Safe Haven

by Lisa Mondello

  She dragged her thoughts away from where they were straying and the guilt that was pulling her down. She knew she’d fallen deeply in love with Kevin over this last week. But even though they’d made love, it didn’t mean he felt the same way about her.

  She couldn’t afford to play house or think about what might have been if she’d been smart enough to listen to reason.

  It wasn’t all that cold outside, but Daria knew Ski must be freezing. A person’s body temperature dropped while sleeping and Ski wasn’t wearing a heavy jacket. Kevin told her not to open the door under any circumstance. Ski was right outside the door watching for movement both in the well-lit courtyard and parking lot. Since the apartment was on the second floor, it was unlikely George had developed Spider Man qualities enough to scale the side of the building and break in through a window. What could it hurt to just open the door for a second to give Ski a blanket?

  Daria decided it wouldn’t hurt at all. She’d just call for Ski through the door and slip the blanket out to him. The door would only be open for a second. He’d smile at her bashfully in that boyish way of his and then gently give her a quiet admonition for opening the door. But he’d have the blanket. She’d have connected with a human being and she’d feel better.

  She turned away from the window and went to the sofa, stopping short. She was sure the crocheted blanket had been draped over the back. She couldn’t remember moving it.

  “Are you looking for this?”

  She gasped in shock when she lifted her head, her blood running cold.

  He held the blanket in his hands. “Oh, my God, George! How did you get in here?”

  Terror sliced through her veins like icicles jutting down from the roof gables. The room was dim.

  “Take another look my little chickadee,” he sneered. “Are you sure you know who you are talking to?”

  Confused, Daria squinted her eyes. What was he talking about?

  “You shouldn’t be here, George,” she said, trying to remain calm. She inched backward toward the door. “The police are looking for you.”

  Daria tried to balance herself between terror and fury. Her ex-husband had destroyed her home, made her life a living hell, and scared her half to death. And yet, he was alive and that somehow gave her comfort in knowing she would not be falsely charged with his murder.

  “They’re not going to find me,” he said. “Because I’m not your ex-ol’ man, Dar.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He was insane. He had to be to do the things he’d done and now Daria knew without a doubt her ex-husband was a sick man.

  “Family is a wonderful thing, don’t you think? Warm, loving.” He took a step closer to her and she a step back, but she was met with the force of the sofa. Hitting it, her knees bent until she collapsed down on the sofa. “And tight.”

  George lunged forward and covered her body with his. Daria struggled to move him off her. He smelled of raw sweat and grease. He clamped his cloth-covered hand over her face as she tried unsuccessfully to break free under his strength.

  “I’ll betcha Georgy Porgy never told you about me, sweet thing.”

  His smile was wicked. She’d never seen George so evil, so full of hate and malice. As her senses slowed, her eyes caught the scar above his eyebrow. It was wide and whitened with age, and so glaring. She’d never noticed it before, and wondered how she could have been married to him for nearly five years and not noticed something so obviously noticeable to her now.

  “Have you figured it out yet, pretty bird?”

  My pretty little bird.

  The words that had once held meaning, the ones she now heard with such distinction slammed into her mind as her muscles turned numb, slowly at first, then dulling more and more. Through her blurred vision, she tried to focus on his face.

  “You’re…not George,” she said against the cloth covered hand over her face. Her voice sounded so far away, she didn’t completely recognize it as her own.

  He just laughed something vile and chilling.

  “Bingo.”

  Horror washed over Daria as the last remnants of strength she had slipped from her. Losing the fight, she plunged into darkness.

  *

  The note propped up on Ski’s chest was drenched in blood. One of the drumsticks he’d been fiddling with was thrust right through the center of Ski’s chest.

  Guilt collided with Kevin’s fear. He closed his eyes against the fury that was building and threatened to explode inside him.

  Dammit, Ski was just a kid! Nothing more than an honest officer trying to please those around him. And now he was dead. Lord, how am I ever going to bring this news home to Ski’s family?

  “No one saw a thing,” Jake said, walking back from his neighbors door. Jake glanced at Ski and with closed eyes, shook his head.

  Kevin swallowed, resisting the urge to pull the note off Ski’s chest, knowing the kid would have to be photographed this way as evidence. “That’s impossible.”

  “The woman who called it in said she found him this way when she came home from work.” Jake looked away and took a few steps toward the railing. Holding on with one hand, he bent his head. “Do you think he knew what hit him?”

  Kevin glanced up and down the terrace, and paced a few steps.

  Dammit, not Ski. Everyone liked the kid. Any time an officer went down it hit the department hard. But this one was going to hurt for a long time to come.

  “For his sake, I hope not,” Kevin said. “People are always coming and going in this apartment building. Someone had to see something. What about 3B? She’s always letting the cat out twenty times a night. I say hello to her almost every day when I come home from work.”

  Except this last week while he’d been watching Daria’s home. His place had been empty.

  “Nothing,” Jake said. “And your neighbor on the other side didn’t hear so much as a thud on the floor.”

  “That’s because he listens to his TV at five million decibels. Of course, he didn’t hear anything. Did he see anything odd?”

  Jake looked shattered as he glanced back at Ski. “No.”

  “There’s no forced entry. But Daria wouldn’t have let anyone in.”

  Kevin thought of the report he’d seen in the captain’s office as he paced up and down the walk.

  As his mind spun, Kevin quickly filled Jake in on the file Matt Jorgenson had shown him earlier.

  “It had to be Dawson,” Kevin said, finally hearing the sirens screaming toward the apartment complex. “He’s an electronics expert. She couldn’t remember putting the alarm back on when she’d left to get the wine. But if she had, Dawson would have known how to disable it. That’s why the wire failed that first night. George Carlisle met me and contracted a murder on Daria that night. But Terry Dawson was there and somehow scrambled the signal.”

  “It makes sense,” Jake said. “But how are we going to find him?”

  Kevin looked at his partner and sighed, feeling the weight of fear. Fear for Daria. “I don’t have a clue.”

  *

  Daria’s eyes drifted open to the sound of grinding metal against metal. Then they immediately closed. Her head felt like a watermelon that had just been cracked open and drained. The rocking motion had her stomach doing a somersault. Bile rose up her throat, scorching it.

  She pulled at her arms in an effort to rub the throbbing in her temples and found that she could not move her them at all. She yanked again, and felt sharp pain in her wrists. It took a few seconds to realize she’d been bound with rope. She tried to smack her lips to help with the cotton-dry taste in her mouth and discovered she’d been gagged as well.

  With great will, she forced her eyes open again. Everything was blurry and refused to come into view. It was almost surreal. Nothing made any sense. She recalled how George had come after her at Kevin’s apartment.

  No, not George. The man who had attacked her was not her ex-husband. How could he be?

 
But that made no sense all, only adding to the confusion whirling around in her brain.

  Daria tried to lift her head. She had to get out of there, wherever there was.

  She’d smelled it before. Grease and grime. It had been on him. The man who looked like George but who definitely wasn’t.

  Kevin. Good Lord, where was he? For that matter, where was she? Tears bubbled up her throat, choking her, as it dawned on her that she might never see him again.

  A bright light passed by an opening in the compartment. It illuminated the space just enough for Daria to make out her surroundings. A large set of steel teeth bent into the opening of what looked like a car door. There was no upholstery, no bench seats or rugs on the floor of what she now realized was the shell of a car.

  The claw that held the metal frame tight was probably from a crane, she decided. Gears switched and groaned, shrieks of metal cried out as the crane lifted the skeleton of the car in the air. Then, as quickly as it started, it stopped. Suddenly, Daria was as light as a feather, floating down in what felt like a free-fall until the hard, cold metal beneath her slammed into the earth below. Her head bounced up and then snapped back, bringing bright white spots in front of her eyes along with a sharp pain. And then her world went black again.

  *

  It was a hunch. And Kevin had played out hunches and won on things much less important than a person’s life. He wasn’t a gambling man, but this was the only hand he had left to play. This was Daria’s life.

  “Remind me again why you think Carlisle will bring her here?” Jake said as he sped down side streets toward the water.

  “I don’t think it was an accident that Carlisle asked for that first meeting to be at the salvage yard. In Dawson’s file, it mentioned he’d worked on loading docks and scrap metal yards before his stint in prison.”

  “You think he was working there?”

  “There’s no way to verify the company records right now. The file didn’t have a current address for Dawson. If he did have access to the facility, he would have had a front row seat for the meeting and the team getting into place.”

  “We weren’t sloppy that night, Kev. There’s no way we could have known.”

  “We did it right,” he said, yet knowing that brought little relief. “We just weren’t as cunning as Carlisle and his buddy. Dawson would have been close enough to scramble the signal so nothing was recorded.”

  “If he knew we were there. Why would he go to all that trouble? Why not just have Dawson kill Daria right from the start?”

  He cast Jake a hard look, squashing down the image that immediately came to mind.

  “He’s playing with us,” Kevin said, recalling what Charlie had told him in Matt’s office. “I don’t know why. But it all makes sense. Ski was tailing Carlisle while Dawson did all the dirty work. He’s been toying with Daria right from the start. Including that damned bird he hung on her door.”

  Kevin eased on the brakes as he took the corner too fast, bending his SUV sharply to one side. Jake held on to the dash. At this time of the night, the roads were quiet, but there still might be people on the streets moving about both on foot and by car.

  The lights blazed on the top of his SUV, the siren screamed. Kevin wanted to warn people he was a man on a mission, desperate to find his woman. And he wanted Carlisle, Dawson, and whoever else might be involved to hear him coming. He wanted them to know he was coming after them.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The thick smell of grease and metal assaulted her nose as her eyes drifted open. Daria couldn’t hear the voices any more. However surreal, she felt better when she heard the voices. It meant she wasn’t alone in hell. Her stomach rolled. Whatever the demon George look-alike had given her made her stomach queasy.

  Daria fought the waves of nausea as she twisted her hands against the ropes that bound her. She was far from being alert, but had enough sense to know that wherever the hell she was, it was not a good place to be. Kevin would be looking for her. And he’d find her. That much she knew with absolute certainty. She only hoped it wouldn’t be too late.

  *

  The dog was going to be a problem, Kevin thought as they broke the chain on the gate.

  “Where’s Cujo?” Jake asked, glancing around for their unwanted Doberman friend.

  Kevin looked around, but didn’t see or hear the dog anywhere. It was bad enough dealing with Carlisle and Dawson. They didn’t need to add an over anxious man-eater.

  “Keep alert. If they’re here, they’ll probably spring him on us.”

  “Wish I’d thought to bring a T-bone steak. Isn’t that the way it’s done in the movies?”

  It was a simple way of breaking the mounting tension, Kevin knew. Easy banter was sometimes the only way to get through a tense shift. Some called it sick, the kinds of jokes cops made about the things they’d seen. Others called it survival. Right now Kevin just wanted to survive the night so he could take Daria home and make love to her again. He so desperately wanted to know they still had the opportunity for endless nights of making love.

  The junkyard was eerily quiet as Kevin and Jake moved though the darkness, drawing on shadows and bearing their eyes down on nothing.

  “What makes you think they’re here?” Jake finally asked.

  “Daria mentioned something about George the day we’d met. She said she knew he’d dealt with loan sharks and if she didn’t come up with the money he needed to pay off his debt, he’d be crushed like a tin can.”

  On the far side of the lot stood a crane with an arm that jut out into the sky. Stacked in rows directly next to it was what once were cars. Now they looked more like a huge cardboard boxes that had been squeezed together.

  “They’re here,” Kevin said. He could feel it. And just as if he could sniff them out, Kevin could hear it. Voices were raised in a dark office just inside the building. He glanced at Jake, just a quick look that signaled their next move. Into the shadows they went toward the voices in the night.

  Anger surged through Kevin as he approached the two men coming out of the office door who looked identical enough to be the same man. His gun was snug against his palm, his feet firmly planted on the ground as he and Jake moved into position. The voices grew louder.

  “I just want it done and over with. I can’t take any more of this.”

  “Take it easy, bro. I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Well, I am. I’m going out of my mind.”

  Kevin’s eyes had acclimated to the darkness enough to distinguish between the two men. George Carlisle stood with his back to them dressed as if he’d just gone out to an expensive restaurant for dinner. Terry Dawson stood sideways facing the yard dressed in greasy overalls, with his hair mussed as if he hadn’t showered in days.

  Jake moved slowly around in a wide circle to come in from the other side, careful not to let Carlisle on to him.

  “These things can’t be rushed, Georgy.”

  “I’ve played by your rules for long enough, Dawson. This is the end.”

  “You’re right about that. Once our job is done here we can both go our separate ways as very wealthy men.”

  “That’s the deal.”

  Kevin inched closer, still in the shadows, mindful of the noises around him. The grit of dirt under the soles of his feet, the sound of a car in the intersection down the street peeling out as the light changed from red to green.

  He squeezed behind a garbage dumpster for the last few yards. When he emerged on the other side, Dawson had disappeared and Jake was nowhere in sight.

  Carlisle stood on the grease stained tar in his Bruno Magli shoes and neatly pressed pants. His fists were planted by his side, and his body was rigid. By the sound of the argument they’d just had, he was probably too preoccupied to hear Kevin’s approach. Quickly and stealthily, Kevin moved in behind Carlisle and shoved the barrel of the gun against the back of his neck.

  Through clenched teeth, Kevin growled. “What the fuck have you done with her?”
>
  George started to laugh. “Bang, bang, I guess I’m dead.”

  “No, you’re very much alive, I’m happy to see. But you’re going to wish you were dead if you hurt Daria.”

  “What makes you so sure I hurt Daria at all?”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  In one quick move, George twisted around, pulling a gun from the pocket of his jacket as he moved. Keeping a close watch on the gun, Kevin grabbed Carlisle’s wrist, but didn’t miss George’s other fist as it connected with his jaw.

  The blow was softened by the gloves George was wearing, but Kevin was momentarily stunned by the impact. He struck back with the butt of his gun, hitting Carlisle square in the nose. Holding tight to George’s hand, he twisted the man’s arm behind his back until Carlisle was hunched over, staring at the dirt.

  “On the ground,” he hollered, pushing George and his pristine suit down. He removed the gun, kicking it away from them before handcuffing George.

  George spat out blood and then rolled halfway over, glancing up at Kevin.

  “What made you think you could put your hands on her,” he said, evil clouding his face. “I saw that little show you put on TV. It made me sick. But she’ll never be yours. I’ve seen to that.”

  Kevin shoved the gun in George’s face. “Where is she?’

  “My, my. Does Daria know about this angry streak of yours?” he taunted.

  “You’re going to rot in jail, Carlisle.”

  “If I am, then just know that Daria will be rotting, too. But she’ll be in the ground and I’ll collect my one million dollars in life insurance money.”

  “Insurance money? That’s what this is about?’ Kevin reeled for a moment under the impact of this new information, but soon pulled himself together. “How do you suppose you’re going to manage that? Insurance companies don’t pay out for murders.”