by Katie Ruggle
Several businesses had already closed for the winter, and the buildings looked abandoned. The town emptied out every fall, occupants and tourists fleeing to ski towns or warm beaches to escape the cold and storms. Hugh couldn’t blame them. As one of the few year-round police officers in Monroe, Colorado, he could attest that the place got pretty dull in the winter, when the few hard-core residents who remained got snowed in on a regular basis. With mountain passes bookending the town, the highway in either direction was closed more often than not.
The blackened ruin of the town diner a few buildings down from the VFW added to the post-apocalyptic feel. After an explosion destroyed it a few weeks earlier, the diner’s owner had moved into the VFW temporarily so that the Monroe residents weren’t forced to go without their morning eggs and coffee. She was planning to rebuild the diner, but the work wouldn’t start until spring. The construction crews abandoned town before winter just as quickly as everyone else.
Hugh frowned at the front of the VFW. Things had gone to hell over the past month. He missed the diner. In fact, he missed a lot of things he’d taken for granted a month ago: sitting in his usual booth, going to work, being pain free.
After checking to make sure Lexi’s window fan was on, he headed toward the VFW entrance. His scalp and the back of his neck began to prickle again, warning him that there were eyes on him. Slowing his stride, he surreptitiously glanced around, checking the surrounding buildings and the street.
No one was there.
Everything was silent, as if even the ever-present wind was holding its breath. The scuff of his boots against the pavement sounded too loud, and he stopped, this time not caring who saw him looking around. Nothing was moving, though. The entire town was still.
With a swallowed groan, he turned back toward the VFW. He’d been sensing these phantom stalkers for days now. Boredom and inactivity were obviously driving him insane. He’d only taken one more step toward the makeshift diner when Lexi started barking. Pivoting, he half jogged, half limped toward his truck. It was one thing to ignore his own instincts, but there was no way he was going to ignore Lexi’s. His partner was never wrong.
At the truck, he hurried to attach her lead to her harness, clipping it to the ring he used when they were going to do a search. Lexi quivered with anticipation, already in drive and ready to go.
As soon as he stepped back and gave the command, she was bounding toward the building across the street. It was a historic brick building that had been a bank at one point. Now, it housed a laundromat—closed for the winter—on the first level and several offices above.
When Lexi led him to the alley behind the building, Hugh was relieved. Without a uniform or a badge, snooping around the front of the laundromat was likely to attract suspicion from passersby. His relief disappeared, however, when Lexi led him to a back door and promptly sat, looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to open the door so she could continue tracking.
The door was locked. Hugh pulled his phone from his pocket but then hesitated. Everyone else was dealing with the Rack and Ruin bust. He wasn’t chasing a suspect or following a confirmed tip; he wasn’t even on duty. All he had was his K9 partner tracking an unknown scent. If this caused officers to be pulled off the drug bust, he could be endangering lives. They needed all the help they could get with that motorcycle club.
Dropping his phone back in his pocket, he pulled out his lockpick set.
His uncle Gavin had taught him how to open his first lock when Hugh was eight. It was the bathroom door, so it wasn’t the trickiest of locks, but they’d moved on to the front door dead bolt next. After that, Gavin had shown him the trick to opening school lockers, handcuffs, and car doors before he’d advanced to disabling alarm systems.
Uncle Gavin was currently serving a six-year sentence at Colorado State Penitentiary for second-degree burglary. When Hugh was eleven, he’d been home when the cops had come for Gavin the first time. After the arrest, one of the officers had walked over to where a terrified Hugh had been watching on the front steps. The policeman had sat down next to Hugh, given him a rub-on tattoo of a badge, and explained the importance of leaving other people’s stuff alone. When the cops had left with Gavin, Hugh had decided to become a police officer. After all, the front of the squad car seemed like a much better place to be than the back.
As Hugh casually glanced over his shoulder, checking to make sure the coast was clear, he gave silent thanks for Uncle Gavin’s lessons. The dead bolt was a simple single-cylinder style, something he could’ve handled with a couple of bobby pins. With his professional torque and pick, it only took seconds for Hugh to gently press the keyhole pins into place and unlock the door.
After another quick look around, he turned the knob and slipped into a small, dim entry. Lexi brushed past his leg in her eagerness to get inside and immediately trotted up the stairs. Drawing his gun, Hugh followed, keeping his footsteps as quiet as possible.
At the top of the stairs, Lexi took a left. Hugh paused, looking at the three closed doors to the right. Someone could be hiding in one of those offices, and Hugh didn’t want to turn his back until he checked them. His hand tightened on the leash as the impatient dog hauled against him in her hurry to follow the scent. An almost silent command brought her back to him, albeit reluctantly, and they headed down the hall to the right. Keeping an eye out for anything behind them, he listened as he walked softly toward the first closed door. All he heard was the click of Lexi’s nails and the occasional creaks of the elderly wood floors under his weight.
The first knob resisted turning under his grip. Locked. He tried the second and the third. Both were locked as well. Only then did he allow Lexi to lead them down the hallway in the other direction. She surged forward eagerly and sat in front of the first door on the right.
This doorknob turned easily under his fingers. Pushing open the door, he stepped into the room in the same movement, gun up and ready, turning right and then pivoting to the left to check the entire space.
It was empty. The small area had been an office at some point, but now the only evidence of its former occupation was the cables that snaked out of the wall, the ends sprawled uselessly into dust and cobwebs. The dirty blinds were down, but the slats were at an angle, as if someone wanted to look outside without anyone being able to see in.
Lexi trotted to the window, sniffing along the baseboard. As he moved to follow, Hugh noticed the dust on the floor was smudged. There weren’t any shoe prints that he could make out. Instead, it looked more like someone had knelt or sat next to the window. He walked to the spot where the dust had been rubbed away and looked around the room. There were other marks in the dust, including where his own boots had scuffed, but nothing as distinct as the area where he stood. Hugh crouched awkwardly, extending his injured leg out straight, and peered through the slats of the blinds.
He had a clear view of the VFW parking lot and the top of his pickup.
A door slammed. Shoving to his feet and ignoring the spike of pain in his thigh, Hugh ran out of the room. Lexi quickly took the lead as they tore through the hallway and down the stairs. Hugh shoved the door open, and he and Lexi tumbled out into the sunshine.
Squinting as his eyes struggled to adjust to the brightness after the dim, dusty interior of the building, Hugh swiveled his head back and forth, looking for whoever had just exited the building. There was no sign of anyone, no sound, not even a chirp of a bird. Lexi wasn’t hauling on her leash. Instead, she made uncertain circles, facing one direction and then another. Hugh swore under his breath.
Whoever had been in that building, whoever’d been watching him, was long gone.
* * *
This new life Mr. Espina had given her was a nightmare.
Sure, it beat getting strangled by a Jovanovic and being buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, but it still wasn’t good. There was one bathroom. One single, solitary, old bathroom
…for six people. It was as if all her struggles, all her hard work, had been erased, leaving her as poor and powerless and trapped as her twelve-year-old self had been.
And this time, there was no escape.
Turning from the ancient claw-foot tub, she found five pairs of eyes watching her with everything from friendly interest to deep suspicion. Kaylee forced a smile. “I like the lion feet.”
“Me too!” the youngest, who had been introduced as Dee, blurted out, bouncing in place. She quieted quickly when the oldest boy—and the most silently hostile of the bunch—put a hand on her shoulder. Although Dee went obediently still, she snuck Kaylee a quick, conspiratorial smile.
As if she could read Kaylee’s mind, Jules—the only adult there except for Kaylee—made a face. “I know. One bathroom sucks. We’ll make it work, though. I’m up really early, and the kids are quick getting ready for school. Dee takes a bath at night, so that’s one less person hogging the tub in the mornings. Did Mr. Esp—Uh, do you have any idea where you’ll be working?”
“Not yet.” Kaylee fought to keep her expression untroubled. After going over the new persona that Mateo Espina had created for her, Kaylee had wanted to cry. No, she’d wanted to scream and kick things and roll around on the floor and have a complete and utter tantrum like a two-year-old. The disappearance expert had stripped her of her six years of hard-earned college education, both her undergrad and grad-school work, and replaced it all with a GED. A GED. She didn’t even get to keep her status as high-school valedictorian. All of those double shifts at the factory and sleepless nights spent studying had been for nothing.
She took a deep breath, reminding herself for the hundredth time that a life of minimum wage and limited personal space was a small price to pay for not getting tortured to death.
“I have to go job hunting,” she added. Her tone was as flat as she felt.
“Okay, well, just let us know when you need the bathroom in the mornings, and we’ll work around your schedule.” One of the teenage twins made a sound of protest, but a look from Jules had him turning it into a cough.
“What’d you do?” the other twin asked.
Kaylee looked at him quizzically, but Jules must have understood his meaning, because she gave him a stern glare. “Tio, zip it.”
It finally registered with Kaylee what he’d been asking. Although he didn’t press the question, everyone except for Jules was staring at her with varying degrees of interest and wariness. Not for the first time, she wondered why Jules and her siblings had had to run. Mr. Espina had told her that they’d take Kaylee in because Jules owed him a favor. Kaylee figured that had to mean that he’d helped this family disappear, too. Had they witnessed something, like Kaylee had? They stared back at her, obviously wondering the same thing about her. From the wary looks they were giving her, she could only imagine what heinous crimes they thought she’d committed to be forced to change her identity and share their house.
“Nothing.” Kaylee figured she’d better say something before they mentally convicted her of mass murder. “I just…saw something. Something bad that a powerful man didn’t want me to see.”
“Like a mob hit?” the other twin, Ty, asked.
Kaylee couldn’t stop a wince when his words touched a little too close to home. “No.”
“A drive-by shooting?” Apparently, the twins weren’t going to leave it alone.
“An assassination?”
“Someone planting a bomb?”
“A kidnapping?”
Everyone went still, the air thick with tension, until Jules broke it with a clap that made every single person in the hallway flinch. “Sorry. How would you like to see your room?”
Honestly, Kaylee would rather not see her room, since she could only imagine what it would be like. It was in this collapsing house of horrors, after all. Jules looked so desperately optimistic, however, that Kaylee couldn’t find it in herself to crush her hostess. Instead of allowing her true feelings to escape, she swallowed back all the emotion that had been building from the moment she walked into Martin’s basement room.
“Sounds good.”
Kaylee followed Jules to the base of the stairs, the kids close behind them. Since no one could see her face, Kaylee allowed her forced smile to drop. It probably just looked like she’d been baring her teeth anyway. Maybe once they’d shown her to her room, she could lock herself inside and have the shrieking, stomping, pillow-punching tantrum she’d been dying to have since her life had been stolen from her. The entire time Kaylee had been traveling to Monroe, Colorado, she’d been terrified. Everyone—from the gas station attendant to the woman in the next public bathroom stall—had been a potential associate of Martin Jovanovic.
A potential assassin.
Kaylee’s foot had just touched the first step when the front door swung open, startling her into turning. There, framed in the doorway, backlit by the afternoon sun, stood a cop with a police dog by his side.
Officer Jovanovic’s face flashed in her mind, and her head spun with instant panic. That had been so fast. She’d just arrived at the supposed safe house, and Martin had already found her. Kaylee grabbed at the banister to catch her balance. Her fingers felt thick and useless, but she managed to grip the wood. She braced, waiting for the shouting, for the cop or the dog to tackle her and handcuff her and put her in the squad car and drive her who-knew-where to her grisly death. Everything in front of her went gray.
“Viggy!” Dee ran to the dog, petting him as he pressed his head into her stomach. The cop smiled down at them.
Jules brushed by her as she headed for the cop. Kaylee sucked back a protest, wanting to scream for her to run, not to get closer, not to grab his hand and smile up at him in greeting.
Kaylee squeezed her eyes closed and then opened them again, but the scene in front of her didn’t change. Jules and the cop were still making googly eyes at each other. Kaylee could almost see the cartoon hearts circling the pair. He didn’t look like a cop on a mission to hunt down Martin Jovanovic’s enemy. He looked like a guy in love.
Martin hadn’t sent him here. She wouldn’t be hauled away in handcuffs…not now, at least. As the realization sunk in, her panic retreated enough for her to pull in a shaky breath. Blinking several times, she managed to clear her vision, and her grip on the banister eased.
The officer looked at Kaylee, and his expression hardened. The muscles that had just relaxed ever so slightly stiffened again.
“Who are you?” he barked.
Her heart thundered in her chest, and she swallowed. You’re ready for this, she reminded herself firmly. She’d repeated the name and backstory over and over to herself for hours as she drove across deserts and mountains. “Grace Robinson.”
“Where are you from?”
“Most recently? Bangor, Maine.”
“Why are you here?” The kids’ heads turned with each question and answer, following the exchange like they were watching a tennis match.
“Theo,” Jules broke in firmly. “Stop interrogating her. She’s not one of your suspects. Grace was my friend in high school. She’s going to stay here for a while.”
For a brief moment, his too-intense gaze left Kaylee—not Kaylee, she thought for the umpteenth time, Grace—and landed on Jules. Grace took the opportunity to suck in a few long breaths and try to quiet her shaking hands. Too soon, that laser focus was locked on her again.
“Why don’t you have an accent?”
“What?” Accent? Did people from Maine have an accent? Mr. Espina had let her choose her pretend city of origin, and Kaylee had chosen Bangor because it seemed like a nice place, a peaceful place. She hadn’t realized there was an accent.
“You went to high school with Jules.”
“Yes.” The word came out slowly. Kaylee felt like she was stepping into a trap.
“In Arkansas.”
Oh! That accent! “Just for a few years. My parents moved around a lot.”
“Military?”
“No.” Kaylee didn’t have enough knowledge about the different military branches and rankings and everything else she’d be expected to know to pull off that lie. “They were just restless.”
“Restless? Is that another term for avoiding arrest?”
“What? No!” She couldn’t believe she was offended for her imaginary parents. Her real mom had lived in the same horrible basement apartment for twenty-four years until she died of liver failure five years ago. Grace hadn’t known her real dad. “They didn’t do anything wrong.” Neither had she, but she was paying for Martin Jovanovic’s sins. A new surge of rage filled her, and she shoved it back. She could have her pillow-thumping tantrum later. Right now, she needed to focus on not making the cop suspicious…well, more suspicious than he already was.
“Why are you here?”
The jump back to his original question threw her off-balance, and her answer came out sounding hesitant. “Just visiting Jules.”
He waited, watching her steadily.
Racking her brain for a reason he would believe, all she could think about was that room in Martin’s house. Grace decided to go with the truth—in a somewhat altered form. “And I needed to get away from my ex-boyfriend.”
By the way his face hardened even more, she knew right away that it had been the wrong thing to say. “He’s dangerous?” he barked.
“No. Just a jerk.” Noah wasn’t a jerk, though. His uncle was—well, jerk was a very mild word for what Martin was—but Noah had been nothing but sweet to her. Although her common sense told her that he had to have known his uncle did very bad things, another part of her felt guilty for convicting him without even talking to him about it. Maybe he was ignorant of his uncle’s true nature, or maybe Noah didn’t know exactly how deadly Martin really was. Grace just couldn’t believe that Noah—kind, considerate Noah—would be okay with having her killed. There was no way he could have hidden a monster of that magnitude under his perfect-boyfriend exterior.
