Stalking

by Blake Pierce

  She stammered, “I–I’m not sure I want to talk about—you know.”

  Nick continued, “It’s just that… well, most ads in that particular publication are clearer on the subject.”

  Larissa’s mind flashed back to some of the ads she’d seen in Wholesome Ways. She knew that Nick was right. Even the dating ads typically indicated an intention to “wait until marriage.”

  Her own ad had been deliberately unclear.

  “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Nick said.

  Well, that’s what you’re doing, Larissa thought.

  At the same time, it seemed rather silly of her to feel this way. After all, this man had answered a dating ad that she’d made public. Didn’t he have a right to ask some personal questions—even about her sex life?

  Maybe, she thought. Still, she felt troubled and confused.

  He leaned across the table toward her.

  He said, “There was something else you wrote in the ad—‘Hoping to change all that.’ That worried me. Hoping to change what exactly? Are you thinking about…?”

  Larissa found herself holding her breath as the words hung unspoken in the air.

  Nick shook his head sadly.

  He said, “Annette, do you realize how rare it is for someone to get to be your age and still hold on to that—innocence? Have you really thought this through? It’s a precious thing you’re thinking about giving up. And once it’s gone, you’ll never get it back again.”

  Larissa didn’t like the turn this conversation had taken.

  She said, “Nick, what’s this all about? I mean, are we really here on a date?”

  “Of course,” Nick said. “What else could it be?”

  Larissa shrugged and said, “Well, it sounds like you’re kind of…”

  She stopped herself from finishing her thought.

  “…kind of lecturing me about morality.”

  But from Nick’s expression, he clearly knew that she meant to say.

  He let out a self-critical groan and rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” he said. “I don’t mean to get all moralistic. It’s just something I do at inappropriate moments. I’m really very sorry.”

  Somewhat to Larissa’s relief, his apology sounded perfectly sincere.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “Perhaps we should order some lunch,” Nick said.

  Pushing her coffee cup aside, Larissa said, “No, I’d really rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

  She searched for the right words for a few seconds.

  Then she said, “Look, I think I made a mistake. Taking out that ad, I mean. It was… well, it wasn’t like me at all. This isn’t like me at all. I really shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Nick said again.

  “No, please don’t feel bad, this isn’t your fault. It was kind of you to answer my ad, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but…”

  Nick tilted his head sympathetically.

  “Oh, I understand, don’t worry,” he said. “I understand how you feel. And the last thing I want is to be pushy. Maybe we should just call it a day and get back to our regular lives.”

  Larissa sighed with relief.

  “I’m so glad you understand,” she said, reaching into her purse.

  Nick took out his own wallet and said, “No, please, let me pay for this.”

  He put a rather generous amount cash on the table. They put on their jackets, and Nick walked her outside to her car—a used car that she’d bought cheaply to save money. She and Nick shook hands chastely, and then he walked away.

  It occurred to her that they’d never gotten around to telling each other their real names.

  Maybe it’s just as well, she thought.

  She got into her car and tried to start it.

  The ignition let out an agonized rattle.

  She groaned aloud and tried again. The same thing happened.

  She was surprised and annoyed. This car had been dependable since she’d bought it, even on some really cold days. Why wouldn’t it start now?

  Just not my lucky day, I guess, she thought.

  But what was she going to do?

  Then came a knock on the driver’s window. When she saw that it was Nick, she rolled her window down.

  “It sounds like you’re having some trouble,” he said. “Can I help?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you have jumper cables?”

  “Try starting it again,” Nick said.

  She did, and this time the ignition barely made a sound.

  Nick shook his head and said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s not the battery. Jumper cables wouldn’t do any good. You need to get towed somewhere to get it worked on.”

  Larissa looked around and didn’t see a service station nearby. She fought down a cry of frustration.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  Nick said, “I understand, but surely I can help.” He pointed and added, “There’s a gas station about a quarter of a mile that way. I’ll drive you over there and you can tell them your problem, and they’ll send a tow truck.”

  “But I don’t have time to wait for it to get repaired,” Larissa said. “I’ll be late getting back to work.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll drive you to Boneau,” Nick said. “You can come back and get the car whenever it’s ready.”

  Larissa could hardly believe her ears.

  “Oh, no, I can’t ask you to do that,” she said. “Boneau’s much too far out of your way.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Nick said with a charming smile. “The rest of my day is pretty much free. And it seems like the least I can do after… well, disappointing you.”

  In a voice brimming with gratitude, Larissa said, “That’s more than kind of you. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  She got out of her car and followed him across the parking lot toward a white utility van. She was a bit surprised to see that such a well-dressed man was driving a rather unattractive vehicle. But she didn’t much care, as long as he was going to give her a ride.

  “Sorry about the company vehicle,” he explained. “But it runs just fine.”

  As they walked around the back of the vehicle toward the passenger’s side, Larissa noticed that the sliding door along the side was partly open.

  That’s odd, she thought.

  She was about to ask why it was open when she felt a powerful, vise-like hand on her shoulder.

  Larissa Billham knew right then and there that she was in terrible danger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Eyes closed, Riley leaned her head against the passenger’s window of their borrowed car. She wasn’t paying any attention to where they were going. She just assumed that Crivaro was driving them back to Dalhart, where she would fetch her belongings in the motel, make her way to the airport, and catch the first flight back to DC.

  And it’s a good thing, too.

  She remembered what she’d told him at the crime scene.

  “I’ll never be any good as an agent. I just can’t do it. It’s time for me to go home.”

  Crivaro hadn’t said a word in disagreement. In fact, he hadn’t said a word at all. It seemed pretty obvious that he agreed with her.

  And how can I blame him?

  She didn’t think that he held her responsible for Sister Sandra’s death. After all, he had rejected Riley’s argument that the nun had been abducted.

  Riley and Crivaro had both failed Sister Sandra.

  But she was sure that Crivaro wasn’t ignoring one painfully obvious fact. Riley simply didn’t have the psychological resilience for this job. She’d been a wreck ever since she’d killed Heidi Wright.

  She wondered—would she have fared better if she’d followed everybody’s advice and talked to a therapist before coming back to work? She doubted it.

  Riley felt as though something inside
her had snapped for good. All the therapy in the world wasn’t likely to help.

  I’m through.

  She might as well go back to Quantico and turn in her badge and her gun.

  Anyway, she wondered if maybe there was an upside. Her job had been driving a wedge between her and Ryan. Maybe now they could patch things up once and for all.

  But she felt a deep disappointment even so. Was she going to spend the rest of her life being Ryan’s idea of a good wife? It didn’t seem like much to look forward to.

  Riley’s eyes snapped open as the car slowed and rattled across a train track.

  She was surprised to recognize some of the modest buildings that lined the streets.

  “We’re in Boneau,” she said.

  “Yep,” Crivaro said.

  “I thought we were heading back to Dalhart.”

  “Not yet,” Crivaro grunted. “We’ve got some business to take care of here first.”

  “But where are we going?” Riley asked.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Crivaro said.

  He turned off the main street onto a side street.

  Then he pulled the car to a stop and said, “Aha. That’s just the kind of place I’m looking for.”

  Riley’s eyes widened with confusion. Crivaro was parking in front of a run-down-looking bar called Bobby’s Bait House. It was housed in what almost looked like a condemned building. But the place was open, all right. A neon beer sign was flickering in the window.

  “Come on, let’s go inside,” Crivaro said.

  “But why?” Riley asked.

  “Why not?” Crivaro said.

  They got out of the car and walked on into the dank, dimly lit bar, where the jukebox was playing a scratchy record of a song from a couple of decades back. It was the kind of dive that could be anywhere. The only reminder that they were near the banks of a majestic river was a stained and faded image of a paddlewheel riverboat on the wall.

  Riley followed Crivaro straight to the bar, where he ordered bourbon with ice for both of them.

  As the bartender poured their drinks, Riley said, “Aren’t we on duty?”

  Crivaro chuckled gruffly and said, “Not at the moment, we’re not.”

  They picked up their drinks, and Riley followed Crivaro over to a booth with tattered, black vinyl upholstery.

  They sat down, and Crivaro looked all around with a satisfied expression.

  He said, “This place pretty well suits our mood, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t understand,” Riley said.

  Crivaro shook his head and said, “Riley, when you’ve been doing this job for as long as I have, you learn something about your own goddamn limits. It can be like hitting a brick wall. You learn to respect those limits, not try to push past them. And sometimes that means letting yourself fall the hell to pieces once in a while.”

  Crivaro leaned across the table toward her.

  He said almost in whisper, “I know you’ve hit that wall. What you might not know is—I’ve hit it too.”

  Riley’s mouth fell open. She didn’t know what to say.

  Crivaro added, “First of all, I’ve got to tell you—you’re not going back to Quantico. Not now. Not until we finish this case. Because …”

  Crivaro’s voice faded for a moment.

  “I’m burnt out, Riley,” he said. “I’ve got nothing. That nun’s dead because I didn’t trust your instincts. And I damn well should have trusted your instincts, because my own are shot to hell. I think we both need to talk.”

  Crivaro stared at the tabletop for a moment.

  Then he raised his glass and said, “Here’s to the brick wall we’ve just smashed into. And maybe to chasing away a few inner demons.”

  Riley obediently clicked her glass against his.

  They took small sips from their drinks and sat in silence for a moment.

  Then Crivaro said, “When you and I were flying out here, I told you about the Magrette bank robbery, and how it led to my first gunfight. And the lesson of my story was—well, that it didn’t have much of a lesson, at least not for you. I didn’t feel a thing when I killed the leader of that bank robbery gang. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d shot him, because I’d been shooting blindly every which way. I didn’t know I’d hit anybody until I saw him lying dead on the ground. And it sure didn’t haunt me over the years.”

  Crivaro crinkled his brow in thought.

  Then he said, “But one particular moment of that day still sticks in my memory. I can remember the very first bullet that whizzed by my head when the gunfight was just getting underway. I remember it like it was yesterday—or even just a few minutes ago.”

  Riley felt an unexpected jolt of agitation.

  Suddenly she remembered the whistling buzz of a bullet whipping right past her head—the first shot that anyone had ever fired deliberately at her.

  “I had that happen too,” Riley said.

  Crivaro asked, “Has it been nagging at you? Have you been flashing back to it?”

  Riley squinted with thought.

  “No,” she said. “I’d forgotten all about it. Until just now.”

  Crivaro shook his head and said, “Riley, I doubt that very much. It’s been just below the surface of your thoughts this whole time. You’ve been repressing it. And it’s been bothering you a lot more than you realize.”

  Riley stared at the tabletop for a moment, feeling terrified and yet strangely relieved to let that terrible moment come back to her.

  Then she said, “I was just two or three inches away from death.”

  Crivaro nodded and said, “And now how do you feel about it?”

  The memory of that whizzing bullet was echoing through Riley’s consciousness.

  Riley said, “I feel like… this moment, us talking together right now… it’s not real. It’s not happening. What’s real is that bullet.”

  Then with a slight gasp, she added, “My death is what seems real.”

  “And your life doesn’t,” Crivaro said.

  “It doesn’t, no,” Riley said. “It feels like my life is some sort of…”

  She paused, looking for the right word.

  “Mistake?” Crivaro said.

  Riley felt an eerie calmness starting to settle over her.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Riley said. “Like I’m not supposed to be here.”

  Crivaro looked at her sympathetically.

  He said, “Riley, if you survive in this job, if you keep beating the odds and don’t get hit by one of those bullets or get killed in any one of a million possible ways, you’ll get this same weird feeling over and over again. And with that feeling can come…”

  He paused, letting Riley search for the right word.

  It came to her right away.

  “Guilt,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Crivaro said. “We both know you’ve been feeling guilty about Heidi Wright. But maybe you haven’t come to grips with the starkness of it, the either/or nature of what happened.”

  Riley nodded slowly.

  “One of us had to die,” she said. “Heidi or me. I thought I was feeling guilty for killing Heidi. But really, I’m feeling guilty for…”

  She gasped slightly.

  “For being alive,” she said.

  “Yeah. And believe me, you’re going to feel that way again and again,” Crivaro said. “But you can’t repress it. You’ve got to come to terms with it, even when you’re in the midst of it. You’ve got to keep telling yourself, being alive is nothing to feel guilty about.”

  Riley felt as though a weight was starting to lift from her mind.

  But it wasn’t gone yet.

  Something else was troubling her, and she knew she had to bring it out into the open.

  Now she found herself remembering again Heidi’s eerily contented smile as she’d aimed her gun at Riley.

  And then…

  It came back to her all too clearly.

  She said to Crivaro, “When I sho
t Heidi, I never decided to do it. I remember feeling somehow outside of myself. It was like I watched myself raise my weapon, or rather watched somebody else raise my weapon, then felt somebody else pull the trigger. It was like someone else did it, not me.”

  Crivaro smiled knowingly.

  “That ‘someone else’ is real, Riley,” he said. “And you’d better be grateful for it. It’s the part of you that wants to stay alive, even when the rest of you feels ready to give up. It’s the part of you that’s trained to stay alive. And like I just said…”

  Riley finished his thought, “Being alive is nothing to feel guilty about.”

  Riley felt as though everything was changing, becoming clearer—as if even this dimly lit bar was becoming brighter.

  But this clarity seemed to be stirring up as many questions as answers.

  Just as one of those questions was stirring to the surface, Crivaro’s phone rang. Seeing that the call was from Sheriff Quayle, Crivaro put the call on speakerphone.

  Quayle asked, “Are you two still in Boneau?”

  Riley and Crivaro exchanged amused glances.

  “Yes,” Crivaro said, not offering to tell the sheriff exactly where they were at the moment.

  “Good,” Quayle said. “I’m almost back to Dalhart, but I just got a call from the county sheriff over there. He says we’ve got another missing persons report from right there in Boneau. The sheriff’s out at the medical examiner’s office. You guys are probably the closest to the caller.”

  Riley felt a tingle of alarm.

  Crivaro told Quayle, “Sure, we can check it out.”

  Quayle continued, “I’m not sure if it’s anything real yet. This seems like too soon for our killer to be making another abduction.”

  Crivaro replied, “He could be changing his MO. Anyhow, we’ve been moving way too slowly on these tips.”

  “This one came from the Colville & Bean law office,” Quayle said. He gave them an address on Main Street, which sounded to Riley like it must be just a couple of blocks away from the bar.

  “We’ll be right there,” Crivaro said, then ended the call.

  As she and Crivaro were getting up from the table to leave, Riley noticed the drinks still on the table. She was pretty sure she’d only taken a sip or two, and that Crivaro had done the same.

  “Hey, leave those drinks alone,” Crivaro laughed as he was putting on his jacket. “We’re on duty, remember?”