Cold Hearts

by Sharon Sala

  Two boxes of cereal. Always sugarcoated.

  A bag of apples.

  A six-pack of Coke for Reece and one of Dr. Pepper for him.

  Two pounds of hamburger meat. He could make that tomorrow when...

  He paused, then put back the meat because he’d gotten carried away. No tomorrows.

  He thought about cheese. He always bought cheese. Reece would wonder why he’d skipped the cheese. He wheeled the cart around and headed toward the back of the store to the dairy department, and the moment he rounded the corner in front of the milk case and saw Melissa Sherman he wanted to cry. He’d tried so hard to save her, and instead he’d delivered Reece into her lap.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Reece drawled.

  “No, Reece, you can’t—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Louis. Go away. Now!”

  Reece grabbed the grocery cart and aimed it toward the woman, knowing full well she wouldn’t be afraid. She wouldn’t run. In her eyes he was Louis, the man who swept the floors where she worked. He was in like Flynn, and she would never see it coming.

  He kept moving closer, closer. The blood rush was so strong he felt invincible.

  Hot damn, she sees me. She’s smiling. I knew it, I knew it. She thinks I’m Louis. Son of a bitch, this is going to be a piece of cake.

  Then Reece heard Louis shouting, “Run, Melissa! Run!”

  Reece froze. “Louis! Damn it! I told you to get lost!”

  Melissa was staring.

  Louis gathered every ounce of energy he had left and began screaming as he ran, “Run! Run! He wants to kill you!”

  When Melissa Sherman turned and ran through the double doors leading into the back of the store, Louis felt faint with relief. He’d done it! She was on her own, but she wouldn’t be taken unaware.

  Reece was running now, past the display aisle with the butter and cheese on sale, shoving aside a shopping cart and the woman pushing it as he went.

  “I’m going to catch her, and when I’m done with her, I’m going to kill you, Louis. I swear to God, I am going to kill you!” he screamed.

  * * *

  Cain Embry was on the far side of the dairy section. He appeared to be shopping for yogurt, but in fact his whole focus was on Melissa Sherman. He watched all the people coming and going around her without concern until he saw a stocky, middle-aged man talking to himself, and then all of a sudden he was heading toward her, and something about the way he was moving said trouble.

  Then he saw Melissa look up at the man and smile. When she did, he stopped. Then all of a sudden the man started running toward her and screaming. Before he could react, Melissa turned on one heel and shot through the doors behind her with the man only a few yards behind.

  What the hell?

  Cain ran forward, dodging two aisle displays and three women with shopping carts, hitting the double doors with both hands as he ran.

  * * *

  Mack glanced at his watch and then back up at the front door, willing Lissa to appear when her cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen to see who it was and answered.

  “Hey, Trey. This is Mack. Lissa is in the supermarket.”

  “You need to find her and get her under wraps. We have reason to believe her stalker is after her as we speak, and that’s not all. We know who he is.”

  Mack was already out of the car and hurrying toward the store, ignoring any and all stiffness and pain.

  “His name. What’s his name?”

  “Reece Parsons. All we know is he’s average height, middle-aged and stocky, with a long gray ponytail.”

  “I have private security tailing her, but I’m on my way inside, too. I’ll call when I have her home.”

  Trey started to speak and then stopped. “Hang on. I’m getting info that his truck has been—oh, shit.”

  Mack was only yards from the entrance. “What’s wrong?”

  “One of my officers just radioed in that the Parsonses’ truck has been located at the supermarket. We’re on our way.”

  Mack dropped the phone in his pocket and started to run. He burst through the front entrance and raced past the checkout stations, looking down each aisle as he passed. He was halfway along when he caught a glimpse of her at the far end of the store and then saw the man running toward her. He took off down the aisle, dodging shoppers and shouting her name as he went.

  * * *

  Lissa was running through the swinging doors into the back of the supermarket, darting past a pallet of produce and screaming, “Help me!” when all of a sudden someone grabbed the back of her jacket and spun her around. She saw a fist coming at her, and then everything went black.

  Reece threw her over his shoulder on the run, heading for a door marked Exit about fifty yards away.

  A woman opened the door to the public bathroom and was walking out when Reece slammed it back shut on her. He heard her cry out in pain and kept on running.

  Then gunshots!

  “What the fuck?” he said, and spun.

  A big man with a shaved head and a grim expression had a gun pointed straight at them, and there was another man coming up behind him, wearing jeans and a hoodie.

  “If you take one step toward me, I’ll break her neck. If you shoot, you’re going to hit her, too!” Reece shouted. Then he realized the man in the hoodie wasn’t stopping.

  Mack flew past Cain without hesitation, and when he did, Reece turned and ran with Lissa’s limp body still over his shoulder, only she was dead weight, slowing him down. He took a side step toward a wall jutting out to the right and swung Lissa’s body like a baseball bat.

  “Nooo!” Mack screamed, watching in horror as she hit the wall with a hard, solid thud and slid lifelessly down onto the concrete while Reece disappeared around the corner.

  Seconds later Mack was down on both knees, checking for a pulse as Cain skidded to a halt beside him.

  “Is she—”

  “I have a pulse. Call an ambulance!” Mack said, but before Cain could get the phone out of his pocket, police were swarming into the area with Trey Jakes leading the pack. He saw Lissa on the floor and stopped as the others ran past him.

  “Is she all right?” Trey asked.

  “She’s breathing. That’s all I know,” Mack said.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” Cain said, and moved away from the noise to make the call.

  “Get her out of the line of fire,” Trey said. “We have the back doors blocked. He can’t get away, but he may be armed.”

  Mack didn’t hesitate as he scooped her up and ran toward a pallet filled with bags of dog food, then ducked down behind it. Cain was right behind him, and as soon as Mack stopped, Cain put himself between them and further danger.

  “You okay, boss? Your shoulder is bleeding.” With his gun in one hand and a phone in the other, Cain ducked down beside them as the shouting around them got louder.

  Mack felt blood running down his back, but it didn’t matter. They’d fixed him up before. They could do it again. He just wanted her to wake up.

  “It’s nothing,” he said as he began feeling along the back of Lissa’s head. He winced when his fingers came away bloody.

  “Oh, God. She’s bleeding,” he said.

  * * *

  Reece was trying not to panic as he ran. The delivery door was in sight, and he knew the truck was parked at the side of the store, not far away. He would be in it and gone before the cops knew what happened.

  And then the delivery door opened.

  The moment Reece saw uniformed officers coming in, he skidded to a stop, then started back the other way, only to see more cops coming at him from that direction. He was caught in a narrow hallway with no way out.

  “Son of a bitch!” he screamed.

  That was when Louis suddenly reappeared.

  The cops were yelling at Reece to stop and get down on his knees when Louis pulled the gun out of his inner pocket and began shouting at Reece, too.

  The cops froze, uncertain as to wha
t was happening. All of a sudden the man they were after was talking to himself in two different voices. One voice was loud and angry, and the other one was scared and crying. The crying man kept putting the gun up to his head, and then the loud angry man would shout, “No!” and slap it away.

  Trey was beginning to realize the man was mentally unbalanced. He was behaving as if he was two different men. Trey wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but he knew the man had a mother and called on that knowledge when he shouted his name.

  “Louis! Louis! Put down the gun! Your mama called us. She doesn’t want you hurt.”

  But he didn’t respond, and Trey wasn’t sure what to do next.

  Louis was sobbing and yelling.

  Reece spun toward the cops, trying to wrestle mental supremacy from Louis in order to get control of the gun, but Louis wouldn’t let go. He was screaming so loudly that Reece thought his eardrums were going to burst.

  “Stop it, Reece! Stop it now! I’m not going to let you hurt anyone else. Not ever again!” Louis cried.

  Reece was panicked. “Where did you get that gun? How come I didn’t know you had a gun?”

  Louis kept crying. “You wouldn’t listen. I kept telling you it was wrong, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  The employees working in the back of the store and socializing in the break room began opening doors and peering out to see what was going on.

  “Get back inside and get down on the floor!” Trey yelled, waving his own gun.

  They didn’t have to be told twice. They all ducked back inside and shut the doors.

  The argument between Louis and Reece was spiraling out of control. It was as if they’d forgotten about everything except themselves.

  Reece was begging. “Don’t, Louie, don’t! You can’t kill me, you can’t!”

  Louis took a deep shuddering breath. “Yes, I can, Reece, because you killed me.”

  And then Louis put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet blew through his head, shattering bone, and scattering blood and brains onto the wall behind him.

  Trey felt sick as he turned away. There’d been no stopping this.

  Fifteen

  Lissa was still unconscious when they reached the ER. Mack was scared, as scared as the day he’d driven to her house to ask if she’d had an abortion, and he felt the same horrible uncertainty now.

  He already knew he was going to have nightmares about watching her body hit that wall and not being able to get to her fast enough to save her. And now that the shock and adrenaline were fading, he was starting to feel the pain of what he’d done to himself.

  As they were assessing Lissa’s injuries, one of the nurses saw the fresh blood on his hoodie, and before he knew what was happening they’d taken him into the next bay and removed the hoodie he was wearing. Once they saw the evidence of recent surgery, and despite his argument that he needed to be with Lissa, they set out to repair the reopened shoulder wound.

  “Just tell me what’s going on next door,” he begged.

  “They’re still examining her,” the doctor said.

  “Is she still unconscious? Just tell me that much.”

  “In a few minutes you can go see for yourself,” the doctor countered.

  Mack was heartsick. He’d hired security to keep her safe, but even that hadn’t been enough to stop a madman. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as the doctor began working on his shoulder. A few minutes in, he got a one-word text from Cain.

  Sorry.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, swallowing past the lump in his throat. Not being able to keep her safe was troubling Cain as much as it was him.

  “Bad news?” the doctor asked.

  “The only bad news I’m dealing with is what happened to my girl.”

  “She had a stalker, I hear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did they catch him?”

  Mack thought about what Trey had told him while they were waiting for the ambulance.

  “He killed himself,” Mack said, then he turned his head, trying to see what the doctor was doing. “Are you about finished?”

  The doctor nodded. “As soon as the nurse redresses this you’ll be good to go. You can fill in the pertinent information as you sign out.”

  The moment the nurse finished putting a bandage over the wound, Mack grabbed his hoodie and stood up. She tried to hand him a clipboard, but he shook his head.

  “Uh-uh. You already have my pertinent information from a couple of days ago when they brought me in here with this same wound. Nothing has changed. I need to get back to Lissa.”

  He walked out of one bay and back into the other as a tech and a portable X-ray machine came out. The doctor who had been working on her was gone, and a nurse was adjusting a drip.

  The obvious change was that she now had an IV, was wearing a hospital gown instead of her clothes and had a couple of blankets pulled up to her waist.

  He threaded his fingers through hers as he glanced up at the blood pressure reading. “Did she wake up yet?”

  Lissa’s fingers tightened on his as he spoke.

  The nurse smiled and nodded, and relief rushed through him as he looked down. “Lissa? Honey?”

  Her eyelids fluttered. “Mack?”

  He felt like crying. “Yes, baby, I’m here.”

  “I hurt.”

  He looked up at the nurse. “Her head was bleeding. Did it need stitches?”

  “No. It was a small cut. We glued it, and now we’re waiting on X-rays.”

  Mack rubbed the knuckle of her thumb. “I’m sorry. I thought I could protect you,” he said.

  Tears rolled from under her eyelids. “I worked with him every day, and he stalked me every night.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Mack said, and then he bit his lip as a wave of pain rolled across his back.

  The nurse glanced at him, and then pushed a chair up behind him and pointed.

  Grateful that she was so observant, he sat.

  Lissa continued slipping in and out of consciousness, which kept him somewhere north of panic. It was almost an hour before the doctor returned.

  Mack stood.

  “Mr. Jackson, right?”

  “Yes. What can you tell me about Melissa’s injuries?”

  “We x-rayed her head and her spine. Everything is intact, and there are no broken bones.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Mack said.

  “But she has a concussion, so I want to keep her overnight.” The doctor eyed the blood on Mack’s hoodie. “What about you?”

  “I just pulled a couple of staples loose. I’m good.”

  “You already had staples?”

  Mack sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  The doctor frowned. “Then, I suggest you go home and rest. She’s not going to know whether you’re here or not.”

  “But I’ll know,” Mack said.

  The doctor’s frown deepened. “Look, we don’t have many patients right now. I’ll have them put her in a room with two beds. I assume you were taking meds?”

  “At home.”

  “What are you taking?”

  Mack told him what the doctor had prescribed.

  “I’ll check with your doctor and see if he’ll okay us to dispense them while you’re here with her, and if you use one of the beds, I won’t argue with your decision.”

  “Deal,” Mack said.

  “They’ll move her shortly. In the meantime, get off your feet.”

  Mack scooted the chair closer to the bed and then eased down and leaned back. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  Pinky was still in her room staring at the door, dreading the inevitable knock. She’d heard the police and ambulance sirens, and suspected the worst. They could be responding to a totally unrelated incident, but she guessed they’d found the truck.

  She didn’t know how to feel, and it had been too many years since she’d prayed. In her heart, she feared Reece would prevail, which m
eant he would either kill the woman he was after, then get caught and go to jail, or get away and live to cause chaos elsewhere. On the other hand, if Louis did what he’d said he would do, she would have one more child to bury. It hurt to breathe and she was too scared to cry, so she waited.

  One hour passed, and then a second hour. It was nearing midafternoon, and she had finally fallen asleep from exhaustion when someone knocked. At first she thought she was dreaming, and then they knocked again and she heard them saying, “Mrs. Parsons. Mrs. Parsons, are you there?”

  She scrambled out of bed and stumbled to the door, oblivious of the mashed-flat side of her hair where she’d been lying and the mascara smudged beneath one eye.

  Trey Jakes saw the fear on her face. “Mrs. Parsons, I’m Chief Jakes. We spoke earlier. May I come in?”

  She stepped aside, then shut the door behind him as he entered.

  “So did you find him?” she asked.

  Trey sighed. “Yes, ma’am, and I want you to know that your call saved a woman’s life.”

  Pinky’s belly knotted. “Did you arrest him?” she asked.

  Trey shook his head. “No, Mrs. Parsons. I’m sorry to inform you that your son took his own life.”

  Pinky thought she’d been prepared for those words, but when she heard them she moaned and staggered backward.

  Trey caught her before she fell and settled her down onto the side of the bed.

  “I can’t believe Louis actually did it. I thought for sure Reece would win out.”

  Trey didn’t know how to begin, so he just launched in. “Look, it became obvious to all of us that your son had some kind of mental illness. He kept yelling and crying and arguing with himself. Was he schizophrenic?”

  She reached for a tissue and blew her nose, glanced up at the cop and then down at a bare spot on the rug.

  “Forty-two years ago I gave birth to twin boys. Reece and Louis. Reece was oldest by five minutes, and strongest. Louis was weak and sickly. When they were eight, Reece came in one day and told me Louis wasn’t breathing. I ran out and found him facedown on the ground, his face mashed into the mud. His death was ruled an accident, but my husband said different. He said Reece had the sickness—the bad blood that ran in his family. He said Reece had killed Louis, and then he went into the garage and hanged himself.”