Look Away

by C. J. Lyons

  Still pressed back against the shadows, she glanced up. Zoe was hugging a railing above her, looking down—on her handiwork? Morgan didn’t wait to find out. As soon as Zoe pulled back, Morgan scurried around Gavin’s body and turned toward the fire door.

  That’s when the shooting began.

  The first bullet ricocheted wildly from the steel-encased steps above her. Several more followed in quick succession, but Morgan was already diving through the exit door and turning toward the storage facility.

  She’d only made it as far as the start of the chain-link fence when she heard her name whispered through the night. Or rather, Hildy’s name.

  “Hildy. Stop. Wait for me.” Zoe rushed to join her. “Those men are right behind me. We need to hide.”

  “How did you find me?” Morgan asked, as she continued along the path between the fence and the woods, assessing her options. The woods were mostly swamp, and a water channel ran through the trees—a lagoon, the people down here called it. Home to blue herons and graceful cranes and funny little turtles and…alligators.

  “You left bloody footprints behind on the concrete—before it turned to dirt. But enough to tell you went this way.”

  Idiot, Morgan berated herself. She grabbed a pine branch from the ground to drag behind her and hastened her footsteps, searching for where the earth had eroded beneath the fence. If the woods were out, and no way was she exposing her car, her escape route, to anyone, then that meant finding a place to hide in the storage yard. “Did you kill Gavin?”

  “No. I came out when I heard him scream. God, that awful scream. Didn’t you see me?”

  “Gavin screamed?” Morgan hadn’t heard—or if she had, she hadn’t registered it, too busy planning her exit strategy, focusing on staying alive. “So you didn’t kill him. Then why were you there?”

  Zoe’s expression was blank, as was her body language. Come to think of it, she was much too calm for having seen and heard what she’d just experienced, followed by being shot at. Or seeing Morgan being shot at. She still had no idea who the men with guns were, what they wanted, or who their target was.

  She paused and assessed Zoe. Much too calm. Unreadable. Someone who had trained herself not to betray her emotions. A lot like Morgan.

  Maybe just as dangerous? Which would make Zoe more of a threat than the men with guns.

  She heard their voices in the distance, much louder and more agitated than her and Zoe’s whispers.

  “Here.” She pointed to a gap between the dirt and the bottom of the fence. She used the branch to brush away the pine straw and leaves disguising the gap, tested the fence to make sure it wasn’t electrified, and then held the bottom of the fence up for Zoe as she crawled through. Morgan quickly followed, reaching with her branch to scoop the debris back into place and hopefully hide any impressions they’d made in the dirt.

  “Where to now?” Zoe asked, as she helped Morgan to her feet. “Mr. Kagan owns the entire strip mall, so if those are security from All American, they’ll have access here as well.”

  Morgan grabbed Zoe’s hand and ran down one of the rows of anonymous storage units. No way was she letting Zoe follow her; she wanted her where she could see her.

  The storage units had cinder block walls and overhead garage-style doors. They seemed to come in one-car and two-car sizes. There were padlocks on the ones being rented but not the empty ones, Morgan saw, as they zigzagged through the maze of buildings. It was like a small city, set up in avenues and lanes running perpendicular to each other. Easy to get lost in—hopefully just as easy to lose someone else.

  There were overhead lights illuminating the doors on each building but no cameras that Morgan spotted. Thankfully, the lights weren’t motion sensing—that would have given away their position to anyone following.

  Behind them she heard the rumble of doors being shoved open, along with the sound of men—more than two men now, at least five or six. And the sound of vehicles racing up and down the narrow streets of the complex.

  Time to commit. As much as she didn’t trust or understand Zoe, it was better than taking a chance outrunning a bullet. Morgan slid her sunglasses from the pocket of her windbreaker and pulled the thin lengths of flexible steel free from the earpieces.

  Normal padlocks like the ones used on these doors—she could pick those with her eyes closed. Pre-coma, that was. Post-coma it had taken her hours and hours of practice, sometimes up all night refusing to sleep until she mastered each of a mountain of locks she’d piled up on the kitchen table.

  Now that it was time to put her newly fine-honed skills to use in the real world, she felt a tremble of performance anxiety. An alien sensation to Morgan, but before she could think about it, her fingers worked their nimble magic and the lock sprang open.

  She raised the door as quietly as possible, just high enough for Zoe to roll inside. Morgan arranged the lock to appear closed and followed Zoe as a Jeep squealed around the corner, its headlights blazing into the space where Morgan had just been standing.

  Chapter Eight

  The Jeep sped past. Together she and Zoe inched the garage door down, leaving only a tiny crack that allowed a sliver of light and, if she flattened her head against the floor, a way to peer out and monitor any approaching bad guys.

  As Morgan and Zoe lay together on the concrete floor, faces pressed to the space below the door, Morgan had time to analyze what she’d seen at All American. Her mind replayed Gavin’s fall like a video, stopping, starting, rewinding.

  “You weren’t on the administrative floor,” she told Zoe. “You were on the fourth floor. You came out of the server room.”

  Zoe was silent.

  “Why were you in the server room?”

  “I was looking for something.”

  “How did you get in?”

  Zoe focused all her attention on the door. She was lying with the good side of her face up, her blonde hair capturing the light. If you never saw the injured side, she’d pass for beautiful, Morgan realized. More than that, though; she looked vaguely familiar. There was no way Morgan could have ever met her in person before—even post-coma Morgan had an uncanny recollection of the people she met however briefly. But there was something…

  “It was my fault,” Zoe finally whispered, still not looking at Morgan. “Gavin died because of me.”

  Before she could say anything else, another vehicle approached. This one stopped not far from their unit, and there was the sound of men climbing out.

  Morgan turned to survey the contents of their hiding place, scouring it for possible weapons. She had a Maglite but didn’t dare turn it on. Thankfully the light spilling in from outside was enough.

  Not much to work with here. Boxes labeled Xmas and Ryan’s Baby Clothes. A dismantled crib. A silver-tinseled Christmas tree. Racks of CDs revealing the owners’ horrendous taste in music. A few pieces of furniture covered by moldy blankets.

  No gun safe. No footlocker helpfully stocked with ammo and an old Army sidearm. No machetes or sabers or crossbows or really anything helpful at all.

  That left just Morgan and her knife, a Kershaw CQC. Pre-coma she used to carry a pistol as well, but Micah hated guns with a passion, and post-coma Morgan’s aim wasn’t up to her usual standards. So for now she left her 9mm in the car and depended on her skills with a blade—always her strong suit—and her wits.

  Not that either would do her and Zoe much good now that Morgan had effectively locked them into a box.

  She returned to Zoe. Both of them breathed slowly and quietly as the men rattled the door across from them, raising it and shining bright lights into the empty space. They continued down the line, skipping the doors with padlocks.

  “Maybe she went out the front?” one of them asked.

  “Wilson would have seen her.”

  Her, Morgan thought. They were only looking for one woman.

  “Not if it was before he got the call. Probably sleeping.”

  The other man grunted, and gestured for
his partner to cover him as he raised another door. They were both armed with semiautomatics.

  “You sure it was her? The blonde? How’d she get in?”

  “It was her. Must’ve stolen an access card. That’s what set off the alarm.” They kept moving, crossing over to start on Morgan’s side of the row of lockers. She couldn’t see them, but she could still hear them. Definitely not trained—sloppy but enthusiastic amateurs was how she’d rate them. Or cheap rentacops.

  Stolen access card. It would have to be one with admin level privileges—which Gavin, as head of HR, would have had. She glared at Zoe. “You used Gavin’s card. They thought he was stealing data, and they killed him for it.”

  Whoever they were. And what data had Zoe been after from the All American servers? Client lists? Proprietary information? Private caller data?

  Could Zoe be the killer Morgan was searching for?

  Zoe said nothing but waved Morgan to silence. The men were at the unit beside them. Without Morgan needing to signal Zoe, they both edged back, their breathing slow and controlled, and climbed to their feet.

  Morgan drew her blade, settled into a fighting stance. Zoe surprised her by doing the same. Her knife was a simple Buck knife with a three-inch folding blade, sold at any outdoors shop, but it would get the job done.

  Who was this girl? Looking at Zoe’s silhouette in the near-dark was almost like looking in a mirror. She worried Morgan more than the men outside.

  The door beside them rattled as the men slammed it shut. Footsteps sounded. The men crossed in front of their hiding space. Both Morgan and Zoe braced, keeping their breathing even, not holding their breath. Morgan’s grip on the knife was relaxed but she saw that Zoe clenched hers in a fist. Mark of an amateur, despite Zoe’s emotionless demeanor.

  Light danced beneath the crack at the bottom of the door. Until finally, “This one has a padlock. Try the next.”

  The footsteps receded. Morgan didn’t drop her guard. Instead she stared at Zoe’s profile, finally remembering where she’d seen her before. She waited until the men had finished the row and driven off to search another area. Then she turned to face Zoe, her knife still in her hand.

  “I know you,” Morgan accused the other girl. “You’re Angela Parsons. But you’re dead. There’s a man on death row waiting to be executed for your murder.”

  Zoe sighed. “Yeah. I know. I put him there.”

  Chapter Nine

  Morgan was too young to remember the Angela Parsons’ case firsthand, but she’d seen numerous documentaries on the controversial conviction of Curtis Troy, the man who had kidnapped Angela when she was eleven, held her for five years, and finally, allegedly, killed her.

  As she and Zoe-Angela huddled silently in the dark, waiting for their pursuers to abandon their search, Morgan recalled what she could of the case.

  Angela had been waiting for the bus at the end of the farm lane in her home in rural Alabama on a winter morning dreary with fog and rain. The media had made a big deal of the weather, as if a force of nature were just as to blame for a little girl’s disappearance as the actual kidnapper.

  Curtis Troy had by all accounts become a recluse after his wife, who was half his age, died. He’d come home from his job as a roofer for lunch and found her sprawled on the basement floor, her laundry basket beside her. At least, that was the story. It was a rural county, at the end of the fiscal year when the coroner’s budget was already spent, and at the time of his wife’s death Curtis was a deacon in the church, a member of the Elks, and had never been in trouble before, so no one saw much reason to question his story. Not then.

  Everyone said grief changed Curtis. He became withdrawn, seldom seen at church socials, taken to long drives at night and on days when the weather was too bad for him to work. He sold the house where his wife had died and moved into an old dairy farm outside of town, with a modest farmhouse and several barns and storage facilities including an underground storm shelter dug into the side of the hill.

  This became little Angela Parsons’ prison for the next five years. No one could say for certain exactly what tortures the little girl had endured during her captivity. Curtis had been kind enough to provide running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity—whether more for his comfort or hers was hard to say, as he’d appeared to move into the small, windowless room alongside his captive. Angela’s DNA, recovered from her pink princess toothbrush she’d left behind, had been found all over the bunker.

  The circumstances of Curtis Troy’s arrest and conviction aroused even more speculation than those years he’d spent with Angela. A 911 call recorded what sounded like a struggle followed by a girl’s scream and the line going dead. The cell phone was finally traced to the Troy farm, where the police found the door to the bunker open and Curtis Troy asleep at the kitchen table, his hand curled around the handle of a bloody meat cleaver.

  Blood was everywhere—not enough to account for every ounce that could be found inside a young girl’s body, but more than enough to suggest foul play.

  Curtis insisted he’d been set up, that he’d never hurt Angela, but also that he couldn’t remember the evening before his arrest. Medical doctors and psychiatrists examined him but could find no physical cause for his so-called amnesia.

  Once the DNA proved that not only had Angela Parsons been living in the bunker but that it was her blood strewn all over the floor and walls and Curtis Troy’s person, and after the clothing she’d worn when she’d vanished along with the contents of her backpack was found neatly washed and folded and laid out in a kind of shrine in the master bedroom closet of the main house, Curtis shut up and got a lawyer, the best he could afford.

  The lawyer filed motion after motion arguing that with no actual body—“the very definition of habeas corpus,” he proclaimed to anyone who would listen—murder charges were out of the question.

  Then when the judge ruled against him, he argued that the death penalty should be off the table—again since there was no actual proof that anyone had died in that claustrophobic bunker. He even tried to negotiate a plea bargain, with Curtis confessing to the kidnapping and as many as a hundred counts of felony sexual assault if it meant his client could avoid the execution chamber.

  When the prosecutor, sensing the public sentiment of any jury pool in the state would be firmly on his side and it being an election year, declined to deal, the case finally went to court. It was a spectacle never before seen in the area.

  The variety of groups lending their support was remarkable: Amnesty International, the ACLU, the Innocence Project, church groups busing people in from five states away, even some famous Hollywood stars, all chanting and marching and singing and holding candlelight vigils until the judge had to order the jury be sequestered and the National Guard put on alert for the day of the verdict.

  Not that anyone doubted what the verdict would be. Guilty. On all counts. Lesser counts garnered a sentence of no less than 463 years, and for the charge of murder in the first degree with special circumstances? A sentence of death.

  When the sentence was read, Curtis Troy first wept, harsh sobs that shook the table he gripped with both hands. And then he fainted.

  He now waited on Death Row, all appeals exhausted, his execution due to proceed whenever the state got permission to use its new lethal injection cocktail. Personally, Morgan thought lethal injection was the cruelest form of execution—the long walk to the death chamber, more waiting as health care professionals stuck you with needles until finally finding a vein, then the time it took for the drugs to work. Not to mention the trauma to the doctors and nurses forced to violate their oath to save lives by actively facilitating a state-sanctioned murder.

  The electric chair was no better, though, sizzling someone from the inside out. No, Morgan believed in the death penalty for men like her father, but she also had enough pride to believe it should be done right: a bullet to the base of the skull. Bullets were cheap, never in short supply, quick, and, unlike the drugs, consist
ent and proven.

  Morgan listened at the door. There were no signs of any activity for the better part of an hour. Zoe sat quietly the whole time, her knife in her hand, her face blank. Morgan had so many questions for her, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

  “Let’s go,” she ordered, reaching down to raise the door. Zoe followed her lead without a word.

  As they retraced their steps and headed to Morgan’s car, she made sure Zoe was never behind her or out of her sight.

  Chapter Ten

  Zoe didn’t try to explain herself until they’d safely reached Morgan’s car and made it out to 278, the main highway running east from I-95 to the ocean. “You need to take me to my trailer,” she told Morgan, when Morgan started to head toward Hilton Head. “We have to hurry. If they figure out it was me, it’s the first place they’ll look.”

  “Then best to assume they’re already there.”

  For the first time, Zoe showed emotion, shaking her head wildly and drumming her fist against the dash. “No. You don’t understand. All my work, everything, it’s all there. I need to get it.”

  Morgan realized words and logic wouldn’t make a dent, not as upset as Zoe was. She wished she could read the other girl better. Was this all an act? But if Zoe had information that could help Morgan find her killer, then she wasn’t about to risk losing it. “Where?”

  Zoe gave her an address in Bluffton. “Behind the outlet malls, beside the nursery.”

  “Is there a back way—so we won’t risk being seen?” If anyone saw Morgan’s car, then her cover was blown as well. All American had her license plate, make, and model on file. After tonight they’d have security locked down tight, so her only chance at accessing the data would be if Hildy still had a job.

  “Yes. The nursery. We can park behind the greenhouse sheds and sneak through the fields where they grow the trees and shrubs. There’s a big row of camellias at the end, right before you get to the trailer park. I can see them from my place.”