Shutting the car door, she looked down. The foot that had the shoe was fine. The bare one was wet and cold on the damp asphalt. For a split second, she wondered if she shouldn’t go out to the street and search for what she’d lost… but then she realized that what she was really missing was courage, not anything from a retail store.
Staring up at the apartment she had run from, she started forward and stumbled on the curb. The walkway to the exposed, common-use stairwell was a short one, and her breath grew tighter as she got closer to the three levels’ worth of doors. She told herself she had a witness with a bad attitude and a loud mouth, and there were people around—
The sound of a dog barking froze her at the base of the concrete-and-steel steps. Glancing up through the slats of the balustrade, she could just see the top jamb of his door. That dog of his weighed a good fifty or sixty pounds. She’d already gotten away from the apartment once tonight. Why was she doing this—
“Because it’s my purse,” she whispered. “It’s mine.”
To give herself time to find a little spine, she focused out the far side of the open breezeway. The light fixtures overhead turned any vista of the four-laner they’d come in on into the same kind of black hole that had waited outside the ER’s entry.
Releasing her hold on the banister, she walked around the base of the stairs. The breezeway led out to a lawn-covered knoll that drifted down to the road, and as she stepped off the concrete, the trees of the public park were a blur in the rain. She had to walk some distance until her eyes could adjust to the dimness, her bare foot registering the springy padding of the cold, wet blades of grass.
There it was. Directly across from her.
Off the shoulder, grille into a tree.
The BMW was where it had been left, and she entertained a thought that she’d just wait right here until the tow truck came—then she’d cop a ride to whatever body shop it was taken to. After that, she’d air-dry and drink bitter coffee and reread the same hunting and fishing magazines until it was fixed.
Finally, after the repairs were done, its owner would come to claim the vehicle, and she would be there to ask him what his name really was—
Anne went to push her sodden hair back and bumped into the pad of surgical gauze again. The shot of pain took her back to the moment when she’d gotten free of the apartment. She’d raced down the stairs, her wild momentum and lack of coordination banging her body between the concrete wall and the balustrade. At the bottom, she’d just blindly bolted.
It could have been into the parking lot. Could have been out to the street.
Could have been to the edge of the world.
She’d never considered knocking on any of his neighbors’ doors for help. She’d just wanted to get away from him… so she’d broken out into a run and ended up right in the road. The squeal of those tires had been like her scream. At least she assumed she’d screamed.
When you were hit with a car, didn’t you scream?
Turning back to the breezeway, she locked her eyes on the underbelly of the stairs and knew it was time she faced—
Something off to the side on the lawn caught her attention. It was a scatter of debris… little objects that glowed in all of their wrong-placedness.
“Are those my sunglasses?” She glanced around. But like there was anybody standing beside her who could answer that?
Going over, she knelt down with a grimace. Her knockoff Ray-Bans had been mangled, the cheap drugstore earpieces bent out of place, one of the tinted insets falling free of its fake gold frame as she picked the aviators up.
Anne rubbed her thumb over the scratched lens that remained. Then she stretched her good arm out and picked up the next thing of hers—her little makeup bag. The scent of flowers rose up as she opened what had been zipped tight. Her cheap lipstick had been ground all over the inside, and she jerked her finger out as the shattered glass of her blusher’s compact mirror nipped her.
Her purse was three feet farther over, and she picked it up by one of its handles. The thing was in tatters, so ripped apart that she could see through it in places. Something had been used to destroy the fake leather—a knife… maybe a pair of utility scissors?—and a piercing sensation went through her chest. Sure, the bag had been cheap to begin with, another knockoff that was pleather rather than anything remotely cowhide. But it had been hers, and she’d bought it only a month ago in JCPenney—
Anne grimaced. What was that smell?
The whiff of urine made her jerk the thing away—and that was when she saw her wallet over by the bushes. Like the purse, it had been torn apart, the cash taken, the change purse emptied. She handled it with her thumb and forefinger and got a nose-full of the same stink that was on her purse.
Her credit card and her ID were out of their slots.
Making a sweep of the area, she collected what else had been hers: the soft container of Kleenex that was damp, her mini-hairbrush… a couple of receipts that were soaked, fortunately just by the dew on the grass.
The muffled sound of his dog barking again jerked her head up.
She’d never gotten along with that animal. It hadn’t liked her from the get-go and clearly that was among the first warning signs for the whole relationship. She should have followed her instincts instead of wasting eight months of her life to confirm what she’d guessed pretty much on their second date—
“I got this grocery bag here.”
She wheeled around. The stubby, cranky, tufty car driver was standing in the breezeway, holding out a paper bag with the Grand Union logo on it. In the harsh lighting, he looked like a J. R. R. Tolkien troll who’d turned into an unexpected protagonist.
“Put your stuff in here,” he said as he stepped onto the lawn. “And then let’s get you to a dry place. You look a mess.”
“Thank you.”
Meeting him halfway, she disappeared her purse and her wallet into the folds of the bag, and then flinched as the driver laid his hand on her good shoulder.
“I’ll take ya home. Unless you wanna talk to him?”
“How do you know it’s a man,” she mumbled.
“You sayin’ it ain’t?”
Looking at the stairs, she shook her head. “The talking part didn’t go well the first time tonight. I don’t think a second try will improve things.”
“Come on then.”
Memories of the argument eclipsed the world around her, and the next thing she knew, she was back in the maroon sedan and giving directions to her house. She was impressed she knew the way. She felt as though her mind were misfiring, an old jalopy that needed not just a tune-up, but a replacement engine.
She’d never felt so alone.
But better than in bad company.
* * *
Darius followed the maroon car all the way to Anne’s house.
He kept up with its progression in distances of a quarter mile, dematerializing and re-forming on the roofs of mini-malls and stores—even a box van parked in a metered spot. In all instances, he stayed out of the way of headlights, streetlamps, and any kind of security lights. He was of the night, traveling through the damp May air, a ghost who lived and breathed.
When the car finally stopped in front of a little house on a street of little houses, he perched behind the chimney of the Cape Cod across the street, his breathing even and slow, but his body tense.