by Alexa Land
But that never happened.
A moment later, arms were around me. I tried to fight them off, but then Brian said, “It’s okay, Hunter. It’s me. I’ve got you. Are you alright?”
I opened my eyes and looked into his face, beyond astonished. Then I sat up a bit and took in the scene around me. My assailant was sprawled on his back on the pavement, unmoving. Vincent was advancing cautiously on the stalker’s prone body, gun drawn.
“Were you shot?” Brian asked me, and I shook my head. “Thank God,” he whispered.
“But how?” I mumbled. “How are you here right now?”
“Vincent. He tracked you.”
When Vincent reached the body, he kicked the gun out of the man’s hand, then checked for a pulse. When he straightened up, he turned to us and called, “He’s dead.”
I slumped in Brian’s arms, clutching him with the last of my strength. “I was so afraid he’d killed you,” I told him. “I didn’t want to believe it. But I was so afraid.”
“The bullet passed through the fleshy part of my upper arm,” Brian said, pressing his palm to my forehead. I realized after a moment that he was trying to stop the bleeding from the gash above my eye. “When I hit the deck to avoid the next bullet, the wheelchair shot out from under me. I ended up whacking my head against the concrete floor, so hard that I passed out.”
“What about Christopher and Kieran, and everyone else?”
“They’re all fine, just worried about you. The first shot was meant for Christopher, but it hit the champagne bottle instead.”
“Thank God you’re all okay.”
“I should text them right now, they’re so worried.” As he was talking, Brian shifted his hold on me, slipping out of his button-down shirt and draping it over me before going back to putting pressure on my forehead. With his other hand he pulled out his phone and fired off a quick text, then dropped it in the pocket of his t-shirt. I noticed the ace bandage on his upper arm, bloody and tied hurriedly.
“I just called an ambulance. How is he?” Vincent asked Brian, coming up to us as he put his phone away.
“Lots of cuts and bruises, but no bullet wounds,” Brian replied.
I looked up at Vincent and asked, “How did you find me?”
“I put a tracking device in your wallet. Hadn’t Brian told you I’d done that?”
“That was part of the ‘extreme security measures’ I was going to brief you on after the gallery opening,” Brian explained.
“I assumed the stalker would toss out your phone if he abducted you, so that wouldn’t work as a GPS,” Vincent said. “And he did just that.”
“Thank you.”
He brushed off my thanks by saying, “Unfortunately, the tracker’s signal wasn’t very strong. We lost it under the tree canopy, so we were only able to narrow it down to this general area. It’s lucky you got free and made it to the road.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The Santa Cruz Mountains, a couple hours south of the city,” Brian said. “We called the police right after you were abducted, and once we tracked you here, they had every available patrol car combing the area.”
Sure enough, a police cruiser rounded the bend a couple minutes later, and the officer quickly took control of the situation. She confirmed the assailant was dead, set up flares and yellow police tape, shutting down the road, and then got on her radio, calling in the scene before her.
When the ambulance arrived, I tried to argue, insisting I didn’t want to go to the hospital. The E.M.T. that assisted me was kind and patient as she triaged my head wound and then my feet, which were torn and bloody, and told me I would need stitches.
“It doesn’t even hurt,” I mumbled, a kind of heaviness settling on me. I began shivering, despite the big, warm blanket she’d wrapped me in.
“That’s the shock setting in.” She folded down the head of the gurney, which had been propping me up.
Vincent had been talking to the police while my wounds were cleaned and dressed, and he came over to me when the E.M.T. finished working on me. “I’m going to the police station to fill out a formal statement,” he said. “Call Nana if you need anything, and she’ll get in touch with me immediately.”
I looked up at him. He was stoic as ever, his dark eyes giving nothing away. I reached out and squeezed his hand as I said, “You saved my life, and I’ll always be so grateful to you. I just wish there was some way I could repay you.”
“There’s no need. I’m just glad you’re okay.” That was all he said before turning and walking away. I watched him for a few moments, until my gurney was raised and loaded into the ambulance.
“Brian?” I called, propping myself up and looking around before they shut the doors. “Where are you?”
“I’m here,” he said, wheeling into view. He was using a manual wheelchair that the E.M.T. had loaned him, since he’d left his behind in his haste to join Vincent and follow the tracker’s signal. He’d been giving his statement to the police as well.
“Are you coming to the hospital?” I asked him.
He nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”
“You need to see a doctor for your arm,” I said. “Make sure that bullet wound gets treated.”
“I will.”
I put my head back down on the gurney, trying to tell myself, it’s over. You’re okay. But I was still so scared and anxious. The fear just wouldn’t go away. I wondered if I’d ever go back to the way I was before.
Chapter Fourteen
I was in the hospital three days. Once the shock wore off, my entire body hurt. The cut on my foot had gone all the way through to the bone, and had required surgery to mend it. Four other lacerations, including the one on my forehead, also needed stitches.
My body was a mass of bruises. The doctor examined me to see if I’d been raped, and the procedure was humiliating. I pressed my eyes shut as he instructed me to spread my legs, then visually examined me before using swabs to take samples for the lab, checking for semen. He determined that I hadn’t been raped, which was a relief, though the exam itself felt like a violation.
Brian, Christopher, Kieran and Nana all came to the hospital the night I was admitted, but I asked to be alone. I needed time to process all that had happened. Once they left, I curled onto my side and cried, all the terror, the pain, the anxiety, rising to the surface and overwhelming me.
I had to get it together the next morning, when the police came to speak to me. Local law enforcement was first, and they interviewed me for almost two hours. They had a dead body in their jurisdiction, and they wanted every last detail about what had led up to it.
As if that wasn’t enough, just as they were finishing up Detective Sanchez and another member of the S.F.P.D. arrived, and I had to start talking all over again. At least Sanchez already knew the backstory, so he only asked about the last twelve hours.
When the detective finished his interview, I asked him what had happened to my stalker’s body, and was told it was downstairs in the morgue. “Can I see him?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I never got a good look at his face, and I kind of feel like I need to do that. It might help give me closure.”
Sanchez frowned at me, but after a moment said, “Well, there’s no law against it, though I don’t think you’ll be doing yourself any favors. I’ll let hospital personnel know you want to see the body. They’ll probably want to get it over with soon.” I didn’t ask why.
Just minutes after he left, a nurse showed up with a wheelchair. “I’m here to take you to the morgue,” she said flatly. I sat up and swung my bandaged feet out of bed, sliding to the edge of the mattress. “Careful about standing,” she said as she helped me into the chair. “You can put pressure on your heels, but avoid putting weight on the balls of your feet. That could rupture your stitches.”
The nurse, whose nametag read Sue, wheeled me out of my room and onto an elevator, then down a long hallway and into the morgue. “We called ahead, the body’s being pr
epared for viewing,” she told me when we reached a small waiting room. “They’ll call me when you’re done, and I’ll come and get you.” With that, she turned and left me there.
The waiting room was windowless, blue plastic chairs lined up against the walls, florescent lights far too harsh and bright overhead. I thought about the people who must find themselves in this room, probably waiting to identify the bodies of loved ones. This cold, impersonal environment must feel like hell to them. For me, it was different. It suited the task before me, the starkness setting the tone for what I was about to do.
Eventually, a young, red-bearded technician emerged and said, “Hey, how you doing?”
“Um, fine, thanks.” I really didn’t think he expected me to answer honestly.
“Alright. Well, I’m Chuck. I’ll take you in now.” He wheeled me into a small room, empty except for a gurney in the center. There was a body on the gurney, draped in a clean, white sheet. It felt surreal.
Chuck folded the sheet back, his movements fast and efficient, revealing the face of my tormentor. I didn’t look right at him at first. Instead, I glanced at the technician and asked, “Do we know his name?”
He went to the foot of the gurney and took a clipboard off a small metal hook. “According to the ID he had on him, he was Donald Alan Swensen,” he read. “Age thirty-three. His address was listed as South San Francisco.”
When I finally made myself look at Swensen’s face, I asked, “Why is there a bandage on his head?”
“I put that there for your benefit,” the man said. “The kill shot entered his brain mid-forehead. It was a very clean entry-wound from a large caliber weapon. I assume he was brought down by a police sniper?”
“No.” That clean, precise shot had been Vincent’s doing.
“Oh. It looked like the work of a professional.”
There was an eerie thought. I looked down at my hands, which were folded in my lap. “Could I have a minute alone with him?”
“I’m not allowed to do that, but I’ll get out of your way,” Chuck said, then stepped back to one of the corners.
I wheeled myself a little closer to the body, then stood up. My bandaged feet throbbed in protest, but I ignored them. And then I took a good, long look at the man that had stalked and kidnapped me.
I’d never seen a dead body before. It didn’t seem real, more like a prop in a Hollywood movie. He was pale, a little bloated, his skin almost waxy. It was really unnerving, but I tried to look past the indicators of death, focusing just on the man.
There was no doubt that this was the same person in Christopher’s police sketch. My friend had remembered him in perfect detail. And he was obviously the same person that had been in the photo captured by the surveillance camera in my apartment building, minus the facial hair. I tried to picture him with a shaggy grey wig and fake nose, and could see the old man from my public appearance as well.
I had needed to confirm all of this, I’d needed to see it for myself. This really was him. And he really was dead.
I stared at him a little longer. It somehow felt like he should be ugly, marked in some way, his dark interior reflected on his features, like the painting in the Picture of Dorian Gray. But he was just regular-looking. There was nothing unusual about him, aside from a little scar above his upper lip that looked like a backwards question mark.
I’d built him up to be larger-than-life, a monster. But he was just a man.
As I sat down in my chair and rolled back a few feet, the technician stepped forward and draped the sheet over the body, then said, “I’ll call the nurse to take you upstairs.”
“Was that man’s family already notified?” I didn’t know why it mattered to me. But I thought about him having a family somewhere, about them finding out their son was dead and finding out what he’d done, and it was depressing.
“I don’t know. Someone else handles next-of-kin notifications,” he told me as he wheeled me to the waiting room.
Seeing my attacker stirred up so many emotions that it was hard to sort them all out. And I was so far beyond exhausted that it was more than I could really process. When I was taken back upstairs, I curled up in bed and shut my eyes. It really is over, I told myself.
But I still didn’t feel any different. Seeing him hadn’t been the shortcut to closure that I’d hoped for. I realized then that a long road stretched before me, that healing, inside and out, was going to take time. Lots of it.
When I awoke several hours later, Brian was in his chair beside the bed, watching me closely. “Hey,” he said, his expression grave. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” It wasn’t even close to the truth, but I really couldn’t bear the thought of talking about what had happened to me. It was still too raw, too terrifying. “How are you?”
He paused for a long moment before answering. Finally he said, “I’ve been better.”
“Is it the bullet wound?” I asked, sitting up quickly. “Did you have someone look at it?”
“It’s not that, a doctor patched it up.” After another long pause he said, not meeting my gaze, “As long as you’re okay, I, um…I think we both need some time to ourselves, Hunter. I’m going home to San Francisco. My house is repaired, and I’m going to be moving back in this afternoon. Christopher, Kieran and Nana are out in the waiting room. They’ll take care of you and see that you get home safely.”
Oh God, he was breaking up with me. That was what needing time to ourselves meant. All that drama had been too much for him. And obviously, he blamed me for what had happened. He should. He’d taken a bullet because of me. Here was a man with PTSD, and I’d gotten him shot, just for knowing me. No wonder he was leaving me.
All I could do was nod. If I tried to speak, I’d start crying, and I didn’t want him to stay because he felt sorry for me. I laid down and turned my back to him.
Brian hesitated for a long moment, then left the room. I waited until he was out of earshot. Only then did I begin to sob.
Chapter Fifteen
For four weeks, I lived in Christopher and Kieran’s apartment while my injuries healed. Even though I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I really couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, either. My universe shrank down to the futon in their spare bedroom.
I missed Brian terribly, but understood why he’d left me. Every few days, I asked Kieran about him, and the answer was always the same. He was fine, keeping busy, going to therapy and putting his life back together. He was much better off without me.
During that month, I was kind of in a daze, spending a lot of time sleeping, or just sitting by myself, processing all that had occurred. While I did meet with a therapist once a week, I didn’t talk to my friends about what had happened. I just couldn’t.
My therapist was trying to work through my guilt, but was making no progress, probably because I knew I should feel guilty. My loved ones had been shot at, because of me. This person, this sick individual, had been brought into their world. Yeah, I felt guilty, because it was my fault. If it wasn’t for me, nothing would have happened to them.
And this man had done far worse things, because of his obsession with me. I just knew that was why Swensen had singled out Christopher and hurt him, because he and I were the same physical type. And then there were those two other young, blond boys that had gone missing around the same time that Christopher was assaulted. When local law enforcement searched Swensen’s apartment in South San Francisco and the trailer where I’d been taken, they didn’t find any evidence linking him to the missing boys. All they found were hundreds of photos of me. So to the police, Swensen’s case was closed.
They only had the word of a kid working in a soup kitchen that those two boys had even gone missing. No one had ever come looking for either of them. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Swensen had hurt them like he’d hurt Christopher, maybe killed them, driven by his obsession with me. I couldn’t even begin to grapple with the guilt and horror of that.
The police d
id learn a few things when they searched the apartment and dug into Swensen’s past. His neighbors, like so many before them, described him as a quiet man that kept to himself. Typical. He kept odd hours and worked from home as a programmer, and had subcontracted on a job updating the police mainframe, so he’d been able to follow my case and find my contact information. Among other things, he’d also found out about the surveillance photos from my apartment building.
The police department was surprised that he’d slipped by, since they did background checks on their contractors and Swensen had a record. It turned out that the primary contractor, the one who’d brought Swensen in, had done so without going through the proper channels and had been paying him under the table, so Swensen never had to go through a background check.
My stalker had been arrested eleven years prior for making threats against an ex-boyfriend. The ex had let the charges drop though, and moved out of state to get away from him. Apparently, Swensen had secretly taken a lot of photos of his ex, which were confiscated when Swensen was arrested. Detective Sanchez reviewed the file, and mentioned offhandedly, “The ex-boyfriend looked a lot like you, Hunter. He was a slim, blond-haired guy in his early twenties.” Sanchez suggested that the ex was at the root of Swensen’s obsession with me. I didn’t know what to think.
Days passed. During my recovery time, Christopher and Kieran were an amazing source of support. They made sure I ate, and coaxed me out of my room every night for a couple hours. They knew I wasn’t up for talking, so they’d put in a DVD, and Christopher would just hold me while whatever random movie played.
I couldn’t tell you what we watched. My eyes were usually blurred with tears, my mind a million miles away. I only remembered my best friend’s heartbeat, strong and steady under my cheek, and the feeling of his arms around me, so comforting and secure. Sometimes, it felt like his arms were the only thing holding me together.
Swensen’s death had brought Christopher closure, helping him turn the page on that chapter of his life once and for all. I wanted to do the same, to learn from my best friend’s example. But for me, it was still too raw, too fresh. Maybe that was why I still felt anxious and vulnerable, and couldn’t bear the thought of being alone. Closure was going to take time, apparently.