Monahan 01 Options (40 page)

“
Get in,” he repeated.

“I don’t think so, Philip,” I told him. “If you needed a ride, you should have asked the office manager for petty cash to take a cab.”

When he slammed his hand on the roof of the car, I knew he had no sense of humour.

“Get in the damn car, Kathleen,” he growled.

“Fuck you,” I replied, backing further away. There were two exits out of the garage and I knew that both would be useless to me if Philip meant to keep me here.

“I just want to talk to you,” he said.

“So talk.”

“Not here.”

“Then leave me a voice message or send me an e-mail. I have no intention of getting in the car with you Philip,” I said as I swallowed my fear.

Philip walked to the back of the car but stayed on the other side. He held up his hands to show me they were empty and said, “Please. I just want to talk.”

“No. You’re scaring me. Now get away from my car.” Sweat was forming on my shoulder blades and my lips were dry. My feet were rooted to the asphalt and I wondered to myself if I had it in me to scream when the time came. It was then that I saw the look in his eyes change and my bowels turned to liquid. I recognized those eyes and knew that he was the one who’d attacked me.

I turned to run but of course, he was much faster than I was. His hand grabbed the collar of my blouse from behind and the force pulled me back against him. I swung around and landed my closed fist on his cheekbone with as much force as I could muster. I remembered to keep my elbow tucked and my feet firmly placed on the ground, just the way my dad used to coach us.

The punch had little or no effect because Philip quickly locked his arm around my neck and dragged me back to the car. I tried kicking him but he was nimble and avoided me.

He led me around to the passenger side and shoved me in the open front door. I looked helplessly around for someone, anyone, but the parking garage was empty of people. Philip hurried around to the driver’s side and tried to fit his large frame in the seat. He grabbed at me again as I opened the door but this time he hurt me when his fingers dug into my neck.

The pain was almost paralyzing and I whimpered, “Please, you’re hurting me.” I tried to push his hand away but it was firmly locked on the nerve in my neck. He finally found the mechanism under the seat with his other hand and he pushed the seat back enough to get his feet inside the car. He slammed his door shut first and reached around me to pull the other door closed.

He put his face very close to mine and said, “Promise to sit still and I’ll let go.” I nodded and when he released my neck I rubbed it with my hand.

I stared at him and said, “You told me the other night to stay out of it and I am. What do you want?”

“It’s too late now,” he said.

“Too late for what?”

“Give me the keys,” he said and held out his hand.

“They’re in my purse in the back seat.” Without taking his eyes off me his hand snaked down between the seats and he found my purse on the back floor. He pulled it through the opening between the seats and started going through it.

“Here,” I said as I tried to grab it from him but he brought his elbow up to stop me. When he finally found the keys he flung my purse at me and jammed the key in the ignition. I hugged my purse to my chest and prayed. And thought about my escape route.

The engine coughed a couple of times but Philip finally had success on the third try. I couldn’t even rely on this piece of shit when it counted the most, I thought.

“I thought you wanted to talk. Where are we going?”

He put the car in reverse and didn’t answer me. He drove the car carefully up the circular ramp to the exit and I thought about jumping out of the car at the booth where I knew he had to stop to put my card in the machine to get out of the garage.

“Where’s your pass?” he demanded.

“What makes you think a lowly little person like me has a parking pass?” I said snidely.

“Because as Chief Operating Officer, I’ve been going over everything. I agree. A lowly little
secretary
shouldn’t have a parking pass. But your name was on the list. Now where is it?” he growled at me.

Personally, I preferred lowly little person to lowly little secretary, but I let the comment pass.

“On the sun visor,” I pointed. There was one car ahead of us and Philip slowed down as we approached the booth. He put his hand inside his suit jacket and withdrew a small, ivory handled pistol. Or gun. Whatever. He held the gun in the palm of his hand where I could see it.

“Any thoughts you might have had about getting out of the car, have just passed, am I right Kathleen?” he said.

“Fuck you,
Robert
.” The gate ahead of us went up and the other car passed through. “Go ahead and shoot me,” I declared bravely. “Because you can’t think for a minute you’ll get away with this. Whatever it is you plan on doing to me. Let me out of the car and we’ll forget this happened,” I lied.

I watched him take the parking pass off the sun visor and fit it in the slot of the machine. I leaned down and tried to get the parking lot attendant’s attention through the window on the driver’s side but his back was to us. I grabbed the handle of the door and yanked on it. Gun or no gun, I decided stupidly, I was getting out of here. Philip had different ideas though, I realized too late. His hand came up and the handle of the pistol hit me on the side of the head just above my ear. I saw stars again but this time there was blackness immediately afterwards.

The world felt like it was spinning and the dizziness was reminiscent of the one time I’d had too much to drink. The side of my head was throbbing and the spinning sensation was making me nauseous. My eyes opened slowly for a brief moment before I lost consciousness again.

The next time I came to I heard insistent voices, far away. My head was still throbbing but the spinning sensation was gone and I realized that was probably because I was lying on my back. Without opening my eyes, my hands touched the surface on either side of me and I felt a soft blanket beneath me. The sound of a door opening made my hands stop moving and I kept my eyes tightly shut.

I heard Philip say in a whisper, “She’ll be fine, mother. Look, she’s breathing and has colour in her face.” The door shut quietly behind them and when I heard their voices in the hall again, I struggled to sit up.

“But she’s bad, mother,” Philip was saying. “Very bad. We can’t let her leave just yet.” Footsteps in the hall told me they were leaving.

The room I was in was dark but a little light showed under the doorframe. My eyes took a few moments to adjust to the darkness but it took my brain a few moments longer to get back in working order. Philip had said “Mother”, so it was safe to assume that I was at Sadie Weinstein’s house. A very stupid move on Philip’s part, I thought. I stood up gingerly to make sure I wasn’t going to fall over and when I felt steady enough on my feet I searched the room. Not surprisingly, the door was locked from the outside but the window I finally found behind the heavy drapes wasn’t.

The room that was holding me prisoner was on the second floor of Sadie’s decrepit house. Without thinking about the consequences, I hurriedly opened the window and was thankful to see that the porch roof was only about three feet below the windowsill. The drop from the roof below me to the front yard though, was quite a bit further, and I tried not to think about it as I eased my way quietly out the window. Panicked at the thought of Philip coming back, I quickly pulled the window shut behind me. My pumps felt slippery on the rough shingles of the slanted porch roof and I took them off and tossed each one like a grenade into a bush I spied at the side of the yard. I turned around and crawled backwards, crab-like, to the side edge of the roof, scraping the palms of my hands and knees.

When my feet went over the edge of the porch roof I laid down on my stomach and pushed myself over the edge. I had no idea what was below me but a drop of ten or twelve feet couldn’t be as bad as being shot, I thought, as I let go. My feet hit the ground and I bent my knees to absorb the shock and fell backwards on my ass. The pain that shot up my tailbone made me forget the throbbing in my head. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I gasped, trying to catch my breath. In spite of the pain though, adrenaline made me scramble right back up. I grabbed my shoes from the bush where I’d lobbed them.

Silence surrounded me and I listened for sounds from the house hoping that they hadn’t discovered my escape. I could see my car parked on the street but without my keys, it was useless to me, so I straddled the fence between Sadie’s house and her neighbour’s, and took off running.

chapter fifty-four

Vanessa was peeking out the front window of her house when the cab arrived and she hurried outside to pay the driver. I’d never been so glad to see a friendly face and I felt like sobbing.

The woman behind the bullet-proof partition at the self-service gas station had been understanding. She couldn’t pass the phone through the small opening but she handed me the receiver and her tinny voice through the speaker offered to dial the number for me. There was no answer at my place or Jay’s and this time I didn’t hesitate to call Vanessa.

When Vanessa followed me through the front door, I told her I needed her car, her cell phone and some cash. She looked at my bloody knees and said, “Not so fast. How about a clean pair of pantyhose too?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you can have whatever you need. Come on in and I’ll make you some coffee.”

I followed her into the kitchen which was off the hallway at the front of the house and sat on a bar stool at the counter. She talked and moved about the kitchen efficiently making coffee and getting cups, and cream and sugar from the cupboards. I lit one of her cigarettes and put my elbows on the counter.

“What happened?” she asked me.

“I got mugged,” I lied easily. “They stole my car and my purse.”

“Did you call the police?” she asked calmly and I knew she didn’t believe me.

“No. I called you.”

“Where’s Jay?”

“Don’t know. What time is it anyway?”

“Quarter to ten,” she replied as she dropped a full coffee cup in front of me. About a third of it slopped over the edge. “You’re bullshitting me, Kate.”

I tried changing the subject. “How’s Ashley?”

“Fine. Asleep in bed. Every time she spends the weekend with her father she comes home exhausted. And don’t change the subject.”

I felt guilty but wanted to protect her. We’d been friends forever it seemed. The fewer people I cared about that I dragged into this mess, the better.

“Okay, I won’t change the subject. Where’s Chris?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m not his keeper.”

“Yeah, right Vee. Is he in town or out?”

“In,” she replied tersely. “Has this got something to do with where we work?”

“Correction. Where
you
work. I’m quitting tomorrow,” I told her.

“Oh, now I get it. Harold gave you shit for coming in late again and you got down on your knees to beg for forgiveness. That would explain the blood on your knees.”

“Save the sarcasm, Vee. This is serious but I’m not getting you involved. Now, are you going to give me your car and phone?”

Her car keys and cell phone were on the counter near the wall and she cupped both of them in her hand and slid them angrily across the counter at me. I caught them before they ended up on the floor. A couple of twenty dollar bills hit me lightly in the face and she said, “Don’t forget the cash.”

“Friends?” I asked her sheepishly.

“Always. But let me help you Kate,” she pleaded. “This is too scary. First Ev and then Rick. And now you, showing up at my door with blood on your hands and knees. You’re a mess. And that black eye has something to do with this. I know it. You didn’t fall down any stairs, did you?”

I ignored her reference to my shiner. “You are helping me Vee. And seriously, I can’t get you involved.” I held up my scraped hands and said, “I ended up like this tonight because I was stupid enough to get involved.” I casually felt the lump on the side of my head left there compliments of the butt of Philip’s gun, but didn’t tell her about it.

“Somebody hurt you,” she said, sure that the cuts and scrapes had been caused by someone else. “At least call the police.”

I slid off the barstool and gathered up the keys and cell phone in one hand, and the cash in the other.

“I plan on calling the police,” I told her. “But in the meantime,
please
don’t tell anyone I was here.”

Alfredo placed the Diet Coke in front of me and I drank thirstily. I smiled up at his friendly face, glad for the presence of a friend.

“Hungry?”

“Not really. I just needed a place to hang out for a while. Lost my keys,” I told him.

“Your friend was here looking for you, earlier.”

“Which friend?”

“Your boyfriend. Mr. Jay Harmon,” he winked.

“What time?” I had been trying to reach Jay because he had a set of keys to my apartment. I got furious again thinking about the possibility of losing my purse with all my treasures in it, including my original Frank Mahovlich hockey card which I kept hidden in a secret compartment of my wallet.