by Jayne, Chris
Should she just grab all ten of them now and take them home, pies and all? Obviously, Mr. Saldata wasn’t at all interested in apple pies; he’d never miss them. Or should she just walk out the door and get these later from the housekeeper?
She hesitated…
…and then she heard it.
At first, Lori could not identify the sound, but then, horrifyingly, she did. It was a plea, a hoarse incoherent plea. And it was coming from the dining room.
Was someone hurt? The sound was almost inhuman in its desperation. Lori froze, a harsh bitter taste coming into her mouth, her stomach clenching so hard it hurt, and then it came again. Words sorted themselves out.
“Please,” the raw voice begged, “please no…” After a second of complete silence, a scream came, a scream so awful that Lori nearly fainted.
Countless times, in movies, she’d seen scenes that had played out very much like what she as hearing right now. Someone was being tortured, and nothing could ever have prepared her for hearing it for real, in person.
Get out, she whispered to herself. Oh my God, get out, get out, GET OUT! They don’t know you’re here. No one knows you’re here. There’s nothing you can do. Get out and call the police.
Her breath coming in ragged bursts, Lori backed stealthily towards the door, one silent step at a time, never taking her eyes off of the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Almost there, and then Lori tripped backwards over a stool that had been pulled out from the breakfast bar. The stool went down in a crashing clatter against the tile floor. Off-balance, with her foot caught in the rungs, Lori followed.
She fell awkwardly, catching herself against the hard tile floor with her wrist, the rung of the stool twisting viciously into her Achilles’ tendon. A sharp pain lanced up her arm. Terrified, no need to be quiet now, Lori scrambled to her feet. The stool skittered away noisily across the kitchen tile.
A bellow sounded from the dining room, and barely a second later, just as Lori regained her footing, the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room crashed open. In the doorway stood the most terrible thing she had ever seen, the most horrifying thing she could ever imagine seeing. Raoul Saldata, his white shirt covered with blood, a wicked-looking knife in his hand, locked gazes with her.
And then, in the next instant, she saw what was beyond him in the dining room. The dining room table was gone. A man, or what was left of a man, sat strapped into one of the dining room chairs with duct tape. He was so covered in blood for a millisecond Lori thought he was wearing a red shirt.
Lori exploded into action in the same instant that Saldata did. He howled out something in a language that Lori did not recognize, and instantly Lori heard a responding shout.
He was separated from Lori by the large, long, kitchen island; she was barely five feet from the back door. Lori turned and ran out the door, which she threw shut behind her with a force so hard she heard glass break. She shrieked at the sound of the breaking glass, then covered the distance to her car in four long strides.
The driver’s door was away from house’s back door and she’d barely made it into the car when Saldata burst out behind her. Sasha had been watching for Lori to come back, but instantly the dog knew something was wrong, and when Saldata came out of the house, she began barking furiously and snarling, snapping her teeth against the glass.
Lori’s hands were shaking so hard she was afraid she couldn’t turn the key, but she did. Saldata lumbered towards the car. Screaming, she hit the door locks on her Range Rover just as Saldata reached the passenger side of the car.
He pressed his florid fat face against the glass. “Get out. Get out now. I will kill you,” he screamed. Sasha threw herself against the glass again, barking frantically.
Lori slammed the car into gear and punched the gas pedal. The powerful car shot forward, tires squealing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Saldata, whose hand had been on the door handle, jerk and spin, and then fall to the ground. Then behind him, another man emerged from the house, a man with something in his hand. The back glass of the Range Rover exploded.
Chapter 6
They were shooting at her.
Lori screamed, her mouth open wide, her hands clutched to the steering wheel. Sasha barked furiously, and the powerful Range Rover took out the closed gate with a clatter, never slowing a bit. She flew past the brick gateposts onto the street beyond, wheels squealing and sliding as the car barely made the turn from the driveway to the street.
Lori drove, not sure she was breathing, staring ahead. Her hands shook so hard she could barely hold the wheel. Sasha jumped into shotgun position, whining at the window, looking at Lori expectantly. The dog knew something had happened, but obviously had no capacity to understand what.
Lori continued to fly down the street, checking the rearview mirror every couple of seconds. Nothing. She reached for her cell phone on the seat next to her, but her hands were shaking so badly she fumbled it and it fell. A quick glance showed that it had landed well forward on the passenger side floor; no way could she reach it without stopping. Not knowing what else to do, she kept driving.
Gradually, she became more aware of her surroundings. The few pedestrians who were out on the street, walking dogs or jogging, were looking at her, their faces blurred masks of shock and horror. For a moment she wondered why, and then she realized she was going more than 60 miles an hour on a residential street. She checked the rearview mirror again, and, still seeing nothing, forced herself to slow down to normal speeds.
Have to call 911. They were killing that man. Have to call 911. Why aren’t they following me? Have to call 911. They shot at me. She repeated it like a litany as she drove, and then it hit her. There had been no car parked in the area behind the Saldata house. Saldata’s vehicles were in the garage, behind closed doors. The reason no one had followed her was that they had no easy way to do that. Lori remembered the layout of the Saldata house. The garage had been on the other side of the kitchen from where she had parked. Long seconds would have been required - even a minute or more - to go back into the house, through a small utility area, into the garage, then into a car. If the keys were not kept in the car, it would take even longer.
Lori pulled up behind another car, forcing her to slow even more. The street she was on, Harbor Road, divided the waterfront properties to the east from the rest of the residential neighborhoods to the west. She might have gotten a good head start from any pursuit, but with ice cold certainty, she knew it was time to turn off of Harbor Road. Within a few hundred yards, she randomly picked a residential street and turned down it, pulling a quick U-Turn about a hundred yards down and then parking behind another car. She saw no one.
Lori put the car in park but did not turn the engine off. She had absolutely no clue what to do next. Numbly, she looked out the windshield, looked back at Harbor Road. It had been nothing more than instinct that had made her make the U-Turn but she was glad she had; now she could see the traffic on Harbor, in the distance. Was she far enough off Harbor that she’d be hard to spot if someone had come after her? She thought she was; she’d passed dozens of residential streets and there was no way someone in pursuit could be looking down all of them, plus the full size sedan she’d parked behind largely blocked anyone’s view of her.
Lori reached down and grabbed her cell. She typed in her passcode, and then she heard sirens. As she watched, about a hundred yards away, a police car and then another flew down Harbor going back in the direction from which she’d come. She paused, her fingers frozen on the cell phone screen.
Could that have something to do with her? She couldn’t see how it could. Why would someone at the Saldata house have called the police? Unless, maybe someone who had seen her reckless driving had called to report a dangerous driver. That had to be it.
Lori took a deep breath, started typing 911 again, images from the Saldata house crashing through her brain: so much blood, and the screaming, and Mr. Saldata chasing her. Had
that really happened? It had been, what? Barely five minutes, and it was already feeling unreal, like something out of a horror movie.
Suddenly, Lori froze, staring forward, not seeing anything out of the window of the car as her mind recreated the scene in the Saldata dining room.
It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. But then she knew it was.
She stared at the phone in her hand wondering what to do now, because what could not possibly have gotten worse, just did: the blood-covered half dead man she’d seen through the dining room door had been Senator Kyle Michaels.
Two minutes later, she still sat, numb and silent; her phone in her hand. Lori couldn’t make sense of it. How could the radio be saying Senator Michaels was dead? Could it have been a mistake? Hardly likely if the President of the United States was offering condolences to the family.
Lori started shaking, more uncontrollably than ever, and as she watched, two more police cars flew down Harbor in the direction she’d just come from.
Slowly, deliberately, she put the phone back down on the seat. What was going on here? Somehow a man - a United States senator - whom everyone thought was dead, was being tortured to death at this very moment less than five miles from here. She had to tell someone, but whom? The police?
Lori had lived in Miami for most of her adult life. Everyone knew that if you poked your nose in where it didn’t belong, you were taking a risk. The Colombian drug cartels were at war with the Mexican drug cartels. The Russian mob hated the Albanian mob, and almost all of it flowed through Miami one way or another. But none of that had ever affected Lori, or really, anyone she knew. If a client wanted to pay for a high-end dinner in cash, Lori politely accepted the envelope and took it to the bank, no questions asked. If you avoided certain neighborhoods and certain clubs, you could safely pretend that none of the organized crime would ever touch you. Michelle’s comment, relayed from Salvadore, that Saldata’s first language was not Spanish came back to Lori; the man had shouted to someone in another language when he saw her. Whatever it was, it was not Spanish.
She’d served parties at houses owned by foreign nationals often enough, and thinking about it she was pretty sure that the language had been Russian or something similar. Was Saldata even the man’s real name?
Yet another police car drove down Harbor, siren screaming, and Lori could no longer assume that this had nothing to do with her or what she had just seen. Desperate questions rolled through Lori’s terrified brain. If Senator Michaels was still alive, who had been shot in the car on South Miami last night? Had anyone been shot? Again, her hand hovered over the cell phone and again she hesitated.
Another guest at the Saldata home last night had been the assistant chief of police in Miami. Where did he fit in? If she called the police, would she stay alive long enough to tell her story? Was that paranoia engendered by watching too many movies?
On the other hand, the old saying came back to her: If they’re really after you, paranoia is good thinking. She’d just been chased by two men, one with a knife, one with a gun. She’d been shot at. The back window of her car lay in little chunks of glass everywhere. A man that the radio said was dead was in fact alive not five miles away.
A little bit of caution was probably in order.
Whoever these people were, they had the power, the reach, the clout to fake a senator’s death. Was she in more danger now than she had been in the house? She didn’t know everything, but she knew one thing: she had seen something that people would kill to hide and Lori wasn’t sure who those people were.
Lori looked around furtively. There was no one out on the quiet street at 10:00 AM on a workday, but a maroon Range Rover was a fairly distinctive car, one with the back window shot out more so. Eventually someone would notice her parked vehicle, would get curious, and would call the police.
She had to get off the street. She had to think, and for at least right now, she could not go home.
Then, for the first time in the last ten minutes, Lori caught a break. It hit her like a lightning bolt. She wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood. She’d gone over from Key Barca to Pinecrest; Jack’s great aunt, Sylvia, not only lived barely a couple of miles from here, Lori was fairly sure she could get there driving only on residential streets. That suddenly seemed like a better idea than ever when yet another police car flew down Harbor, lights flashing, siren shrieking. How many had that been? Five? Six?
It didn’t matter. She needed to get off the street, and now. She quickly checked the street map in her smart phone and pulled out.
Chapter 7
Five minutes later, having navigated all the way without ever driving on a main road, she pulled onto the cul-de-sac where Sylvia and Rob Hensen had bought their retirement home. When she and Jack had moved to Miami, Sylvia’s husband Rob, brother to Jack’s grandmother, had still been alive. They’d seen the couple casually a couple of times a year, but after Jack had been killed, Sylvia and Rob had reached out and moved into Lori’s life in a way that had been invaluable. Then Sylvia went through a loss of her own when Rob had passed away from cancer three years ago.
Sylvia and Rob had been childless, and she’d been thrilled to become a surrogate grandmother to Brandon and Grace, all the more welcome because Lori’s own mother had been killed in a terrorist attack in London when Lori was just a child. At least she’d caught one lucky break. She happened to be close to the one place in Miami where she could go and it would be very difficult for anyone to find her.
Lori pulled up the driveway, parking the Range Rover as close to the garage door as she could get it. Sylvia was not home; her sister took a villa in Tuscany every fall, and Sylvia was staying with her for a few weeks. She’d asked Lori to water her plants while she was gone, so Lori had a key to the house and knew the security code.
Almost on autopilot, Lori walked around the back of Sylvia’s house where the key Sylvia had left was hidden under a flowerpot. Not terribly original, but with the security system in place, someone who didn’t have the code wouldn’t get very far, even with the key. Lori opened the door and carefully keyed in the security code, taking an extra second to do so. Mistakes would be easy to make and the last thing she needed was for the security company to call.
Quickly she went to the attached garage and hit the opener, then jumped back into the Range Rover and pulled it inside, next to Sylvia’s Escalade. Only after she’d pulled her distinctive car inside and shut the door again did she allow herself to breathe a tiny sigh of relief.
She walked into Sylvia’s kitchen, Sasha bounding behind her. The house was quiet, still, terribly peaceful. Sylvia loved scented candles and the fragrance of whatever she had burned last - cinnamon spice? - lingered.
A sense of unreality crashed over Lori and she caught her breath, deep and ragged. Had all of that really just happened? There were tears on her face; she’d been crying without knowing it. Reaching up to push her hair out of her face, her hand caught on something sharp. It was a chunk of safety glass from the back window. She had glass in her hair. Gingerly, she threaded it out of her long hair and stared at it numbly.
Lori had absolutely no idea what she should do. It seemed insane to not call the police. Yet with every passing second, she knew in her heart that - at least for right now - it was the right decision. At least five police cars had roared down Harbor Drive. She would be crazy to ignore that it was at least possible that had something to do with her. Sure, it might have been someone simply calling in her reckless driving, but five cars? That seemed a bit excessive. Her instincts said she was in danger, and those same instincts were telling her to be careful whom she trusted.
Sylvia’s electric kettle sat on the counter; Lori suddenly felt as if she desperately needed a cup of tea. While the water was heating, she sank down onto the cushioned bench in Sylvia’s breakfast nook, and tried to make sense of all of it.
Again, she questioned her own interpretation of the reality, and again she came up wi
th the same conclusion. Whomever or whatever she had accidentally stumbled onto, these were people who could fake a senator’s death and get it on the national news media in less than eight hours. Lori had done enough parties in the last five years that she recognized most of the local “notables.” The assistant chief of police for Miami had been present at Saldata’s the previous evening. She wasn’t sure who the other men were, but they’d all appeared to be affluent American men. She knew the host, Raoul Saldata, the Senator and the Miami assistant police chief. It could well be that there had been others there last night who would also have reasons to stay anonymous.
This was Miami; corruption was everywhere, a fact of life. It was possible to live here and mostly avoid it, live a very safe, quiet, and family-friendly existence. But there were also evil people of great power, money and influence who moved through the city at will, and Lori knew unequivocally that she did not know who she could trust. She’d heard the joke about Miami police a dozen times: there were only two kinds of cops in Miami, those who were on the take and those who were dead. Suddenly, the jest didn’t seem so funny.
Thoughts tumbled through Lori’s head randomly. Could she have done more to save Senator Michaels? Her stomach clenched as she remembered the blood, the screams, the hole on the side of his head where an ear had been.
Lori absently opened a tea bag, placed it in a mug, reached for the electric kettle and then her eyes snapped open widely.
She dropped the glass kettle onto the granite countertop. It shattered into a million pieces, hot water splashing everywhere. Instinctively, Lori jumped back. Very hot water splashed onto her leg, soaking through her jeans but she barely felt the pain.