She leaned into the window hard, pushing with all her weight, grunting with the effort.
But the barrier remained solid as a wall.
Grabbing a dish towel, Caroline wrapped it around her hand, ready to shatter the glass.
But then she paused. She was barefoot and the window was large. The shards could injure her, hampering any chance of escape. She needed a different plan.
A tapping came from the door of her apartment. Quiet at first. Growing insistent.
Caroline froze. The man who’d killed Hector was standing right on the other side of the thin wooden door that separated her apartment from the hallway.
With keening desperation screaming in her ears, she slammed the palm of her hands against the frame of the window.
It didn’t move.
Frantically, she tried again. And again.
At the other end of the apartment, Caroline heard a rustling. Then the faint tickle of metal against metal. Lock-picking tools, Caroline identified the likely source of the sound.
She only had seconds before the man was inside.
She had to get out now.
Caroline turned back to the window.
But this time, she took a slow breath. The window had never beaten her before. It would not beat her today. It needed to open. Right. Now.
With a sharp pop, she slammed both palms into the top of the frame, concerted effort, directed energy. And the seal separated.
She shouldered the window frame open and scrambled outside.
The warm Santa Ana winds swirled her hair, lifting it in updrafts from the alley below.
She gripped the railing and swung around. Inside her apartment, at the far end of the hall, the front door swung open and the tall, blond man entered.
His head snapped up as he spotted Caroline on the fire escape.
Predator and prey locked eyes for a timeless moment, burning up the air between them. Sizzling with concentrated attention.
And then Caroline ran.
Vaulting down the first three stairs of the fire escape, she flew downward.
She hit the second floor, landing hard.
Her gaze pivoted toward the window of the apartment beside her. She didn’t know who lived there, but maybe they could help.
The apartment was dark. No one home.
She felt rather than heard a heavy rattle from above as the hit man stepped onto the fire escape. The stairway vibrated with his steps as he came after her. Thumping, shaking footfalls, like the Giant coming for Jack, who’d dared to climb the beanstalk.
Caroline hurtled onward, her plunge down the stairs a controlled fall through space, her hands tracking the banister to keep from stumbling.
Her bare feet scurried down the metal risers, nerve endings oblivious to the uneven metal slicing flesh.
Cortisol hopped up her senses. Fight or flight. Her mind had been engineered for both, and now flight was all she knew.
Reaching the end of the metal-slatted risers, she stopped. A ladder on a pulley hung suspended in the air above the alley. She’d seen the setup before in movies. The ladder needed weight on it to descend. But she wasn’t big. She hoped it worked.
Jumping onto the ladder, she begged the counterweight to acquiesce, to let her down to the relative safety of the alley below.
There was a sharp ping, and a shower of sparks blossomed inches from Caroline’s face as a bullet ricocheted into the night.
Flinching, she instinctively crouched and felt the phone squirt loose from her back pocket. It plummeted twenty feet down and shattered on the ground.
But Caroline had no time to mourn its destruction.
She flexed her legs and thrust downward. Hard.
The ladder groaned. The metal wheel began to turn.
Slowly at first, then faster, Caroline rode the ladder down, the gears clattering like trash cans until the ride stopped with a metallic jerk that almost threw her from the rungs.
Thrusting hard, she leaped off the bottom.
Her bare feet startled at the sensation of pavement, rough and still warm from the day.
She took off running, away from her building. Away from the man with the gun.
CHAPTER 14
When Caroline reached Alameda Street, she looked for help.
She saw no one. Just warmly lit apartments far above, sheltering people who, like her, ignored disturbing sounds in the night. The yells of the homeless. The gunshots of gangbangers.
How many nights had she taken solace in the impenetrable gates of her apartment, knowing none of the dangerous elements outside could reach her? Now those same barriers prevented her from seeking help. She was on her own. Being chased by a killer.
The broad boulevard provided no respite. But she knew the neighborhood’s winding streets and narrow alleys. If she could duck into one.
Racing around the corner ahead of her, she hurtled toward the Fashion District. The shops were closed, sealed up tight for the night. She wished she could take refuge in one, but steel-slatted gates covered the fronts of most of the stores. Others had bars so close together that scarcely a ferret could’ve squeezed between them.
Caroline flashed past makeshift showrooms where bolts of fabric were piled from floor to ceiling. Outside, rows of mannequins were chained to posts. The human forms gave the illusion of people. But they were nothing more than fabricated witnesses to Caroline’s frantic flight.
Up ahead Caroline spotted a branching alleyway, curving away from the sleeping stores.
She darted down the nearest alley.
The odor of food rotting in dumpsters rode a wave of warm air, nauseating and sick, but she kept going, deeper into the alley. There, she found kitchen bags of food clippings and mounds of discarded fabric.
Broken-down boxes mounded the gutters. Carpet remnants. Old pieces of equipment.
Finding a large pile of fabrics and boxes, Caroline squatted low and ducked into it.
Quickly, she pulled pieces of cardboard over her.
Soon, she heard footsteps. Running. Coming closer. Definitely coming her way.
A wave of nausea climbed Caroline’s throat, clawing at her esophagus.
She clamped down on the sensation.
Struggling to control her panting, she imagined herself as lifeless as the plastic mannequins in the store windows beside her.
A sense of déjà vu washed over her. The hiding. The waiting. The fear of discovery. There had been times when her mother had raged. Those times had been infrequent, but often enough to keep her on edge, always vigilant for the demon that would appear, occupying her mother’s body, poisoning everything her mother said. When the rages came, Joanne Auden’s posture changed, as though her limbs were threaded with crooked wires and charged with a sharp electric current. Her voice would become acid edged and cutting. And Caroline would hide. Blending into the curtains in her father’s study, trying to reduce her human profile, hoping she’d avoid becoming a target for her mother’s free-floating fury.
Now, Caroline willed her shape to appear as just another haphazard lump.
There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here.
She let the words fill her mind, repeating them, thrusting them out into the universe, begging them to take hold, gathering force with her will. She hoped the man would see nothing.
A flashlight beam swept over her hiding place, strafing her tank top and the leg of her jeans. Light leaked through the cracks in the cardboard, painting stripes all around Caroline.
Caroline held her breath. She waited for the hit man to kick the cardboard box aside and point the muzzle of his gun at her.
But then the flashlight switched off and her rank hiding place fell into darkness again.
With a soft scraping, the footfalls withdrew. Slow at first, then faster. The man was backtracking to find her. He was leaving.
Caroline exhaled, the tension leaving her limbs.
But she knew she couldn’t stay where she was. Nor could she go hom
e. She needed to keep moving. The man would return as soon as he realized she wasn’t ahead of him.
Pushing out of the pile of trash, Caroline stood up.
Her tank top, now streaked with dirt, still reflected streetlamps. Too visible. Too distinct.
Atop her pile of refuse were tattered pieces of fabric. Spotted with dark green and brown blotches, they reminded her of the backdrops she’d helped paint for school plays in grade school.
She pulled a jagged bolt of it from the heap.
She slung it around her shoulders like a shawl.
Then she ran.
The first people Caroline encountered were homeless. Standing together in an abandoned construction site, the six shapes clustered around a trash can filled with fire.
A bearded man with an army surplus jacket stood closest to the fire, his hands outstretched for warmth even though the night was easily north of eighty degrees. Beside him stood a woman with a baseball hat pulled low over her forehead. The other four were all men.
They looked up as Caroline approached.
“I’m . . . I’m being chased,” Caroline said. Her voice sounded small and wrong in her ears.
“Yeah, me, too,” muttered one of the men from the dark.
“No, really,” Caroline said. “He’s got a gun. Do the police . . . Are there any around?”
The man beside the fire spat. “Fuck the police.”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the group.
The sound of a motorcycle echoed down the street, the whine and whir of the engine approaching. Growing close.
With a wave of cold terror, Caroline realized the hit man might’ve retrieved his bike so that he could hunt for her.
“You sure got a pretty ass,” said a voice from behind her.
She resisted the urge to look at the speaker, because doing so would force her to face the street, where the motorcycle was slowing down.
A hand alighted on her right triceps.
She tensed but didn’t move.
As the sound of the motorcycle came parallel to the construction site, Caroline made a decision. Steeling herself, she leaned into the unwanted caress.
Encouraged, the homeless man put his arm around her.
A wave of stale sweat coursed up into Caroline’s nostrils—the musky funk of a human without the benefit of regular showers during the Santa Anas.
The man leaned in until Caroline could feel his warm breath behind her ear.
“Let’s go, baby,” he said. “There’s a mattress back in the alley,” he added to sweeten the offer.
Instead of answering, Caroline tracked the crunching of the motorcycle’s wheels as the vehicle left the paved road and rode closer and closer to where she stood. A chain-link fence separated the unfinished driveway from the half-completed building. The hit man wouldn’t be able to enter with the motorcycle. He’d have to climb off and go on foot, Caroline knew.
She considered her options.
Should she run? No. It was too late for that.
A flashlight flipped on.
A wide, white beam of light swept across the landscape, touching the mounds of dirt and locked equipment before settling on the group by the trash can. The light seemed to settle on Caroline’s back, glinting in the hairs of the arm circling her shoulders.
“Get that fucking thing out of my eyes!” snarled the bearded man by the fire.
“Yeah, you’re ruining the ambience,” added the man’s girlfriend.
Caroline stood frozen, hoping her silhouette—a woman in a long shawl, embraced by an amorous suitor—looked sufficiently different from the hit man’s prey that he’d move along. There were hundreds of homeless souls in the area. He wouldn’t search them all. Would he?
After another moment, the flashlight turned off.
The motorcycle’s engine revved.
With a crunch and thump, the bike rejoined the paved street, then sped off.
After the motorcycle had gone, Caroline’s body tremored with exhaustion.
“Come on, baby,” said the hot voice in her ear.
Spinning away from the embrace, Caroline ducked through the gap in the chain-link fence and ran down the street.
Caroline’s feet screamed in agony—a strange, uncomfortably deep pain from her flight down the fire escape. Then the flight down an alley. Then the walk through a construction site. Then the jog down Towne Avenue. The grit and broken glass had penetrated and shredded whatever meager calluses she’d developed from running. She needed shoes. Even more than that, she needed somewhere to regroup. But the farther she ran, the fewer people she saw.
At first, she’d tried to flag down cars. All had given her a wide berth, a wild harpy flapping her makeshift shawl on the roadside. She wouldn’t have stopped for herself.
The memory of her apartment sucked at her thoughts, promising all sorts of comforts if she gave up and went home. Her closet full of shoes. Her laptop. Her wallet. But the hit man knew where she lived. She couldn’t go there. Not safe. So she had no phone. No purse. No money. Nothing.
Fear stretched her in odd directions—cramping in her guts, aching through her legs, tugging at the edges of her psyche, threatening to drag her down to the lower depths of herself. Sweating and terrified. Rational thought threatened to leave her.
Grandma Kate had always said, “Get out of the problem and into the solution.”
She needed a solution now. She hurried on into the night to find the only person she could reach on foot.
“You didn’t bring me another one of those AA flyers, did you? Because I’m really not interested,” Uncle Hitch slurred at Caroline.
She’d found him sitting on the steps of a defunct factory on East Second Avenue. Slumped against a wrought-iron banister whose curlicues and fleurs-de-lis clashed with the dilapidated structure it adorned, he’d been regarding the rising moon when she approached.
“Someone’s trying to kill me,” Caroline said. The words sounded hyperbolic and strange in her ears, but she knew she wasn’t exaggerating. Her presence here alone was confirmation enough of their truth. Her destination had been a reflection of her desperation.
In response, her uncle looked down at the empty bottle beside him, as if frustrated that he could not dispel this vision of a blood relative who was intruding on his oblivion.
“I can’t stay here,” Caroline said, looking over her shoulder. “Too exposed.”
Hitch took long, languid blinks as his eyes fought to focus on his niece.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.
Caroline just nodded. Her chest felt scooped out and hollow as a drum. Her face was crusty with sweat and grime. And she was standing in front of her drunk, homeless uncle, looking for help.
“Okay, okay,” Hitch muttered, hauling himself up to his feet.
He walked into the building’s shadow and pulled his shopping cart out onto the street with a clatter. Mounded with possessions, the cart steadied him. A poor man’s walker.
“Come on,” he said.
He headed down the street, leaning hard into the cart, one step at a time.
Unsure what else to do, Caroline followed.
CHAPTER 15
The blanket that covered Caroline stank of urine and ash. The oversize flannel jacket that she wore smelled of Uncle Hitch. The chaparral beneath her head poked into her cheek.
She turned her head away, and when she did, the sound of traffic invaded her senses. Unbuffered by walls or windows, the whoosh of cars on the 110 freeway was deafening. Trucks and buses. Cars and motorcycles. All roaring past the spot where Caroline had spent the night. All oblivious to her presence.
She didn’t feel rested. Instead, she felt . . . numb.
Beside Caroline, her uncle groaned.
Caroline regarded his profile. Stubble covered his chin, speckles of black against the tanned skin of his face. He’d thrown his right arm across his eyes, blotting out the light. The gray fabric of his sweatshirt made a ratty sleep mask.
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As if sensing his niece’s eyes on him, Uncle Hitch roused.
Shifting, he settled on his right side, facing Caroline.
His eyes opened slowly. A muddy shade of pond bottom, they regarded Caroline for a long moment before closing again.
Then Hitch rolled over onto his back again.
“This can’t be good.” His puff of breath swirled white in the cold morning air.
Caroline nodded. Uncle Hitch, King of Understatement.
Over the din of traffic on the morning commute, Caroline recounted what had happened. She’d already told him the night before, but he’d had trouble standing, let alone focusing. Teetering, he’d guided Caroline to this ditch beside the freeway, where he’d stashed some supplies. The rough brown blanket from an old electrical box. The tarp from a hollow in a gnarled tree. Three half-eaten apples, mealy and dirty, but still edible. She’d forced herself to take a bite of one before settling down to try to sleep.
Now Hitch listened attentively as Caroline described how she’d come to seek him out in a doorway on the edge of Skid Row.
When she finished, he shook his head in annoyance.
“I just need a phone,” Caroline said, cutting off whatever snarky comment he was going to make. She didn’t have time for it. She had to call the police. Or her dad. Or Joey, her best friend from New Jersey. Or the ship where her mom was.
Without answering, Hitch sat up.
He brushed pieces of blond grass from his arms. Teetering slightly, he stood and gathered the blanket and tarp, then tucked them inside the basket of his shopping cart.
Wheeling the cart over the uneven scrub brush, he tucked it into a nook under a bridge beside the freeway. The spot was mostly invisible.
When he returned to Caroline, he kept walking past her.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To see a friend.”
When her uncle had said they were going to see a friend, Caroline had expected someone with a phone. Or maybe a few dollars to spare.
But the man they approached looked as destitute as Hitch. Thick as an ancient oak tree and just as weathered, he squatted on a slab of concrete in a grove of half-dead willow trees overlooking the Los Angeles River. The elements had burnished his skin to a deep mahogany.
Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2) Page 15