Talk to Me

by Stephanie Reid

  He heard the sounds of movement on the other side. A TV broadcasting a ball game was turned down, and after a few seconds the door opened slowly.

  “Mac?” A surprised Juan opened the door wider, an invitation for Mac to enter. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How are you?” Juan asked, removing some newspapers from the overstuffed chair next to his recliner. Sitting down himself, he gestured to the chair. “Take a load off.”

  “Thanks, Juan. I’m doing good. How are you?”

  “Oh, just fine. I suppose you’re wondering if that guy that was banging on your door ever came back around.”

  “Actually, no. That’s not why I stopped by. But, has he?”

  “Yes. In fact, I stopped by your place about an hour ago to tell you about it, but I guess you weren’t home.” Juan pointed to the badge sewn on the police polo that Mac wore on call-outs instead of his full uniform. “You get called out for something this morning?”

  Mac nodded, but he was more interested in hearing about his father’s latest visit. “When did he stop by? Did he cause a ruckus again?”

  “’Bout nine o’clock this morning he was knocking on your door. After a few minutes, I went out there and told him he needed to leave, just like you said I should.”

  “Did he leave?”

  “Yes, but he smelled like booze, and I wasn’t sure he had it together enough to find his way out of the building.” Juan picked up the remote from a handy pocket on the armrest of his recliner and turned off the TV. “Guess he did though, ’cause I ain’t seen him since.”

  “Hmm.” What the hell did his father want? Probably to apologize for his latest law-breaking behavior, but Mac had made it clear to his father a long time ago that he wanted nothing to do with him. And that included his apologies.

  Juan brightened. “So if that’s not why you came by, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Eager to put thoughts of his father behind him, Mac cleared his throat. “I have a favor to ask of you. A big favor actually.” Juan returned his gaze with an open, ready-to-help expression. “A friend of mine had her office broken into last night. Whoever did it trashed the place and spray painted a death threat on the wall.”

  Juan sat forward in his chair, making his recliner squeak. “That’s terrible. Who would do a thing like that?”

  “Well, we have a few suspects, but in the meantime I’d feel better if she wasn’t by herself. I think I’ve convinced her to stay with me, but I have to work second shift this evening—”

  Juan held up a palm. “Say no more. She can stay here while you’re at work. I’ll keep her company and make sure nothing happens.”

  Muscles Mac hadn’t known he was clenching relaxed. “Thanks.” Wanting to reassure Juan, he added, “I don’t anticipate any trouble. She has no connection with me. And we’ll leave her car at the Police Department. I highly doubt whoever vandalized her office would find her here. So there’s no need to worry that you’ll be in any danger by having her stay with you.”

  “Pshhh.” Juan waved his hand dismissively. “I’m not worried about that at all.”

  On second thought, maybe a little fear would make Juan more vigilant. “I would be careful though. Keep your door locked, just in case.”

  Juan nodded slowly, his dark eyes thoughtful. “This friend of yours…”

  “Emily.”

  “Yes, Emily. She’ll be safe here. I wouldn’t let anything happen to someone so important to you.”

  “She’s not important to me. I mean, she’s important, but we’re not…”

  Juan smiled knowingly.

  “She’s my best friend’s sister,” Mac finished lamely.

  “I see.” Juan ran his palm over his battleship gray mustache, smoothing his facial hair, but Mac suspected he was hiding a smile. Oh, well. If Juan thought there was something between him and Emily and it made him more protective of her, then so much the better.

  “I really appreciate this, Juan,” Mac said. He stood up and leaned over to shake the man’s hand. “You’re a good neighbor.”

  “Anytime, Mac. I’m happy to help.” Juan rose from his chair to walk Mac out. “You look out for all of us while you’re at work. Now, I can look out for you—well, look out for your friend’s sister anyway.”

  Mac eyed Juan’s sparsely furnished apartment. Since his wife had passed, Juan had been tossing a lot of TV dinner boxes into the recycling bin. Mac hadn’t given his neighbor much notice. What if his kitchen wasn’t well stocked? He thought of the uneaten soup can Emily kept in her tote bag.

  “Listen, Juan. Emily sometimes forgets to eat when she’s busy or stressed. Let me leave you some money so you can order some Chinese food or something for dinner.”

  He reached for his billfold and Juan laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Don’t you worry, Mac. I make the best enchiladas. I will feed her well.”

  “Okay. Thanks again, Juan.” Mac headed for the door, but paused to check the dead bolt and chain on his way out. “Do you have a screwdriver I could tighten these screws with? This chain lock looks a little loose.”

  Juan’s bushy gray eyebrows rose, his brown eyes lit with amusement.

  Mac cleared his throat. “Never mind. I’m sure it’s fine.” Since Juan thought he was a love-struck ninny anyway, he may as well go for broke and voice all of his concerns. He stepped into the hall and gave his last instructions. “And don’t watch any of your crime dramas while Emily’s here. She’s seen enough for one day.”

  Juan nodded. “I’m going to take good care of her, Mac. I promise.”

  “I know you will, Juan. That’s why I asked you.”

  * * *

  Emily looked over the list of names Nancy had printed off for her. All of her clients were on this list. She’d spent the last few hours trying to reorganize her ransacked files, and after each file she’d reassembled, she had placed a check mark next to the name of the person it belonged to on her client list. It had taken hours, but she’d finally gotten her files back in order. And now every name on the list had a check mark. Except one.

  Carl Franks’ file had indeed gone missing.

  Emily rolled her head in circles, trying without success to rid herself of the tension in her neck. She ached from leaning over, sorting through files, and her eyes were burning from hours of reading under the harsh fluorescent lights. She had some lovely floor lamps in her office, whose calm light she usually preferred over the fluorescent lights, but they’d all been broken by Carl.

  And she was confident it had been Carl. There was just no other explanation. She supposed there was some comfort in knowing who the perpetrator was. At least she knew the face of her enemy. Though truth be told, she was finding it difficult to think of Carl as the enemy. She’d been working with him for over a year and she’d found that beneath his anger, he was a truly complex and hurting individual. Life had not been kind to Carl. Not that he made it any easier with the choices he made, but Emily still felt compassion for him. She held out hope that one day he would realize how he’d sabotaged himself at every turn and find a way to turn his life around.

  She made a quick call to Detective Dorsey, letting him know that Carl’s file was missing. Dorsey wasn’t at all surprised and reported to Emily that he still didn’t have a lead on Carl’s current whereabouts. Emily ended the call, thanking him for the update, and then began putting her office back together as best she could.

  Using her hands to scoop dirt off the carpet and back into a potted plant, she heard shuffling in the waiting room. Asha, Sandra, and Nancy had left for lunch a few minutes ago, promising Emily they would help her sort out her office when they returned. It was too soon for them to be back, though.

  Emily brushed the dirt off her hands and into the plant and went to see who’d come in to the office.

  “Ruth?” Recognizing her client from the woman’s tense posture, Emily hurried across the waiting room to greet her.

  “Oh, there you are. It was so quiet I thought maybe I had the wrong day.
It is Monday, right? Not Sunday?” Ruth asked.

  Emily chuckled. “Yes, it’s Monday. I’m so sorry Ruth. I guess Nancy wasn’t able to get ahold of you to let you know that we canceled all of our appointments today.”

  Ruth frowned, her disappointment palpable. “Canceled? Did something happen?”

  Emily didn’t want to frighten Ruth, so she kept her answer vague. “Someone broke into my office this weekend. No one was hurt, just some property damage that we’re sorting out.”

  Ruth inhaled quickly. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.” She ran a distressed hand through her thick blonde hair. “That’s too bad. I was really looking forward to our session today. It’s been a rough week.”

  Emily frowned. She wasn’t supposed to have favorite clients, but it was human nature to gravitate toward certain people. And Ruth was one of those people. They’d made some recent gains in grief counseling—Ruth finally beginning to move forward after the sudden death of her teenaged son, and it was troubling to hear she’d not had a good week.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Emily was emotionally exhausted and not at all sure she was up to the task of giving Ruth her full attention. But Ruth had few close friends with whom to talk, and Emily hated to make her wait until next week to unload her burdens. She made an impulsive decision. “I’m afraid my office is out of commission, but if you’d like, maybe we could meet in the conference room. And you could tell me about your week.”

  “Oh, goodness no.” Ruth shook her head. “Would you listen to me? Your office was broken into, and here I am, wanting you to listen to my silly little problems.”

  “Ruth, I don’t think your problems are silly.”

  Ruth smiled nervously. “Well, be that as it may, they will keep until next Monday, I’m sure.”

  Emily noticed a dullness in Ruth’s eyes that spoke of exhaustion. “Why don’t we try to squeeze in a session on Wednesday instead of waiting until next week?”

  Lines of tension in Ruth’s expression softened. “Are you sure you have the time?”

  Emily smiled. “Of course.” She went behind the receptionist’s desk and pulled up the appointment calendar on the computer. “Did anything happen in particular to make last week difficult?”

  Ruth rested her elbows on the receptionist’s counter. “I won’t get into all of it now, but it’s just the same old stuff with my family. I feel like everyone just wants me to move past my son’s death. They want me to stop talking about it, stop wondering what went wrong.” Ruth paused, her eyes glassy with tears. “Sometimes I think they’d be happier if we all just pretended he never existed.”

  Emily heard the naked pain in Ruth’s voice and wished she could recall the details of her son’s death. She remembered the boy had been young, and it had been an unexpected passing. It was particularly difficult for Ruth because her ex-husband had been out of the picture for years. Her world had revolved around her only child. And then she’d lost him. Many of their sessions had centered on how painful it was that her sister and parents didn’t understand her grief.

  Ruth sighed. “This is all coming up again because I decided to move forward with a lawsuit against the person responsible for his death. My sister told me I just need to move on and that dragging things out in court won’t bring him back…I don’t know, sometimes I think she’s right…but I just don’t know.”

  Emily tilted her head to the side. “Ruth, are you sure you don’t want to talk today?”

  Ruth took a deep breath and plastered a bright smile on her face. “No. No. Wednesday will be fine. Do you have anything available first thing in the morning?”

  “How about eight?”

  “Perfect.”

  After she wrote the appointment time on a card for Ruth and said her goodbyes, Emily wrote on a sticky note, reminding herself to read through Ruth’s file again before their next session.

  Continuing to put her office back to rights, Emily’s mind buzzed like a bee flying from flower to flower. Was Dorsey going to track Carl down before he did something truly horrible? Until they found Carl, where was she going to stay that wouldn’t endanger her family or friends? Did she have any other clients who, like Ruth, really needed the session she’d had to cancel today?

  People counted on her and the knowledge she may have let them down weighed heavily. She felt slightly nauseous, her stress level skyrocketing, and she knew she needed to slow herself down, but that was easier said than done.

  Hoping some manual labor would shut her brain off and silence her worries, she left her office to grab a vacuum from the utility closet. Wrestling with the tangled electrical cord, she heard the front door to the suite open.

  Mac came in, wearing his police polo and jeans and looking incredibly sexy. What was wrong with her that she could still lust after a man with her life in total shambles? Seemed a bit unstable to her. Particularly when she’d already decided that man was off limits.

  Mac held up a white paper bag. “I hope you like sub sandwiches.”

  Her stomach answered with a ferocious growl. The wall clock said it was just past one o’clock in the afternoon. She’d skipped lunch, and the smell of freshly baked sub rolls tempted her almost as much as the man holding them.

  “Mac, that was so thoughtful of you.”

  “You haven’t eaten yet have you?” When Emily shook her head, Mac handed her the bag. “Had a feeling you would skip lunch.”

  She sat down in one of the waiting room chairs, unwrapped a sub, and had to force herself not to stuff it in her mouth as fast as she could. “I’m starving. Thank you,” she said, holding up her sandwich.

  Grabbing the other sub, Mac sat down next to her. “So, listen. I have to work from three to eleven this evening, but I made arrangements for you to stay with my neighbor until I get home.”

  Emily tried to swallow the bite of sandwich lodged in her throat. It was a moment before she could answer. “I’ve been thinking…maybe I should just stay at a hotel.”

  Mac shook his head.

  While he was busy chewing, she forged ahead. “Why not? It’s fairly public. Lots of hotels have security cameras in their halls. It seems like the perfect solution to me.”

  “Cameras are great for capturing criminals after the fact, but they don’t do shit to prevent crime.”

  She inhaled, ready to argue, but he shook his head.

  “Look,” he said. “Cameras prevent crime, but only when the criminal is rational enough to care about the consequences. And we may be dealing with a desperate father, who’s on drugs and doesn’t give a flying fuck about getting caught.” Putting down his sandwich, he drove his point home. “The safest place that you could be is somewhere no one would think to look for you, with people you have no connection to.”

  Sean had said almost the exact same thing to her this morning after Mac had left her office. She’d questioned Sean on his choosing someone to protect her who just weeks ago he’d thought had lost the edge needed to do his job. Sean had countered with the same logic as Mac, saying, “I know it seems odd that I would trust him to do this after what I said, but this is more about hiding you than it is about coming out with guns blazing. Mac is smart. He’ll do whatever it takes to make sure Carl, or whoever did this, can’t get to you.”

  What Sean didn’t know was that it wasn’t a lack of faith in Mac’s ability that concerned her. It was a lack of faith in her own ability to keep her hands off him that had her dead set on staying anywhere other than Mac’s apartment.

  Unwilling to admit this to Mac, she brought up her second biggest concern. “I don’t know. This seems like a lot for you to be taking on. You work long hours. You don’t need the added hassle of playing my bodyguard.”

  Mac’s coffee-brown eyes locked with hers. He held her gaze in silence for a moment before asking quietly, “Why won’t you let someone take care of you for a change?”

  His voice moved over her, raspy and soft, like warm velvet. A compassionate caress that had her looking down at her
sandwich to hide the tears beginning to pool in her eyes.

  “You help people for a living. You help your brother, watch over his kids. You even fixed my lip when his dumb ass hit me.” He tried to joke, but his voice turned serious again. “But who takes care of you?”

  She thought of her parents, the last people she’d allowed to take care of her. After they’d died, Sean had tried to be there for her, but she’d pushed him away. She hadn’t wanted to be a burden to him as he was finishing college. And she’d felt she had something to prove, too. She’d needed to know she could make it on her own. For ten years, she’d made it on her own. Alone. Lonely.

  A white handkerchief appeared before her downcast eyes. It was like being giving permission to cry, and the dam of defenses she’d been holding in place all day washed away. Gratefully, she took the handkerchief, held it over her eyes and leaned in when Mac’s strong arms came around her.

  He ran his hand over her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Let me be here for you, sweetheart,” he whispered. His words were a balm to her frazzled nerves, and she relaxed against his hard chest. Breathing deeply, she took in his scent, soapy and masculine, and for a brief moment she felt what it would be like to allow someone else to share her burdens. It was a heady feeling indeed.

  Sniffling and drying her eyes with his handkerchief, Emily sat up straight and nodded to Mac. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll stay with you.”

  “Good,” he said, his relief evident in the long breath he released. “So, as I was saying, while I’m at work tonight, you can hang out at my neighbor, Juan’s. Then I’ve arranged to have the next couple of days off.”

  Emily groaned. “Please don’t waste vacation time on this. I’m sure we can figure something else out while you’re at work.”

  Mac waved off her concerns. “I’ve got more time than I know what to do with, and if I don’t use it, I lose it.” He smiled, gently brushing the hair back from her face. “No more arguments. Let’s pack up your stuff, and we can drop your car off at the PD before I take you over to Juan’s place for the evening.”