by Kate Aeon
And then he kissed her and headed out the front door to go to work.
And she was alone.
Well, she was used to being alone, and unlike Alan, she didn’t have any illusions about how much help the police would be or how safe she was. She locked all the locks and jammed the bar under the front door.
Called the phone company. Her problem with caller ID was, in fact, that she hadn’t paid the full bill. The customer service representative told her BellSouth would be happy to reinstate full service as soon as she was caught up on her bill.
It didn’t matter, Phoebe decided. Even if she could look at the phone and know it was Michael on the other end, she would still answer it. What else could she do? She had to know what he wanted. What he was planning.
Phoebe stood in the main room, looking back at the dining room table, the raised counter and her bowls of fresh fruit, the tiny kitchen behind that. All one room, really, and to the right the open door into her bedroom. She could see almost everything on the ground floor, plus the steps set just back of her bedroom door, and the loft above those — empty. The door into the furnace at the top of the steps. Right of that, the door into the upstairs bathroom/bedroom combination.
She needed to go upstairs, just to make sure everything up there was the way it was supposed to be.
The trip up the stairs hurt like hell and proved to be a waste of time. The upstairs bedroom was empty and dusty. The upstairs bathroom, the same. Her pins locking the bedroom window shut were in place, dust-covered, untouched. The window was still painted shut. The big walk-in closet with its sliding mirror doors stood open so that she could see in, the light worked, the closet had its own layer of dust. Dust and tan carpet.
It hadn’t been worth the trip up, but now she knew.
She sat on her butt and scooted down the stairs, keeping her bad knee straight. It was just easier that way.
If Alan wouldn’t leave town, perhaps she should — but if she left, Michael would still know where to find Alan, and he might decide to go after him just because he could, before he picked up her trail and tracked her down.
No leaving, then.
Should she warn Brig that Michael had threatened him, too? She decided against it. He’d be coming by tomorrow morning; she could tell him then.
She did a careful tour of the downstairs — bedroom, bedroom closet, bathroom, laundry closet, kitchen-dining-living room. Everything was in place, everything looked just the same. The tea mug sat where she’d found it. She decided to leave it where it was.
Tea, though — she could definitely use a good cup of tea. She heated the water in the kettle, made green tea and skipped the honey, and drank it standing at the counter. The tea made her feel better. She knew it was only a quirk of habit — that she associated green tea with good feelings — but that single cup of tea was as soothing as an hour in a hot bubble bath.
The townhouse was warm in spite of the air-conditioning, and Phoebe realized she was exhausted. She’d only had a couple of hours of sleep, and while that had been good sleep, there hadn’t been enough of it. She looked at the couch. She could keep her backpack with her, have the handgun close by, just close her eyes for a few minutes and rest. She needed the rest.
Just a few minutes.
She lugged her backpack over to the couch, put it on the floor, and stretched out in the single block of sunlight pouring in through the angled top window.
She sank into blissful comfort. It was a cheap, lumpy, secondhand couch, but she didn’t care. It was the middle of the day, everything was locked and tight, for a little while at least she could stop worrying. She felt so much better.
And then she was dreaming. Alan, at first. Kissing her; pulling her close, wrapping his arms around her, telling her she was not alone. But somewhere along the way, the dream changed. Because suddenly Michael was there, whispering, “You’re all alone, Phoebe. No one can save you. No one. I brought you a flower for your funeral. The first flower.”
And suddenly Phoebe was as cold as if she’d been drenched in ice water. She was freezing, drowning, she was sinking into an icy lake and she had to wake up. Wake up. Wake up, wake up.
Wake up.
Phoebe woke into darkness, the air around her freezing, her skin prickling from the chill, with the child’s voice in her head screaming, Wake up! Wake up!
She tried to sit up, while the room spun around her, and as she did something dry and rough poked her neck. Wobbly, confused, dry-mouthed, and terrified, Phoebe reached over her head and managed to fumble her reading lamp on.
In the warm yellow glow she saw something long and thin and dark lying angled across her chest, snagged on the cotton of her blouse. She tried to pick it up, and it stabbed her fingertips. She couldn’t get her eyes to focus — she was having trouble waking up, and her chattering teeth and shaking hands from the cold were slowing her down, and Chick — who was inside Phoebe’s head panicking and screaming, He was here! I chased him away — prevented her from thinking straight.
What was going on?
Phoebe finally managed to sit up, and the cold vanished, and so did the screaming inside her head. She pulled the dry thing off her chest with two fingers, managing not to hurt herself on it anymore, and she stared at it until her eyes cooperated by bringing it into focus.
It was a single rose. Dead. Dried. The stem covered with needle-sharp thorns.
Oh, God.
She’d slept the day away, and somehow Michael had reached out of her dreams into reality and given her the flower from her nightmares. The one for her funeral.
She made her way to her feet and wobbled into the kitchen. The clock on the stove said 11:50 p.m.
All day. She’d slept all day.
She was queasy, and shaky, and she needed to get out of the house. If Michael could reach her behind her locked doors, he could reach Alan, too. And as long as she and Alan were apart they were vulnerable.
The phone rang. She didn’t answer it. She couldn’t stand to hear Michael’s voice again. She was too near throwing up. She couldn’t listen to his threats again. She wouldn’t.
She closed her eyes and clenched her fists while the phone rang, and rang, and rang, and with every ring she got angrier. How dare he? How dare Michael threaten people around her again? How dare he use other people as disposable playing pieces in his game to get to her? She wasn’t as afraid for herself anymore — she had her gun, she’d taken precautions with her home, she lived watchfully, and she’d had a lot of practice doing it. She would find a way to keep him outside her doors. She knew she had beaten Michael once before, which had to count for something. Even if this wasn’t truly Michael — but it is, the little voice in her head whispered, it is — he’d made himself close enough to the original to be indistinguishable to the person in the world who knew Michael best, and hated him most. Her.
So until she found proof that she considered satisfactory that Michael was dead, she would keep thinking of the man coming after her as Michael. Because so long as she was dealing with Michael, she would never let herself cut corners or make assumptions.
She would take on whatever he threw at her. She might not survive it, but if she went down she was sure she wouldn’t go down alone.
Phoebe didn’t feel confident at all about Alan, though. He’d never lived under siege. He had no idea how tight his focus would have to stay to keep himself ahead of someone who wanted to kill him. He would have had dozens of opportunities already to make a fatal mistake — to go down empty hallways, walk across parking lots past blind spots and traps, speak to people he didn’t know in situations where no one else was around to back him up. He didn’t know about checking every step he took five steps ahead of time to make sure he never went around a corner he couldn’t see. He just didn’t know how to keep a constant watch, because he’d never done it. And he didn’t understand Michael — that Michael would just keep coming and coming and coming until Alan was totally destroyed.
And the time for Alan
to learn how to save his own life was not during and after a twelve-hour night shift in an emergency room. His mind would be on other things all the time.
He needed a guardian angel.
He needed her.
Chapter Fifteen
Just past midnight. Not, traditionally, the best time for ER docs, and Alan, looking over the unit, wanted to be anywhere but where he was. He’d tried to call Phoebe half a dozen times in the last few hours — at first just to check up on her, but then because he started being scared. He’d been pretty sure when he left her house for the hospital that he was fine where Phoebe was concerned — that he could take her or leave her and that if Brig found proof that she was conning him, he could go on without missing a beat. But not being able to reach her had left his heart thudding like a jackhammer, and he couldn’t get her beautiful smile out of his mind or stop thinking about the way she’d looked at him as he left. Alan was sure Phoebe was all right, but he couldn’t leave the ER to go check on her, and as a result he was having a hell of a time staying focused on his work.
The late-night pediatric clinic had cleared out, as had the felt-bad-after-the-doctor’s-office-closed crowd. There wasn’t as much busywork as a result, but the people remaining to be seen had bigger problems than “head cold for last month” or ”wrenched ankle last week.“
Three patients were on beds, with another three or four going through the triage process out in the waiting room. The first of the full stretchers held a knife wound to the shoulder that was deep and about six inches long and covered with a tight pressure dressing — and that would get about sixty stitches as soon as the combative drunk attached to it stopped threatening to kill the staff. The second held a fifty-four-year-old white male with chest pain radiating down the left arm for the last four hours, growing increasingly more severe, with current complaints of nausea, vomiting, and severe shortness of breath. He was in the middle of his first heart attack and getting everything in the book tossed at him while Alan waited for Admitting and the nurses in the cardiac unit to ready a bed upstairs. The third was a stressed-out man in his early thirties complaining of migraines and blinding lights behind his eyes.
The thing all three of them had in common was endless puking. The drunk had brought up his Mad Dog 20/20 dinner about an hour earlier and was now trying to rid himself of the turpentine dessert — and the whole ER reeked of it. The heart attack threw up in incessant tight, short little bursts, and apologized to the nurses after every round. And the migraine — oh, the migraine. The migraine made more noise than a twelve-cat fight; he sounded like he was trying to turn himself inside out every time.
Alan hadn’t been so close to throwing up himself since his first cadaver.
Even the nurses — as tough a bunch as had ever run an ER — looked a little green around the gills.
“I say we TOBASH Knife-Boy and ship the other two now,” said Helena, the night ER charge nurse. “TOBASH” was an acronym for Take Out Back And Shoot in Head; dealing with people who had just spent hours trying to kill themselves or others, and then when they almost succeeded, who arrived in the ER demanding care while simultaneously threatening to kill the people waiting to give it had given birth to that acronym. Helena smiled when she said it, but her eyes were grim. Twenty-three years as an emergency RN had ground a few sharp edges onto her personality.
This wasn’t what Alan had thought medicine would be — and worse, this was as good as it got. ER was still the place where doctors got closest to actually practicing medicine. Every other specialty ended up so tangled in paperwork, insurance, government-mandated categorization, and corporate bullshit that the doctors and nurses couldn’t do much patient care. The field had lost something essential when insurers started calling the shots on what they would cover, and it lost a lot more when hospitals went from being private community-funded services to the next big corporate profit-centered acquisition. Alan didn’t know if medicine would ever regain the ground it had lost.
It had lost its humanity.
He turned and found one of the nurses leading in a slender young black man who’d fallen down stairs at home — at least that was his story. A badly healed break in one arm and bruises in all stages of healing suggested that the truth was a long way from a simple accident. And the boyfriend, a trim, older copper-skinned man in pressed slacks, wearing a neat white shirt and tie not even loosened at the collar at this god-awful hour, acted suspicious as hell.
At least this newest patient wasn’t barfing.
Alan closed his eyes against the coming lies and thought of Phoebe. He wanted to talk to her — to reassure himself that she was safe and then to bitch to her about the night he was having, to hear her laugh at his description of the puke-fest. Better, he wanted to curl up in bed with her again and hold her, and then he wanted to make love to her. On his balcony. On the rug. In her bed. In his bed. On the kitchen table at his place. On hers... no, not on hers. She had one of those spindly, feminine tables made strictly for dining, and even that only if you ate with little forks and elbows down.
Furniture ought to be multipurpose, he thought, and bolstered by the obvious truth of this, he took a deep breath. Phoebe was all right. She was just taking calls on the psychic line and was too busy to answer his calls. Or afraid to answer, for fear it might be the freak. Maybe he should pick up an answering machine for her so she could screen her calls. She should have one. Why didn’t she? In any case, though, he was sure she was fine. He promised himself that he would try her again as soon as he finished the new assessment. Then he headed behind the curtain to listen to lies for a while.
Twelve fifteen a.m., and Phoebe had gotten over the shakes. She took out her Browning, stripped it, and spread the pieces on an old towel in the center of her bed. She sat, bad leg positioned off the side and aligned to cause her the least possible pain, carefully cleaned the weapon and put it back together. She checked the mechanism to make sure it worked smoothly, then slid the shell cartridge in with a satisfying click. When she was finished, the oddly sweet smell of the cleaning oil filled her bedroom, and she felt confident that the handgun would operate correctly if she needed it.
She slid the Browning into its holster, secured the holster within her backpack, and stared at the ceiling. She tried to find the woman she had been in that first moment when she’d acted to stop Michael. She had only been that woman for a short time — a few minutes, less than half an hour at the most. But that woman had moved beyond fear into a cold place where sound rang hollow and pain washed out like the blue in a South Florida sky and colors faded away to black and white and blood red. When she had been that woman living in that cold place, she had been able to stand against Michael and win.
It was the first time. The only time.
And now she had to do it again.
She thought of Alan, and what Michael would do to him if he got him in a shotgun’s sights or within reach of his knife. Phoebe frowned. She didn’t know that she could find the woman she had been for those few critical moments — but even if she could, the effort would be useless if she wasn’t in the right place to make a difference. And the right place at that moment had to be the emergency room.
She looked at her knee. “You hurt,” she told the damaged joint. “A lot.” It didn’t — or at least it didn’t hurt any worse than its baseline level. But the nice thing about her knee was that it always looked like it hurt. Anything that could make medical professionals flinch and stare fixedly at other things while they corralled their shocked reactions had to be pretty bad. Her knee was.
She looked at the clock. Already twelve forty — she had taken far longer than she should have to clean her gun. Pushing one a.m. was a ludicrous hour to be out in her neighborhood. The neighborhood scared her even without having to think about Michael. But she thought of Alan, and how a death he wouldn’t see coming hovered over his head like a dark angel.
She had to get moving. “Right. Out the door. Don’t think. Just do.” She swung her backpack
over her shoulder, grabbed her cane as she headed for the door. She kept her free hand under the backpack’s front pouch flap, resting on the grip of the Browning, and she tried not to let herself think about Michael and whether he was flesh and blood or a ghost bent on vengeance or some stranger coming after her for reasons she didn’t know — or if he might be someone she knew. Like Ben.
The weight of the gun had grown in the backpack. Phoebe could find no beauty in the thing, no grace. Nothing but efficiency and a tight, tense freedom — the freedom to stand between death and those she... loved?
She could not think of love. Not yet. Probably not ever. Love was an emotion reserved for those whose lives were not lived under a deathwatch. She could not afford the messiness of love, or the hope.
Phoebe could only afford a dark, ferocious intent to survive.
Outside was typical South Florida summer — the air filled with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine, voices from one of the enclosed patios nearby speaking softly in Spanish, dogs barking. The night, still too warm and humid to be genuinely comfortable, nonetheless felt better than morning would in a few hours when the sun came up again.
Palm fronds rattled in a faint breeze. Phoebe’s skin crawled. She thumbed the safety off, but nothing and no one came after her. She reached her car, checked it for intruders before getting in, locked it as soon as she was seated, and managed to start the thing on the first try.
She drove to Alan’s ER, parked in a location that gave her a clear view of the entrance doors while still letting her see around her, and tried to spot Alan’s car. She didn’t see it — perhaps the doctors had a parking lot away from the general traffic. Alan had a fairly nondescript car — a four- or five-year-old well-maintained green Toyota Corolla with M.D. plates — but she was certain she would recognize it if it were in view.
