by B. L. Mooney
I whispered, “No.” I gripped the lapels of his jacket. “I want to understand how you can be two separate people, Joseph. I’m so confused.”
He took a deep breath and backed away. “You’re confused?” He shook his head and walked to his desk. “I never wanted to show you that side, Lindsey.”
“I think I need to stay somewhere else.”
His shoulders dropped as he nodded. “I understand. I just want to protect you, and I can’t do that if you’re not with me.”
“I appreciate that, but I think if we want to salvage whatever is left of our friendship, we need the time apart. I need to think about what happened and process how I feel about it.”
He nodded. “I’ll tell Jasmine you need your car back, and we’ll pick it up tonight.”
“I’m sorry?” I walked up to his desk. “Did you say that Jasmine still has my car? I thought she was going back home.”
“No, she was going on a red-eye flight, but it got canceled. There was a problem with the landing gear and then weather played a role. She decided to take a few days and think about things. I think it’s perfectly healthy for her to—”
“How long have you known she was still in town?” I crossed my arms. It was amazing that I’d been begging to go home all weekend, and when he found out his ex-lover was still in town, project Protect Lindsey was called off. I started tapping my foot.
Joseph looked down at my foot and smiled on his way back up to my eyes. He pulled out his phone and tried to suppress the smile he couldn’t wipe off his face while looking through the phone. He smiled big before turning the phone around to me.
“She sent me a text later Saturday afternoon and showed me that she did dye her hair as she said she was going to.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I snatched the phone from Joseph and looked at Jasmine, the brunette, in a very seductive photo. I sat down.
“As I was saying, I think it’s healthy for her to make some changes and take some time off to reflect what she wants out of life.” He caught the phone as I threw it at him.
“She wants you. It isn’t that hard to figure out, Joey.” I turned to go, but his laugh stopped me. “Just what in the hell is so funny?”
“You are.”
“Asshole.” I turned and almost made it to the door before he grabbed my arm and turned me back around.
“You don’t want me, but no one else can have me, either. Maybe you should take some time off to reflect what you want out of life.”
“I never said I didn’t want you. In fact, I said all weekend that I did want you.” I tried to break my arm free of his grasp.
“But as soon as you had me, you didn’t like what you saw, and now you want out. Isn’t that right?”
“No. I want you, Joseph, but I want all of you.” He let me go. “That’s what I thought. Don’t judge you. Don’t fix you. Just let you be. That’s what Jasmine said to me. Remember that?” I gave a half-humorous laugh and tearless cry. “I can’t judge what I don’t know. I can’t fix what you won’t share. And I can’t just let you be because you’re my best friend.”
When the door shut, I walked back to my desk and looked down to my schedule. I wanted to cancel my afternoon and take Lindsey away. I wanted to keep her safe, but in order to do that, it also meant keeping her away from me. I leaned over and buzzed for Elizabeth.
“Yes, sir?”
“Will you please take Lindsey to get her car after her last appointment?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you.”
I put my elbows onto the desk and my head in my hands. Lindsey made me feel things I swore I’d never feel. I wanted to protect her, take care of her, and more importantly, love her. I was torn between the past that had proven what love was capable of and the future, the dream of what love had the potential to be.
And I didn’t know which was right.
I ran into the house and slammed the door. I had hoped to make it upstairs before my father saw me. I guess I should’ve shut the door a little quieter.
“Joseph! Get your ass in here right now!”
I only had four years left to live with that animal. Four years left before I went to college. I never even wanted to go to college, but if it was my ticket away from the crazy world I grew up in, I couldn’t sign up fast enough.
All I did was work and study. What tuition and fees couldn’t get paid with scholarships, I’d save from my odd jobs. I was going to get out on my own and not owe my father a dime. My future would be mine—free and clear.
I turned the corner and looked at my father, but I didn’t say anything. He motioned for me to come closer, and I didn’t hide my distaste for him, scoffing and curling my lip as I walked further into the room.
He looked at me for a moment. “Why are you angry with me?”
“You’re a smart man. I’m sure you can piece that together yourself.”
“There are things you don’t understand. There are things you’re too young to understand. I don’t fault you for that.”
I scoffed again. “No matter my age, I’ll never understand you.”
He rubbed his hand over his mouth a couple of times before he stood. That usually meant he was trying to either calm down before he answered or that he needed to think his answer through.
He walked over to me and stood a few inches taller as he looked down to me. “You may not understand, but you will respect me. Is that clear?”
“Completely.” My tone let him know that I may have understood, but it didn’t mean I agreed.
“You’re too soft. Women are going to walk all over you, and when they do, you’re going to come running to me. You’ll come to me for advice.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be here for you. Son, no matter how much you think you hate me right now, you will need me.”
At that moment, I would’ve bet my life that he was wrong.
As the last client for the day was gathering her things, my mind was on Lindsey. I hoped she was happy I had let her go. It would take time to get our friendship back, but it would never be as strong as it once was. If only I were strong enough to have resisted her, we wouldn’t have been in the mess we found ourselves in.
I looked at the client before me and nodded when she stood. “I’ll see you when you get back from your trip. Have a wonderful time and enjoy yourself.”
Since we were the only two in the office, I walked her out to the elevators. Normally, I wouldn’t have walked the client out of the lobby, but Austin could’ve been anywhere.
“Oh, I plan on it. See you in two weeks.” She reached for the elevator button as the doors opened. Detective Darwig stepped off.
I waited for the elevator doors to close before I turned to him. “Phil? Lindsey isn’t here. She went to pick up her car at the Jessup Hotel.”
“There’s been an accident.”
The room spun. I let her go when I should’ve protected her. “What the fuck happened?” I walked him back to my office to collect my things.
“Is it possible someone else was driving her car?”
I walked over to my desk and pulled my cell phone out of the desk drawer. There were a couple of texts from Lindsey.
The car isn’t here. Did she say where she’d be?
Elizabeth asked the desk, and she’s still checked in.
Is this some kind of sick trick to keep me??????
I looked at the detective and then quickly back to my phone. I scrolled through my text conversation with Jasmine and pulled her new hair photo up and turned it to Phil. “Is this the woman who was in the car?”
“It’s very difficult to tell, but I believe it is her. Who is she?”
I sat down and placed my head in my hands. “Is she dead?”
“My last update was that she was in surgery. Dr. Hatcher, who is she? I must notify her family.”
“She has no family. She has a boyfriend she lived with, but there isn’t any family.” I grabbed a notepad and ripped out a clean sheet
to write her info down for him. “What happened?”
“We need to get to Lindsey.”
I looked up at him. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“It was a hit-and-run, so I can’t be certain, but I don’t believe it was. Now, we need to find out where Lindsey is.”
“She’s still at the hotel last I knew.” I grabbed my phone at Phil’s direction and called Elizabeth.
“Joseph.” Lindsey must’ve taken the phone when my name popped up. “What the hell is going on? Is Jasmine not going to give me my car back?”
I tried to calm myself before speaking. I didn’t want to alarm her. “Where are you?”
“I’m still waiting in the parking lot.”
I looked at Phil. “Are you in Elizabeth’s car in the hotel parking lot?”
“Yes. What kind of question is that? We aren’t standing out on the corner.”
Phil motioned for the phone, and I handed it to him. “Lindsey, this is Detective Darwig. I need you to have your friend check into the hotel under her name and give you the room key. Then have her text the information to Dr. Hatcher. I need you to stop using your phone, and in fact, turn it off. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could hear she was saying something. Phil did a lot of nodding, but he didn’t tell her much.
“I’ll be there shortly to explain it all, but please, have your friend use the utmost discretion, and do not make a scene.” He hung up on whatever it was Lindsey was trying to say and handed the phone back to me.
“Do you think he’s checking her phone?”
“I think we need to be smarter than him about this, and for what I want to do, Lindsey won’t need her phone.” He walked over to the door. “My partner stayed back at the hospital, but I’m going to pick him up and meet you at the hotel. Don’t say anything to Lindsey until I get there, and text me that room number when you get it.”
I had closed up the office in record time and was out the door before I got the room number. I sent the text to Phil once it came, but I refused to wait for him before I went in. I needed to see Lindsey. I should never have let her out of my sight.
I knocked on the room door and was greeted by Elizabeth. “She isn’t happy about this.”
“I don’t think anyone is.”
I walked past Elizabeth and needed to see Lindsey. I knew she was okay, but the thought of her being the target in her car was enough to drive up my anxiety. No matter how upset she seemed to be, it was still a relief to see her for myself.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands. Her phone was next to her. I wanted to reach down and make sure it was off, but I needed to trust her. She needed to see that I trusted her. She refused to look up when she spoke. “What’s going on, Joseph? Why am I here, and where the fuck is my car?”
Elizabeth backed toward the door. “I’ll just leave you two—”
“No, you need to stay. The detective needs to talk to all of us.”
Lindsey looked up at me. “You know something.”
I sat next to her. “The only thing I know is that Phil walked off the elevator as I was seeing my last client out.”
We all looked at the door when we heard the knock. I got up and looked through the peephole to see Phil and his partner, Aaron, at the door. I opened the door, but moved back over to Lindsey’s side before they came in. After I sat next to her, she reached out for my hand. I accepted without hesitation. She was still my good friend, no matter the difficult time we were going through.
Phil came in first and waited for Aaron to secure the door. He looked at me and cocked his head toward Lindsey. “What did you tell her?”
Lindsey spoke before I had a chance to. “No one has told me a damn thing, but it changes now.”
He pulled the hard chair out from the makeshift desk and sat in front of Lindsey, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Your friend who you lent your car to has been critically injured in an accident. She’s still in surgery, but I’ll keep you updated as best I can.”
Lindsey looked at me and squeezed my hand. “She was his friend.” She looked back to Phil. “What happened?”
“It was a hit-and-run. We’ve been able to go through some video from security cameras and determined that it was Austin.”
“Where is he? Didn’t he get hurt?”
“We believe he was injured. We found the car he stole and used in the hit-and-run abandoned by some empty offices not far from the accident. How it made it that far I have no idea. The offices have been searched, but we didn’t find him.” He looked between the two of us. “Look, we need him to think it was you. We need you to stay here and cancel all appointments as if you’re the one in the hospital.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Lindsey let go of my hand and stood. “He isn’t stupid. He’ll know that isn’t me.”
“It’s been quite some time since he’s seen you in person, and we’re hoping he didn’t get a great look at your friend.” He took a deep breath and sat back. “He knew what kind of car you had. We’ve been getting reports of cars like yours being broken into, but nothing stolen. It’s almost as if he’s searching every car he sees, hoping it’s yours. He can’t watch you at your apartment anymore. You’re no longer there.”
“That’s preposterous to think he’ll look for every tan colored SUV out there.”
“I’m not saying he’s doing that. We have footage of him at the mall driving through the parking lot. He drove past your vehicle, and it was as if he realized he passed it a few cars down because he slammed on his brakes and backed up. Once he confirmed it was your car, he parked a few spots behind it to wait for you to come out.
“When your friend came out, it was too busy for him to do anything, so he followed her. We think she realized she was being followed and tried to lose him. We can’t follow them the entire path she took trying to get back to the hotel, but what we can see included some frantic driving by both of them.
“She managed to get ahead of him by a few cars, and when she took a left turn, he used the empty lane of the opposite traffic to speed up and t-bone her side of the car. He hit her hard and full force with the front of his vehicle.”
“Oh, my God.” Elizabeth was shaking. “He’s trying to kill you.”
Both Lindsey and I started to go to Elizabeth, but I backed off and allowed Lindsey to console her. “I’ll be fine. Trust me. They’ll find him before he finds me.”
Elizabeth tried to stay strong as Lindsey wrapped her arms around her, but a few tears escaped. I wondered if Lindsey was connecting anything else that Phil had said. Shopping malls were where Austin liked to find his victims. It was best that Elizabeth not hear the rest of it, and I tried to get her to go home before any more was discussed.
“Elizabeth, may we continue to use your information for the hotel? You’ll be reimbursed for each charge, but I think the plan is to keep everything out of Lindsey’s name.”
Phil stood and put the chair back. “Yes, actually, this is what I suggest. We’ll put a few plain clothes policemen in the hotel to make sure nothing happens, but we’d like to use this as a distraction to him. We’re releasing the victim’s name as Lindsey and keeping her under around the clock protection. Very few people will know that Lindsey is actually here.”
I could tell by the look on Elizabeth’s face that she was concentrating and working through something. Her eyes were downcast, her forehead scrunched, and her mouth was in a hard, thin line. “Just where did he escape from?” She looked at Lindsey.
Lindsey answered, “Prison.”
“I thought when you said you had unintentionally put him away that you meant a mental ward. What did he do to be sent to prison?” No one answered her as quickly as she wanted. “Answer me!”
I stood and walked over to her. “He murdered people, but you will be safe.” I looked at Phil and Aaron.
“Yes, we’re keeping an eye on everyone Lindsey has regular contact with.”
“Is he someone I’ve helped at the office?” Elizabeth backed up as if we were the crazy ones. Maybe we were. “I don’t remember anything about a client going to prison.”
“No.” Lindsey spoke up and wrapped her arm around Elizabeth. “He was someone from a previous office I had.”
Aaron stepped further into the room. He’d been standing guard at the door the entire time. “If you’d like, Elizabeth, I can see you home.”
Elizabeth was young and hadn’t quite seen the evils of the world yet. We hired her right out of college, which was a concern for us, but we decided she was the best for the job at hand. I wished we had exposed her to more when she started working with us and better prepared her for the things that could happen in an office that worked with mental health issues. Most people were harmless in their quest to better themselves, but there were a few who needed to be watched. However, this wasn’t something Lindsey or I were prepared for, either.
“Can you take me to my parents’ house? I don’t know if I can be alone tonight.”
“Sure. I’ll drive your car, and Phil can follow us in ours. Why don’t we go and have a coffee while we wait for them? I haven’t gotten much sleep and could really use the caffeine fix.”
She nodded and looked at Lindsey. “Do you want me to cancel your appointments?”
Lindsey looked at me. I knew the struggle she was having. We were supposed to be there for our clients and not let them down. I nodded my opinion, and Lindsey turned to Elizabeth.
“I think it would be best to limit the people in the office. Just tell them it’s unforeseen circumstances. I don’t want there to be unnecessary worry about the accident when it isn’t even me.”
“We’re going to release the name to the media. Chances are they’ll see it anyway.” Phil shrugged his shoulders after Lindsey scowled at him. “We need to let him think it’s you. We can’t do that if we don’t release the name.”