Writing on the Wall

by Jenna Rae

  Lola gripped the seat belt, trying not to look impatient. She didn’t want to be rude, especially after Marco had been kind enough to come all the way to the hotel in Foster City and pick her up.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, smiling at him. “I hate to impose on you like this.” She took in his paint-spattered clothes. “And to interrupt you while you’re working.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he murmured, merging onto the freeway. “I was just glad to hear your voice! I’ve been so worried. You both dropped off the face of the earth! I’ve been calling you every day. I don’t like having to guess what’s going on with you, Lola—things have been pretty scary.”

  “It’s been a weird couple of weeks,” she replied. “Sorry I haven’t been staying in touch. Del said we had to lay low.”

  “I understand. Your house?”

  “Please. Last time I couldn’t get in touch with Del, that’s where she was. And I want to see the damage—I told you about that, right?”

  “I have to say, the neighborhood was pretty boring until you moved in.”

  She made a wry face. “Well, hopefully, it can get boring again really soon.”

  “Amen,” Marco muttered, reaching over to squeeze her arm. Lola swallowed hard. Marco’s kindness made her feel weak, and she needed to stay strong.

  When he dropped her off, handing back the spare key she’d given him the month before, she thanked him again and waved off his offer of help. Then she gingerly pulled the crime scene tape off her front door.

  She looked around and found that the house wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d thought it would be. Things had been knocked over and pushed aside, but her books were okay. Unfortunately, most of the furniture would have to be replaced, and all of the artwork. She inspected the kitchen. Several dishes had been broken, and a cupboard door hung askew. She opened the fridge. The food was all gone, too. There wasn’t even any coffee in the house. Orrin chuckled, and Lola waved him away.

  Del obviously wasn’t around. Lola called and left her a message apologizing for deviating from the plan and explaining that she was at the house.

  “Oh,” she added, “don’t worry, I’m setting the alarm.” She punched in the numbers, but the light didn’t blink. Well, she thought, maybe Del had it disconnected altogether because of the other cops coming and going.

  She looked around. Okay, what now? She had to figure out where Del was and what the source of the danger was. She was sure that the truth was somewhere in her own mind, that she was inches away from grasping it, and her frustration mounted.

  “This couldn’t possibly be more aggravating.”

  ***

  When Del and Phan returned from meeting with James, they were both frustrated. He’d had little to tell them and had seemed more interested in picking their brains. They’d felt like he was stonewalling them and had responded by doing the same.

  “Typical Feeb,” Phan griped, and Del nodded.

  James wanted to take custody of Lola, shake her down. He was clearly convinced that she had the money or knew where it was.

  Del kept her cool throughout most of the fruitless meeting but ended by bursting out, “Listen, asshole, we don’t care about the money. That’s your problem. We’re trying to keep this woman alive. Got it? I mean, okay, you don’t give a shit if some innocent civilian dies, fine. But we do.”

  She’d stormed out, leaving Phan to smooth things over and say their goodbyes. She regretted losing her cool, but it was done. James was useless, a bland blond bureaucrat in a blue suit.

  “Sorry,” she muttered to Phan as they entered the precinct.

  “Guy’s an ass,” he responded companionably. “Funny, he looks a hell of a lot like Beckett’s old partner.”

  “You think?” She frowned. “Davis?” She sat at her computer and pulled up Davis’s picture. “Yeah, I guess. A little younger, though. And less... I don’t know what.”

  “Gin soaked.” Phan raised an eyebrow, and Del shrugged.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, Lola—never mind. It was just a dream.”

  “What?

  Del was embarrassed. “She woke up night before last with a bad dream, hollering. Said her attacker was in the ambulance with her after the pipe bomb. She wants to meet with the sketch artist.”

  Phan frowned. “You never said anything. You don’t believe her?”

  “I think it was a dream. She has a lot of crazy dreams, Phan. I think she just wanted to be able to help, you know?”

  “Still,” he started.

  Their cell phones buzzed at the same time, and they both listened to Lola’s messages. The desk sergeant handed them each a message from her, rolling her eyes.

  “She’s at the house?” They looked at each other.

  Del called the house and got a busy signal. Was the phone off the hook, or had it been messed with? There wasn’t enough time to check.

  They raced to the car, and Phan shoved Del toward the passenger side with a grunt. As they tore out of the parking lot, Del dialed the security company and was told that the alarm system had been turned off the night before.

  “No. I turned it on myself. And the resident just turned it on.”

  The manager patiently said, no, the unit was not activated.

  “Do it remotely.”

  That wasn’t possible.

  She hung up and tried the house again. Busy signal again. Phan, who had the roof light flashing as he wove through the heavy traffic, pushed the laptop at her. He was on the phone. Of course, the cameras! Del pulled up the program and switched from camera to camera, searching for Lola.

  “She’s in the kitchen.” Del heard her voice shaking and steadied it. “Looks fine. She’s cleaning up. She’s alone.”

  “Check.”

  “No one in any other rooms.”

  They were only minutes away, and Del wanted to push the car faster. Maybe she should have told Lola about the cameras. She would have stayed away from the house if she’d known the guy could see her in there.

  “Come on,” she muttered as a delivery truck veered in front of them and forced Phan to brake. She called the house phone again. Busy signal.

  “Okay.” Phan’s voice was calm. “Civilian alone. Gotta figure he can see her. No landlines. Cell?”

  “It was in her purse when I took it.” Stupid, she told herself. Really stupid.

  “That’s okay. Mason? Del! I need you to focus. Should have had more eyes on the place. Can’t see the garage, the laundry room or the side yard. There’s a part of each hallway, up and down, that’s outside camera range. And the front of the house is blind.” He shook his head. “Listen, she’s fine. She’s alone, right?”

  Del shook her head. “For now. As far as we know.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lola heard a faint noise, footsteps on hardwood floor. Del! She was relieved but a little nervous. Del might be angry with her. As she started to call out a hello, she saw a tall figure heading toward her. Not Del. A man—a bad man, moving fast.

  She shook her head, too frightened to think.

  Move! She turned around and started to run toward the laundry room, the back door. But time seemed to slow down. She felt like she was wading in molasses, and before she’d gone two steps he was on her.

  He grabbed her around the waist, lifted and swung her. She saw the wall coming straight at her and tried to twist away, but there was no time. She hit the wall with her head, her shoulder, and the side of her face.

  He let go as she hit, and she bounced off the wall and hit the floor. She grunted and watched tears and blood drop from her face onto the linoleum. She tried to scrabble away from him, but he was too fast and too strong. He grabbed her arms, squeezing them and pulling her up backward. She bit back a cry of pain, pressing her lips together.

  “Time to be a good girl, Lola.”

  His voice sounded familiar. She hadn’t seen his face well enough to be sure, but he smelled like The Creep. This recognition broke her
limited control, and she whimpered. She couldn’t remember how to move her head, her body.

  He was talking, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. This had always been the case. When things were too scary, she couldn’t hear what the bad people were saying. This usually made them even madder. She heard one word, “whore.”

  She finally remembered how and twisted her head to try and see his face, but this just made him grip her even tighter. She felt like she couldn’t breathe and panic set in. She didn’t want to panic. If she did, she would go away. But it was too late. The old helpless feeling washed over her, and she stopped struggling. Into the hole she slid, and everything went away.

  ***

  As Phan brought the car to an abrupt stop in front of a house several doors down from Lola’s, Del was still flipping from one camera view to another, unable for a moment to locate Lola. Then she spotted an intruder and switched gears. Her mind recorded: white male, over six feet, medium build. Dark blue hooded sweatshirt, hood up and almost covering a dark baseball cap, pulled low. Dark blue pants. Slacks? Dress shoes, too. Weird. He was carrying an unconscious victim, female, toward the stairs.

  She turned the computer toward Phan and gestured at the screen without a word. They watched as the assailant disappeared out of range. She scrolled through the images until she saw him in the master bedroom. He came in and raised his arms higher, then dropped the victim on the bed. She almost rolled off, and he stopped her with his knee. Del’s breath came in short puffs as the man stood over the unconscious victim—Lola—for a long couple of minutes. Del strained to see. She heard Phan shooting short bursts of words into his phone.

  “He’s trying to wake her up,” Phan guessed.

  “Then she’s alive.”

  “Or he thinks she is.”

  Del’s gaze flicked to Phan’s face and back to the screen.

  “Is she breathing?” Del heard Phan’s question but didn’t answer. The doer seemed worried, too, because he checked her pulse. Apparently satisfied that she was alive, he touched her hair, her lips. He wiped something off her face—was that blood?

  He obviously hadn’t anticipated her being unconscious. Had he hit her too hard, or had she fainted? Maybe she’d gone a gomer. It was hard to tell. Now he’d have to adjust his plan, whatever it had been. That made things worse. When bad guys had to improvise, it made them impulsive, reckless.

  This was too personal. She’d known that from the beginning, but now it was too late to change things. Her mind raced, going over and rejecting several possible approaches. What was the best way to handle this? She knew procedure—wait for backup, establish a perimeter, wait for a negotiator, wait for a SWAT team. Wait, wait and wait. While that fucker had Lola to himself. Acid boiled up her esophagus.

  “There’s no way in hell I’m sitting on my ass while this shithead hurts her.”

  “Wait,” he said. “She’s out. He doesn’t know we’re here. He’s not planning to kill her, or he’d have already done it. He cleaned off her face. You saw that, right? He wants to talk to her. We have time.”

  Del was about to argue, though he was probably right, when she saw that the holding pattern had broken. The assailant had taken off his sweatshirt and tossed it out of camera range.

  White dress shirt, no tie. The baseball cap stayed on, but when he leaned down she saw his hair. It was dirty blond, short. She wished she could see his face, but the camera was behind him. He reached down and lifted Lola, moving her further toward the middle of the bed. Del grunted. Fuck. He set her down and pulled his arms out slowly, sitting on the edge of the bed. Del still couldn’t see his face. He reached over and stroked her hair. He pulled a strand up and leaned over to sniff it.

  Like I did, thought Del. Her stomach was boiling with liquid fire. That woman is not Lola. She’s just a female victim. Not Lola. Or she pays for your distraction.

  He caressed the victim’s face, ran the tips of his fingers back and forth along her lower lip. He shifted closer on the bed. There was a glint of metal as he pulled a knife from his pocket and stroked the handle. Del heard a small animal sound.

  “Mason!” Phan’s voice came from far away.

  “Mason? Fuck. Del!” He grabbed at the computer, and she grabbed him by the throat. It was a second before she realized what she was doing and released him. He ignored what she’d done and looked at her. “Stay or go?”

  “Go,” she said, but her body wouldn’t move, and neither would her mind. She wanted to see the computer.

  “Exigent circumstances compel us to alter procedure to ensure—I saw a knife. Do you agree?”

  “Uh.” Her brain was on vacation.

  “You wanna just sit there, or should we go play cops and shitheads?”

  Del felt that penetrate her mental fog. “Yeah. The garage. I have a key to the side door.”

  They sidled down the street, close to the residences. She eased the side gate open, glad that it didn’t squeal in protest. Phan followed as she crept along the outer wall. The windows were closed. No noise from inside the house. She checked her weapon.

  Adrenaline had burned through the last of her mental haze, and she felt sharp and energized, almost high. The victim mattered, but it was the bad guy she was focused on. Her daddy’s voice coached her: watch the predator, not the prey.

  He looked taller than herself and Phan, but not by much. Phan might have a few pounds on him. He was wearing business clothes, so he might be softer than he looked. Something about his clothes bothered her. The pants, the shirt—there was something about the way his clothes fit that pinged for her, but she couldn’t figure out why. She shook it off. Later. Think about it later.

  She slid her key into the garage’s side door and eased it open. Thank God Lola was a neat freak. The garage was empty of clutter that might have impeded their nearly silent progress toward and then up the stairs into the house. The same key opened that door, and Del was just inserting it when she felt Phan’s hand on her arm. He held something in front of his face, and she peered back. It was a Smartphone, and he was checking the cameras.

  The bad guy was still in the master bedroom, but it was hard to see what he was doing on the small screen. As long as he didn’t have an accomplice in the house, they would be fine. The entry hall was empty, so were the stairs. They cleared the downstairs in seconds.

  Two and a half minutes since she and Phan had left the car. They heard voices, the victim’s and the bad guy’s. The victim was conscious and on the move, heading toward the upstairs hallway. Phan gestured at Del to follow him into the laundry room.

  ***

  “Please, I don’t know what you want.” Lola hated the way she sounded, weak and craven. But The Creep had a huge black gun pointed at her, and she was lightheaded.

  The hole was there. It wanted her, and she wanted it, too. But she couldn’t give in to that, could she? Wouldn’t that be wrong? It would, she was sure of it, though she wasn’t sure why. She stared up at The Creep, whose face was partly hidden by dark sunglasses and a baseball cap. He was holding her arm and hustling her toward the stairs and then down them. At the bottom, they passed within several feet of the front door, and she considered running for it.

  She must have signaled her intention in some way because he tightened his grip on her arm and rushed her even faster toward the kitchen. The moment passed and her momentary hope of escape was dashed. What would he do to her?

  She’d woken to find him leaning over her, and she’d felt his hot breath on her face, smelled his toothpaste and soap and that other smell. She remembered the first time he’d stood over her, cursing at her and trying to drag her into the house. And the encounter in the ambulance. It had been real, she was sure of that—he looked just the way she remembered. Her legs buckled under her—now he had her. He yanked her back up with a jerk, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out.

  “You’re in trouble now, girlie,” said Orrin, and his voice was indifferent, neither exultant nor concerned. She looked aro
und but didn’t see him.

  “Orrin?” But no, she remembered. “You died.”

  The Creep laughed and shook her. “You are one crazy little bitch, aren’t you?”

  She arched her back and twisted her legs, catching him by surprise and wrenching free of his grasp. He grabbed her hair and slammed her head into the wall with an almost casual movement.

  There was a blank moment. Then she was floating and breathless with shock. She forgot how to breathe, how to speak, how to think. She couldn’t even register the pain for several seconds. Her vision went white, and everything was eclipsed by the need to flee the sudden tsunami bouncing off the inside of her skull. It was like a loud sound inside of her head, only with no noise, and it was nauseating and dizzying. She was falling but didn’t know how to react to this. What are you supposed to do, when you’re falling? This seemed a theoretical question, and she tried to focus on it but couldn’t seem to care about the answer. And then there was nothing.

  Some unknowable quantity of time went by. She was sitting in a chair. She tried to remember where she was. She tried to stand up and was stopped short. Her wrists hurt. Her head was swimming. Her arms hurt. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. She sucked in air. It hurt, but it cleared her head a tiny bit.

  Oh, good, she thought. I can breathe. Her vision was coming back in watery, broken pieces. She couldn’t remember where she was or why she was afraid, and she wasn’t sure when she was. She tried to focus, to ground herself. She started by wiggling her toes. That was always good. If she could wiggle her toes, then she could maybe think. She wiggled her fingers. Blinked. Breathed slowly and deeply.

  Focus, Lola. Find the up and the down. Figure out where you are. Figure out when you are. And who’s here.

  She knew that her hands were bound behind her back and that there was something stuffed in her mouth. She felt the chair being pulled sideways. Something swam in front of her, and she tried to focus on it. It was a face, she thought, though there was something wrong with it. There were no eyes! She panicked and reared backward, trying to flee the scary face with no eyes, but the chair, and she with it, slammed back down. She cried out in pain and fear. The sound was strange—why? Oh, the thing in her mouth. No Eyes Man had put a hurting thing in her mouth.