycho freaks in the living room to her, so she slapped a hand over her mouth.

  Desperate, she grabbed the heavy ceramic top off the back of the toilet. Climbing on the bathroom counter, she moved against the side wall so that if someone came in, they wouldn’t see her when they first entered. Then, holding her breath and the toilet tank lid over her head, she listened.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Was that her heart thudding in her ears or footsteps?

  The door squeaked open. The tip of a gun appeared. Then, moving an inch through the door came a hand attached to it, a hairy hand with a finger on the trigger, which meant he planned on firing. Firing at her. Attached to that hand was a hairy arm. The kind of hair that needed a good waxing. Not Stan.

  Not that it mattered. Fantasy man or not, if Stan came at her with his gun drawn, she’d use the toilet lid on him, too. She knew what guns did to people. A bloody image from the past flashed in her head and she immediately chased it away. What the hell had Stan Bradley gotten her into!

  She waited until the man moved in just enough for her to see his head of thick dark hair, and then she let him have it. Crunch! The sound of thick ceramic hitting his skull wasn’t pretty, and the man—definitely not Stan—fell face-first to the bathroom floor. His gun dropped and skated across the linoleum, bounced off the base of the toilet and spun around and around and around.

  A loud crash echoed in the other room. Footsteps thundered down the hall. Panic made everything feel surreal, and the next few seconds passed as if the sand had gotten caught in the hourglass. Time flowed in slow motion; even the clanks and clatters in the next room sounded drawn out.

  A man’s tennis shoe appeared at the threshold of the bathroom. Still on the counter, Kathy held the heavy toilet tank lid ready. Breath caught, she waited. Finally, the tip of a gun appeared at the edge of the door molding. Then a hand. A not-so-hairy hand this time. She swung the toilet tank lid.

  She swung too soon and missed the man’s head. Her grip on her weapon loosened. The tank lid went flying across the bathroom, dented the door to the closet, then shattered on the floor beside the big hairy man, who hadn’t moved since his nose met the floor.

  Not moving? That wasn’t good. And then she saw the red pooling around the man’s head. Red. Bright red blood. Lots of bright red blood against the aged yellow linoleum. Which was definitely not good.

  The nasty sound of the tank lid hitting his head replayed in her ears. Bam. Crunch. A crunch like bone. Her stomach turned. She couldn’t look away from the blood. Had she killed him? With a toilet tank lid? Black spots started popping in her vision like fireworks. Memories started spinning through her befuddled brain. The next thing she knew, someone—the second someone with a gun, the one she’d missed with the toilet lid, the one she’d completely forgotten about—was yanking her off the counter.

  She kicked. She screamed. Then she recognized Stan.

  Didn’t matter. He had a gun. Fight, her panicked instincts shrieked.

  He tossed her over his back, caveman style, and shot off down the hall in a dead run. She bounced on his shoulder, each jolt making her stomach slap against her lungs and sending her bladder dancing around her pelvis. Her purse, still hung over her shoulder, slipped down her arm. Bending her elbow, she caught it before it dropped. Stan took a sharp turn into another room.

  “Put me down!” she shrieked. Her heart raced. She started squirming, but his arm tightened around the back of her thighs. Feeling trapped, she sank her teeth into his back and bit.

  “Stop!” He slapped her butt so hard it stung. He turned the locks in the back door, then twisted the top one again and swung it open. Bolting outside, he dropped her on her feet. Her knees folded, presently having the consistency of toothpaste, and she fell to the porch.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he grunted. He cut his eyes to the back door as if he’d heard something, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her up on her feet. “Now!”

  The moment he released her, her gaze shot to his gun. She took a swing at him, which he ducked.

  “Kathy, stop it! I’m trying to help.”

  She couldn’t stop. Her heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and her instincts still screamed fight. His words replayed in her head: I’m trying to help. But she didn’t believe him, did she? No. She took another swing.

  He ducked again. And then he leaned down, grabbed her around her legs and threw her over his back again. Before she could catch her breath, he had taken off in another dead run.

  Back to having her stomach bouncing on his shoulder, she pounded her fist on his butt. “Put me down!” And the next thing she knew, he did what she said. But he could have done it nicer. She was unceremoniously tossed to the ground. The hard thud bruised her backside, and she fought to catch her breath.

  He tore her purse off her arm, and the lima beans flew out and hit the ground. Stan Bradley was a cheater, he hung out with murdering thugs, and he was a purse thief? Could she pick ’em or what?

  He yanked her keys out of her purse and pulled her to her feet. “Get in,” he told her, and motioned toward her van.

  “No!”

  He forced her into the passenger side. Add auto thief and kidnapper to his sins! Then, crawling over her—all six foot plus of hard muscle, probably weighing in at over two hundred pounds—he settled in the driver’s seat, jabbed her key into the ignition, started the van and sped off.

  Before he got out of the drive, she heard a loud pop. The windshield crackled and something pinged around the back of the van. That something was probably—

  “Shit!” She recognized that sound: bullets hitting a vehicle. A buried memory resurfaced. She was eight and so damn scared.

  “Get down!” Stan yelled. Before she could react, he caught her by the arm and threw her to the floorboards. The van, swaying back and forth, spun off his driveway and onto the road.

  Pulling herself up and away from the past, Kathy glared at him. “Stop this van right now and get out!” she shrilled.

  His gaze cut into her. “I know you’re scared and—” His attention shot to the rearview mirror. “Damn it, I knew there had to be more.”

  Kathy’s focus shot to the side mirror. A bla
ck sedan sped behind them. The words printed on the mirror stood out, OBJECTS MIGHT BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. She hoped like hell that was wrong, because the car practically kissed her van’s bumper. And the guy leaning out of the passenger window had a gun.

  “Get back down!” Stan growled.

  Get down, Sweet Pea, get down. Her dad’s voice vibrated through her mind, but she refused to go there.

  She dropped to the floorboards and not a second too soon. Her van—her beloved White Elephant—took another bullet. Ping. Ping. Ping. The bullets hitting the road around them sounded deadly. “I’m not happy,” she yelled at the man driving.

  “Me either.” He didn’t look at her. His focus moved between the road and the rearview mirror.

  A big jolt brought Kathy’s head up against the dashboard. The van swerved, rocked on its left tires, and for a second she felt certain they were about to tip over. “Why are they after you?” she snapped.

  “Long story.” Thuds and pings, which Kathy pretty much figured were more bullets, echoed outside the van. Then another one hit the vehicle.

  “Can you give me the short version?” she hissed. “I’d really like to know why I’m about to die.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Why I’m about to die. That last word vibrated in her head. Die.

  He jerked the steering wheel to the right, then to the left; the van bounced back and forth.

  Die. She really was going to die. An image of Tommy filled her mind. Tears stung her eyes. She thought of all the things she’d miss in her son’s life. His smiles. The bedtime stories. His first date. His graduation. Oh God, his sweet hugs and his little boy smell. And if she died, her ex and his TOW would raise her son. Tommy would be telling that old biddy that he loved her more than dirt.

  “Oh, hell no!” she cried. And, curled into a ball on the floorboards, she buried her face between her knees and prayed. Prayed for a miracle. Reminded Whoever Might Be Listening that she’d given living an honest life a good shot. Reminded Whoever Might Be Listening that she’d taken some hard knocks, first with her father, then with her mom’s illness and then with her husband and his TOW, and that she’d forgone any serious whining beforehand but this was too much. She absolutely, without exception, refused to die.

  She heard a big crash. It didn’t involve her or the White Elephant. It came from behind them. She looked up at Stan Bradley, who seemed completely comfortable driving without a shirt, his jeans still unsnapped, as if…as if someone hadn’t stormed into his house and sprayed it with bullets. He stared in the rearview mirror, and a slow smile pulled at his lips, and he dropped into his lap the gun he’d had locked in his right hand.

  His gaze shot to her. “I don’t think they’ll be following us now.”

  Okay, she was seriously going to have to pray more. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” She dropped her face back onto her knees.

  “You’re welcome,” Stan said.

  Her gaze shot back to him. “Oh, pleeeeaase! I wasn’t talking to you! Why in holy hell would I thank you? You got me into that mess!” She swiped the tears from her cheeks and pulled herself up into the passenger seat.

  She didn’t look at him, but she could feel his gaze on her. He touched her arm. She slapped his hand…and slapped it again as he pulled it away. “Do not. Do not touch me, you…you…I don’t even know what you are, but whatever it is, I don’t like it! I don’t like you!”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Sorry? You say ‘I’m sorry’ when you step on someone’s toe.” Her voice rose, but she didn’t care. “ ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t cover…bullets and…and someone trying to kill me.” A few more unwanted tears filled her eyes.

  Stan glanced into the rearview mirror and then toward her. “Okay, what kind of an apology covers bullets?”

  How could he be so calm? What kind of an apology covers bullets? She wouldn’t know, because she hadn’t gotten an apology when she was eight. She hadn’t even gotten one when she went looking for one at eighteen. Not that this made Stan’s apology mean anything—especially when his mouth twisted and, she wasn’t absolutely sure, but it looked as if he wanted to laugh at her.

  “Is this your idea of how to show a girl a good time?” she spluttered. “Because if it is, I got news for you, buster. I’m so not your kind of girl.”

  The brow over his swollen eye arched. “We seemed to be doing pretty well before…before everything happened.”

  “You mean before your girlfriend showed up?” she snapped, and latched both her hands to the dashboard. “The girlfriend I didn’t know about.”

  His blue eyes cut to her briefly. “You totally misunderstood—”

  “Misunderstood? I was the TOW!”

  He made a face. “What’s a—?”

  “Did I misunderstand all those popping sounds, too? Was that a squirt gun that…that Neanderthal brought into your bathroom? Or how about the one in your lap right now? Does a sign with the word BANG pop out of that semiautomatic when you pull the trigger?” She looked at her van’s windows. “Is that a bullet hole, or am I misunderstanding that too?” She let out a big huff of air.

  The sight of the hairy man on the floor of Stan’s bathroom with blood pooling around his head filled her mind. She felt her insides start to tremble. Was he dead? Had she really killed a man with a toilet tank lid? And what about the men in the car who’d been shooting at them and had wrecked? Oh, gawd! Was she more like her father than she cared to admit? Her sinuses stung with unshed tears.

  She fought against the memory and tried to focus on what was important. Right at this moment, what seemed important was getting herself as far removed from this situation as possible—which meant getting a dozen or so miles away from Stan Bradley, then going straight to the police. Yeah, she’d go to the police. That’d prove it. Prove she wasn’t like dear ol’ dad.

  That’s when she remembered her new fandangled cell phone. Damn, she could have already called the police.

  She reached down, but her purse wasn’t there. Bits and pieces of its contents littered the floorboards, but not her cell phone, which must have been thrown to the back. She started to go for it, but then her gaze shot to the man driving the van—the man who had a gun.

  Fear settled like a bad burrito in her gut. “Seriously, I want you to pull over and get out of my van.”

  He frowned, let out a gush of air, passed his hand over his face, then met her gaze. But he didn’t say a word.

  “Pull over right now! I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want you far, far away from me.” She put some punch in her voice. Or at least she tried.

  “I really wish I could do that.”

  “You can do that.”

  She didn’t like the nervous little tickle she got in her belly. It wasn’t a he’s-a-hunk tickle; this was a the-shit’s-about-to-hit-the-fan kind of tickle. This was the first sign she always got before life plopped something terrible into her lap, and she didn’t need anything else in her lap. She hadn’t shoveled the crap from her lap that had appeared at Stan’s place ten minutes ago. Oh, heck, who was she kidding? She hadn’t dealt with the crap her husband laid on her four years ago. She hadn’t dealt with the crap she’d gotten herself into on her little trip back to Alabama to make things right, either. In fact, if you asked the court-mandated therapist she’d visited when she’d gotten caught shoplifting at the ripe old age of twelve, the good doc would say she hadn’t dealt with the crap her dear old dad had laid on her in the first eight years of her life. If there was one thing Kathy Callahan was good at, it was not dealing with crap. But her lap was too full to take any more. No more crap room.

  “Look. There’s a nice spot to pull over, right there.” She leaned close and wrapped her hand around the steering wheel. “Just turn here and—”

  He put his hand on her wrist and tightened his hold on the wheel. “I can’t do that, Kathy. I can’t let you go now.”

  She kept her eyes fixed on his face, on his swollen eye, so he
wouldn’t know what she intended to do next. Truth was, she wasn’t sure when it had become the plan. Not that it was a good plan, but it was the only plan she had. And she was going for it.

  She released the steering wheel and, lickety-split, her hand shot straight for his crotch. It wasn’t the prize behind the zipper she was going for—not that she hadn’t once entertained the idea—but the prize that lay in his lap. Unfortunately, with her eyes still on his face, she found the behind-the-zipper object first.

  Before Stan Bradley could do more than widen his eyes—yup, even his swollen eye widened—she rebounded and wrapped her fingers around the gun. Then, breath held, she pulled back, drew the gun to her chest, wrapped her right hand over her left, kept her trigger finger to the side of the gun, just the way she’d been taught to do for safety, and pointed the weapon at his gorgeous naked chest.

  “I said, pull over and get out of my van!”

  Chapter Five

  Joey crawled his 300-pound ass out of the car, spitting out the white powder from the air bag. He was madder than hell and feeling like…like he’d just been in a car crash. Which he had.

  Fighting back adrenaline, he focused enough to make sure he didn’t have any serious injuries. His neck ached, but mostly his head, and he remembered hitting the driver-side door when the car flipped. If he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, no telling what would have happened.

  Leaning down a bit, he looked back into the wrecked car at Donald. The man’s nose and head were bleeding, and he looked half out of it; but he wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. But both Joey’s and Donald’s ass would be grass if they didn’t catch Luke Hunter fast. The boss didn’t like people who couldn’t get the job done. And Joey and Donald had sure as hell screwed up. Of course, they hadn’t been alone. Boss would also have to whack Pablo and Corky. Joey could only hope that digging four graves might prove too much for their boss.