Jennifer was passed out and snoring by nine o’clock. The woman was a producer, for God’s sake. She was going strong from sunup to sundown, usually. The fact that she thought she could sit with me while I knitted and not pass out from sheer boredom was amazing. She’d insisted on sleeping on the couch, to be sure she could get to me in time if anything happened.
I didn’t know what she thought was going to happen, but it was clear that my nearly being run over had rattled her, way more than even I was rattled. I’d been freaked out in the moment, but I bounced back from things quickly. I knew it wasn’t some kind of hit on me and there was no reason to freak out. I just wanted to get on with my job. Both of them.
Which would explain why I was dressed in all black at eleven at night, sneaking out of my own bedroom window. I’d never even done that when I was a teenager. I’d been too terrified of my brothers finding me. They were more intense than any little punk sending nasty messages to the studio. They wouldn’t hesitate to throw me to my father and demand I be punished for attempting even a margin of the shit they pulled.
I couldn’t drive my car to the meeting because I couldn’t chance the loud sounds my car made waking up Jennifer. Instead, I hiked down to the closest street corner and got an Uber to take me.
My driver pulled up within a few minutes and gave me a big frown. “Lady, you sure you know where you’re asking me to take you?”
I nodded. “I do.”
He shook his head. “Even the normal ones these days have their fingers in some dirty pies.”
I didn’t reply and he got the point. He drove me in silence the rest of the way, letting me gather my thoughts. I needed it. I was still confused about how Ricky had found out about Pamela wanting to talk to me. I hadn’t had a free moment from Jennifer to call Tabatha back, so I was in the dark. I knew it was risky, meeting Pamela in the dark, in a bad part of town, but I had to know what she wanted to tell me. My gut wasn’t doing any fluttering, the way it did when I was on the right track, but she could still get me where I needed to be.
When the driver pulled up to the entrance of the park, he looked back at me. “You sure you want to be doing this, lady? I can promise you it ain’t safe in there.”
I opened the door and nodded. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride.”
I shut the door silently and flipped up my hood, covering my blonde hair. I slipped into the park and walked along the edge, trying to spot Pamela. The woman stood out, so I thought it would’ve been easier to spot her. Especially after I’d circled the perimeter of the park twice. My stomach turned, not in the good way, and I felt a chill go up my back.
I put myself in sticky situations all the time. It was part of the job. I wanted to uncover criminals. That meant I had to go where criminals went. In all the time I’d been working since my first case, the Gadberry case, I’d never felt quite the same amount of warning flood my veins as I did in that moment.
Taking note of the feeling, I pressed my back against the fence that circled the park and squatted down. I didn’t see anything, though. There was no lurking man headed my way or boogeyman waiting to pop out. I was alone. Completely alone, it seemed.
My heart thumped when I realized what my body was trying to tell me. It was too quiet. At midnight, the park should’ve still had several miscreants bumbling around. We weren’t in the middle of nowhere, it was the middle of a city; yet it was as silent as my parents’ property in the country. Something wasn’t right.
With my body pressed against the fence, I swallowed and tried to calm down. It didn’t have to mean that Ricky was planning on grabbing me. It could’ve just been a weird coincidence. I knew better, though. Coincidences were cute things for romantic comedies.
Right on cue, I heard the high-pitched squeal of metal on metal as the gate at the front of the park rumbled shut. From my vantage point, I could see Ricky and three other huge men walk in just before the gate closed all the way.
Ricky wasn’t as big as the rest, which was probably why he had such an anger problem. He had the mentality of a Chihuahua, biting and snapping at everything to prove he wasn’t weak. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit and held a large chain in his hand. Instead of using it to lock the gate, he wrapped it around his hand once and grinned down at it. I knew the move. Not from experience, but from hearing it from scared women who’d seen it.
One of the other men stood guard at the gate and Ricky gestured towards the other two to fan out while he headed towards the center of the park. My heart raced painfully in my chest while my brain went over what I needed to do to escape alive. I wasn’t prepared to die. I didn’t want to have the bones in my face crushed, either, so I thought quickly of what I should do.
I was getting ready to stand up when I heard the soft exhale of breath coming from directly behind me. I spun around on a shriek and froze as I met the dark eyes of a man standing behind me, on the other side of the fence. He wore a simple white mask to hide his face, but the eyes were alarmingly clear. Black and trained on me with an intensity I’d never felt before, they didn’t blink.
“Better run, little rabbit.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I sprinted away from the masked man, knowing my scream had alerted Ricky and his men to where I was. I headed for the far corner of the park, as far away from them as I could get.
“Come on out, Darby Connors. I just want to talk to you,” Ricky called out. “Isn’t that what you want? To talk to me? Oh, no, wait. You just want to talk about me.”
His voice was menacing and there was no way in hell that I was coming out to face him. I made quick work of getting around a fallen log and then looked back at it. If I could push it closer to the fence, I could climb on it to try to get over the fence.
“You want to know what I do to bitches like you, Darby?”
I ignored him and forced the log to move with all my might. My already skinned hands throbbed against the rough bark, but I didn’t let it slow me down. I had the log moved in seconds, my adrenaline giving me strength I didn’t know I had.
“I gut them. You want to be gutted, bitch? Apparently, you do. What’s wrong? Your life in the suburbs not as exciting as you’d like? Your husband got a small dick or something? Why can’t you just keep your fucking nose in your own business?”
I climbed on top of the log and braced myself for what was surely about to be very painful. The top of the fence had dull metal points and I knew I wasn’t getting over it without a battle wound. I held onto the top with my hands and brought my leg up to the side. My shoe caught on the point and I arched my body until I could get my other leg up, too. Hanging backwards from the fence, I prayed to God that Ricky’s men didn’t find me like that. Just a sitting duck, ready for the picking.
“It was stupid of you to trust a slut like Pamela. She knows where her meals come from. She’s a good bitch. She came right to me and told me about this meeting.”
Fucking Pamela. I used all my might to slowly move my legs to the other side of the fence, effectively forcing my mid-section to be slayed across the dull spikes. My back clenched from the pain and I just barely managed to switch my grip in time to keep from falling back into the park. With a cry, I pushed off and threw myself to the ground outside of the fence. The spikes felt like they impaled my back on the way, but I’d check later.
I looked back at the fence and panted. I had no clue how I’d managed to contort my body over the top, but I’d done it. I was still aware of the man who’d been outside of the fence, though. It seemed weird for Ricky to have his man dressed up, but I didn’t want to ask questions.
I pulled myself to my feet using the fence and then let out a throat ripping scream as Ricky himself grabbed my arm and yanked me into the metal bars so hard my forehead bounced off them. Stars lined my vision for a second, but I fought against his grip like a cat in water. I wasn’t going out like that, not after what I’d done to climb over the fence.
“Stop fighting, you stupid whore!” Ricky tried to get a better grip on me, but I managed to slip free.
I flipped him off and forced my body to move, away from the park, away from whatever else was waiting for me there. I stayed in the shadows, despite worrying about what else was hiding in them, and walked several blocks before squatting down behind a dumpster to catch my breath.
My ribs hurt, my back screamed out in pain with every step, and my head throbbed painfully. Everything hurt. I had no clue how I was going to explain what’d happened to Jennifer, who thought I was asleep in my bed. I could already feel a lump forming on my forehead. There was no way she wouldn’t see it.
I was just thankful that in the part of town I was in, the noise was back again. It didn’t feel like Ricky was going to appear out of thin air and kill me.
I grabbed for my phone to get an Uber and realized that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. With panic building in my chest, I grabbed at my pockets and found no phone. I looked back in the direction I’d come from and let my head fall back into the brick wall behind me.
It must’ve fallen out by the fence. No part of me wanted to go back for it, but I had notes in it on the story I was working on. I couldn’t leave it.
Standing up was more miserable than ever and every part of my body protested. I fought through the pain, though, and went back for my phone. Luckily, Ricky was gone. I stayed hidden and watched the fence for a long time before braving the open to search for it. When my fingers did connect with the hard plastic, I felt like crying. I’d been sure it would be gone.
After that, I hightailed it out of there and caught an Uber back to the bottom of my driveway. It was early in the morning and the sun was starting to rise. I just wanted to crawl into bed and take some time to recover before diving back into my work.
The hill back up to my house was miserable. I started to worry that I was dying halfway up. My body hurt so much that I half convinced myself that I had internal bleeding. I’d spent so much energy on the hill that I couldn’t talk myself into climbing back through my bedroom window. Instead, I tried to open the front door as silently as possible.
Everything was going according to plan until I kicked Jennifer’s overnight bag. I froze, hoping she wouldn’t wake up, but Jennifer had apparently become a ninja at some point in the night.
She flew up from the couch, her stun gun in her hand, and pressed it against my neck before I could even attempt to tell her that it was me. White hot shock coursed through my body and I lost control of my muscles. Everything went slack and I fell to the floor. Pulses coursed through me, causing my body to tense painfully.
“Oh, shit! Darby!”