Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  Setting the sandwich down, she'd picked the puppy up and gone out into the back yard to the designated "potty spot." She'd told him kindly but firmly, "Go potty!" He'd wandered around, sniffing the grass.

  That's when her phone had begun to ring in the kitchen.

  Maybe it wasn't telemarketers. Maybe it was Brice or T.J. or Dobbs. They were at the casino looking for the girl who'd been … hosed. Maybe they'd found her.

  She looked down at the puppy. He appeared to be just about ready to squat. The phone rang again. If she wasn't ready with a treat the instant he complied, the potty trip was wasted. She could snatch the dog up and maybe get to the phone in time … she thought just as he proceeded to squat and a small trail of yellow liquid puddled under him.

  "Good dog!" she cried and knelt beside him, telling him he was the most wonderful dog that ever drew breath, petting him lavishly and dropping his favorite bacon-flavored treat onto his little pink tongue.

  The phone had stopped ringing.

  She started back into the house, but the puppy suddenly pricked his ears up, looked toward the gate in the fence and started barking furiously. Probably the neighbor's cat.

  "Bundy, come!" she called, and motioned inside.

  The puppy did not yet have … what had T.J. called it — consistent recall. He didn't have any recall at all, as a matter of fact, came when he felt like it and otherwise ignored her. Now, he continued to bark furiously, like a Doberman in an eight-pound body. She went to the back door, opened it and continued to call him. He suddenly lost interest in the back gate and the neighbor's cat that surely was on the other side, but still showed no interest in "recall" either until she waved a treat at him. Then he pranced into the house, pausing long enough to snatch the probably-made-out-of-soybeans fake bacon out of her hand.

  She went to the phone on the counter and saw the red light blinking that indicated she had a message. The puppy suddenly bolted out of the kitchen toward the front door, barking furiously. Apparently, the neighbor's cat was playing taunt-the-puppy.

  The dog stood in the living room, barking at the door. Bailey picked up the telephone and listened to the message.

  And then she couldn't breathe. Or think. Or move. She was in molasses, she remembered the feeling. Remembered it too well.

  And this time, the murderer wouldn't be distracted by the poor soaked-to-the-skin homeless woman who had taken Bailey's place in the grave.

  Think.

  The car. Run!

  The puppy was still barking furiously.

  And it wasn't at the neighbor's cat.

  Bailey was suddenly so terrified she couldn't have drawn in a breath if there had been any oxygen left in the room to breathe, which there wasn't.

  She couldn't get to the car. It was parked out front. Out the back door? No, the puppy had been barking at the back gate, too.

  Survival instinct took over as it had done that night in the rain almost two years ago. It screamed the same word into her mind now that it had screamed then.

  Hide!

  The hallway and stairs were dark and she bolted up them with no clear idea where she was going, just a panicked run. There were six bedrooms and three bathrooms on the second floor. Only two of the bedrooms had any furniture in them — her bedroom and another one already furnished with a gigantic four-poster bed and matching armoire when she moved in. She'd stored all her unpacking mess in that room — Amazon cartons, huge boxes that contained smaller packages inside. Piles of bubble wrap, a couple of garbage bags full of packing worms. The room was stacked high with all that; her bedroom provided only a closet for concealment. The other bedroom, then. She dashed into it and closed the door silently behind her, looked around desperately in the dark.

  A sickening sense of deja vu washed over her.

  Hide, hide, hide — she has to hide!

  Looking around frantically, she spots the dumpsters. Without even getting to her knees, she commando crawls toward them across the wet asphalt, gravel and then mud. The nearest is only ten or twelve feet away and the car blocks her from the view of the gunmen in the street.

  The bedroom was on the front of the Watford House and the streetlight outside the window shined through the crack between the curtains, casting a saber of light into the room, enough for Bailey to make her way among the packing boxes. Some of them were huge, but empty they weighed nothing at all. She pushed the boxes out of her way, dived under the bed, then reached out and pulled the boxes back into place between the bed and the door.

  There's only about eighteen inches of clearance under the dumpster, but she scoots under it, jams herself beneath it and shoves her way through the mud and filth, pushes as far back as she can go.

  She can't lift her head to look out. Her right cheek is smashed into the mud and all she can see is the bottom of the front door of her car and her cellphone lying on the rain-drenched street beside it.

  With her face against the cold hardwood flooring, Bailey could hear nothing but the hammering sound of her heart, exploding with every beat, so fast it didn't seem like there were individual beats at all, just a solid humming sound.

  Bundy was barking furiously downstairs.

  Then the puppy yelped and fell silent.

  Oh dear God, no.

  A storm of abject terror blew through her, rattling all the doors and windows of her soul.

  No.

  She held her breath, waited, her belly alive with winged creatures fluttering frantically through her body and into her bones.

  Was that a sound on the stairs? They creak, all the steps creak. Did she hear one make a sound? Her heart was thundering so loud … did she hear … footsteps?

  She hears footsteps, sees wet shoes. Someone has come around to that side of the car. The man is only ten feet from her. The panic in her chest explodes like some Navy dinghy when you pull on the strap. If she'd had any air, if she could have breathed at all, she'd have screamed, wouldn't have been able to hang onto the wail as it leapt unbidden out of her throat. All he has to do is lean over and he will see her. But she has no air to scream and remains silent. He stoops down, his back to her, picks up her phone and tosses it into the car on top of her purse. Then she hears scuffling feet.

  The other man has picked up the body of the homeless woman and is dragging it across the street. He drags it around the car and the two of them pick it up, toss it into the front seat on top of Bailey's purse and phone and slam the door.

  The step did creak! She heard it distinctly.

  No! This wasn't, couldn't be happening. She was imagining the sound—

  She heard the door to her bedroom open down the hall.

  Bailey had wanted to die, had put a gun to her temple and pulled the trigger so she would die. Now, she was going to get what she wan—

  Bethany!

  The name detonated, imploded though, a nuclear reactor creating a black hole in the universe in the center of her chest. They knew Bailey was alive, had come looking for her, had found her before she could testify against the man the federal marshal had said had no soul. She had dared to cross Sergei Wassily Mikhailov. And now he would kill her. But not just her — that was the thing. He would murder her whole family!

  A small sob escaped her lips, so soft no one could hear.

  The door of the room opened. Someone turned on the light. She could see feet clad in clunky black shoes. Boxes were shoved aside, out of the way.

  And this time the man would lean over and look. And he would see her.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The feet approached the bed.

  One more second. Two.

  The silence was suddenly shattered by the wail of a siren — of more than one siren. More than two sirens. The symphony did not sound distant, like it was far away and getting closer. It erupted instantly, so loud the source might be sitting in her front yard.

  The feet remained where they were. Big feet — a big man. The shoes were the heavy, lace-up kind, ugly but shined so perfectly she could al
most see her reflection in the surface.

  Then the feet turned and clunked in loud footsteps out of the room. She could hear the sound of them thundering down the stairs. Heard the back door open. Heard the screen slam shut.

  Heard … silence.

  Not silence, sirens. But only sirens. He was gone.

  Bailey slumped on the hardwood floor amid the dust bunnies and began to sob. Relief on top of terror. Then she suddenly stopped crying because she couldn't move or breathe.

  Bethany!

  They'd found her, they would find her daughter, too. All these months of hiding, waiting for soon, soon, soon. All of it to keep her baby daughter safe.

  And now …

  She slid out from under the bed and raced down the stairs with no destination in mind except to get to her daughter, to hide her, to protect her somehow, to …

  Deputy Fletcher, the one who was shot on the Fourth of July — had that been her fault? — was standing in her living room and he caught her as she flew past him. She tried to shake free — he didn't understand, she had to go, she had to get to Bethany.

  "It's alright, Miss Donahue," the stalwart deputy said, and didn't let go of her arm. "If someone was here, they're gone now. You're safe.”

  "Let me go. I have to …"

  To what? What could she do?

  Another deputy stepped up and handed Fletcher a phone. He listened for a second and then held it out to Bailey.

  "The sheriff wants to talk to you."

  She took it wordlessly, a robot. It had all been for nothing. All the waiting and the loneliness and the fear … it had been useless. He'd found them anyway. And he would kill them both. María, too.

  "Bailey?"

  She didn't answer, but a kind of moaning sound came from her throat that he must have heard.

  "It's all right. You're safe now."

  "Bethany." She whispered the name, caressed it with her mind, felt the sick dread rise up in her with the desperate need to do something.

  "What did you say?”

  He didn't wait for her to answer.

  "They found the note to the girl on the back of the receipt."

  He wasn't making any sense.

  "They who?"

  "It is so much bigger and worse than we had any idea. The girl, both the girls, are teenagers. They've been kidnapped from somewhere in Eastern Europe and brought here and forced into prostitution. When you gave the girl the note, they thought somebody had found them out."

  It took several seconds for his words to register.

  And even after they did, the meaning of them lagged behind, like one of those old movies where people's mouths move but what they say doesn't come out at the same time.

  Brice was talking again and she tried to focus on what he was saying.

  " … use them as organ donors."

  "What?"

  "The kidnappers told the girls that Americans use illegal aliens for organ donors. The girl, her name was Poli, Polina — I think that's Romanian or Bulgarian — that's what she was terrified of, the monsters who would take her heart and her eyes."

  Bailey finally grasped what he was saying.

  The girl! The note. It had nothing to do with … she suddenly sagged in relief. Deputy Fletcher caught her before she fell but she dropped the phone. He eased her down on the couch, picked up the phone and spoke to the sheriff.

  "He'll be here as soon as he can," he said when he hung up. "He told me to tell you that."

  The reality was settling over her and releasing the knot of terror in her belly. Mikhailov hadn't found her. This had nothing to do with the nightmare night and the rain and the dumpster and the rats and her precious, precious baby daughter. Someone else wanted to kill her.

  And that struck Bailey as funny. The more she thought about it, the funnier it became. She recognized the signs of incipient hysteria but she just went with it. She was in the Witness Protection Program because one group of organized criminals wanted to kill her, and now she had managed to piss off a whole different bunch of psychopaths and they wanted to kill her, too.

  It was too absurd to be real. Jessie … Bailey — the first-grader with knobby knees and elbows who'd flunked physical education in elementary school because she was so pathetically uncoordinated. The teenager who'd been too wrapped up in sports to date in high school and too embarrassed in college to admit she'd never learned how to dance. The adult who had never watched a single episode of Oprah, the Academy Awards or American Idol, who'd never kept up with a pair of sunglasses for more than three days, who had — that totally unremarkable human being had managed to earn a coveted spot on not one but two different hit lists. That was quite an accomplishment.

  She began to laugh. The more she laughed, the more she was struck by the incredible, cosmic absurdity of it all and she laughed even harder. At some point, her laughter turned to tears and that was okay, too. Tears were fine. Cheering was fine. Doing cartwheels was fine. Everything was fine. Bethany wasn't in danger. She was safe.

  Absolutely nothing else mattered.

  And so she sat on the couch, laughing and crying in relief that the officers surely mistook for fear or shock. And then she felt something wet on her leg, looked down and there was the puppy, licking her.

  Bundy! He'd yelped. The man must have—

  She snatched him up into her arms and examined him. He wiggled and squirmed, delighted by the attention. She could find nothing wrong with him. So she held him, petted him and said stupid baby-talk things to him for some period of time that could have been ten minutes or four hours. Time had come unhitched from reality and she wallowed in that suspended perpetual now moment, her thoughts jumbled beyond easy repair but that was okay, too. Everything was fine. Bethany was safe.

  And then T.J. and Dobbs were in her living room; Brice was kneeling on the floor in front of her. And there were paramedics. Why had they called an ambulance? Nobody had been hurt. Then she realized they'd come to examine her and when she tried to tell them, to tell Brice, that she was fine, not hurt, nobody was much interested in what she had to say on the subject.

  So she performed their little tasks, kept her eyes on a fingertip as it moved back and forth in front of her eyes, remembered how impressed the nurse had been months ago when she'd been able to pull off the miraculous feat of multiplying seven times five. But they didn't ask her that this time. They'd all be gone soon and she could talk to Brice — and to T.J. and Dobbs, too, who had become Tweedledum and Tweedledee at some point in her mind but only in the most endearing way.

  She watched the paramedic draw some liquid into a syringe and only connected that he meant to inject her with it when he used the alcohol swab on her arm.

  "Hey, whoa, what is that?'

  "It's something to relax you, that's all."

  "And what if I don't want to relax?" She struggled to move away from the approaching needle. "What if I like to be tense?" She looked beseechingly at Brice. "Come on, Brice, tell them that my very favorite state in all the world is tense and semi-hysterical."

  He smiled at that and she could see it was a relieved smile. Apparently, the remark had constituted multiplying seven times five. But if she let them stick her with—

  She felt the prick in her arm and warmth immediately flooded her face. Then the whole world smoothed out. She recognized the familiar calming effects of narcotics. Yep, that was relaxed, alright. Not one doubt about it. She considered what it might be about this sensation that grabbed hold of some people, made them so desperate for this feeling they'd do anything — lie, steal — anything to achieve it. It was pleasant, in a warm, fuzzy, dopey sort of way, but who'd want to live every day like this?

  She was definitely relaxing, though, and then she became tired, an instant tired, an oh-my-gosh-I-just-ran-a-marathon-backwards-carrying-a-Volkswagen exhaustion. Brice told her he would be here when she woke up, and she assumed he meant that she was about to go to sleep, which was just dandy with her at this point.

  Two paramedi
cs accompanied her up the stairs, a woman on each side so she couldn't just lie down on one of the steps and go to sleep, which was what she wanted to do.

  They passed the guest room. The door was open and she could see the boxes shoved away from the bed where she — she felt terror, surging through her — but on the other side of some kind of gray haze that rendered it surreal, must have happened to somebody else. Then her head was floating down onto her pillow in slow motion, like one of those Sealy Posturepedic commercials where people sleep on clouds. She closed her eyes then and was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Sheriff McGreggor watched the EMTs lead a now-docile Bailey up the stairs to her bedroom. They'd given her a sedative. She would sleep.

  She was safe.

  The Beast, Jeni's word for the man who'd strangled Poli, believed Bailey was onto them somehow. What else was he supposed to believe when she'd warned the girl to run away from him or die? He thought Bailey knew who they were and what they were doing.

  And so they'd gone after Bailey. Had been here tonight. If Fletch hadn't gotten here in time … Fletch and the other deputies had looked around outside with a flashlight, found a footprint in the mud outside the back gate. Could have been anybody's. But it wasn't just anybody's.

  No sense hauling the state police crime lab guys out in the middle of the night. They could dust for prints in the morning, but they wouldn't find any. Even if they did, the prints wouldn't be in any database. These guys came and went like smoke in the wind.

  He had stationed a squad car in front of the house and Deputy Tackett in the bushes beyond the back gate. There would be an armed officer with her at all times, from now on, until—

  Right. Until what? Brice had to figure out how he was going to play this. He had no explanation for how he knew what he knew, at least not one that he could tell anybody. Before he blew out all the stops, contacted all the other law enforcement agencies who should be involved in a multi-national case — the state police, FBI, shoot, maybe even Homeland Security — he'd have to have more convincing evidence than the painting of a dead girl on an easel in Bailey's studio and a mythical fifteen-year-old who had vanished in the casino.