Wired (2 page)

I made a point of walking in the middle of the street, but it wasn't like I was loitering; all I wanted was to get to my destination, get my stuff, and get home. My head down, I jammed my hands deeper
into my hoodie pockets and powered through the crisp air, moving from dark to light and back again as I passed beneath illumination from the occasional street lamp.

At the halfway point between my house and the convenience store, the panic I was trying so hard to keep at bay started to win. Once more I stopped in the middle of the street and tried to work it out in that same logical, rational manner.

What are you doing, Roxanne?

I'm going to the 7-Eleven. People go to the 7-Eleven all the time and absolutely nothing happens to them. Chances are that absolutely nothing is going to happen to me, which means there is absolutely no point in panicking. Keep walking
.

The first step was always the hardest, for I'd discovered that once you got going, it was all a lot easier—in a relative sense, anyway. So I forced myself to move forward, trying hard to believe everything I was telling myself, because if I let myself panic, everything I feared would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I made it another half a block, then slowed to a halt and turned to look behind me toward home. A discarded
S.F. Chronicle
fluttered and slid across a shard of light striking the pavement. I turned toward my destination. The pale glow of the 7-Eleven was only a block away, a gas station beyond. It was so close. But so was home.

And as I stood there, staring at the glow, a figure emerged from the shadows and stepped into the street.

Give me a break
. This would certainly have been
the moment to laugh if one was in the mood to do so, and I could feel my body begin to react—in a bad way, with all the symptoms of fear, coming together one by one. I shouldn't have thought about self-fulfilling prophecies.

I didn't make any sudden moves; I simply raised my foot to take a step, landed with the swivel of an about-face, and started walking home at exactly the same pace.

But suddenly, some distance in front of me, there was the figure of a second man, rising up from a crouch in the middle of the street, as if he'd been waiting for some time.

“She's mine, Leo!”

I whipped around and looked behind me at the guy who'd shouted.

“I think not, Mason,” a British accent shouted back. “She's mine.”

I whipped around to look at the guy who'd answered, and a funny little wheezing sound started coming out of my mouth.
I'm going to die
.

I pulled at the messenger bag strapped across my chest and started scrabbling for my phone, which was, as always in times of dire need, somewhere very far and very deep inside. While I was wheezing and frantically feeling out the corners of the bag, the two men started moving in on me, not more than a block away each, and hunched over a bit as if they were stalking me.

In my mind I screamed at the top of my lungs; in reality I suspect the noise was nothing more than a futile squeak. Arms out, taking tentative, sideways steps as they moved in on me, the men had gone
completely silent with a kind of predatory focus that chilled me to the bone.

I dropped to my knees on the street, upending my bag. The contents spilled everywhere: tissues, Band-Aids, sunglasses, money, keys, an expired driver's license, and a few other bits of general crap that had no real purpose but to make me feel more normal. Last was my cell phone, which reacted to my sudden lack of motor control by flying out of my grasp and rattling off across the pavement.

I looked wildly from one end of the street to the other, at the men. They looked the way animals look in that split second before attacking. Sure enough, the men left their marks, sprinting full-bore toward me.

The pavement vibrated from the pounding of their feet. Terror clutched at my throat. I couldn't get air into my lungs. The curb seemed to spin around me as if it had been built in a circle. Dizzy and gasping, I focused on my cell phone.

The pavement shook harder, and I cringed downward, anticipating a fist or a boot in my face at any moment. I still couldn't breathe, and I could barely move. All I could do to prevent a complete surrender was stay focused on the phone. I inched toward it on my hands and knees, leaving a trail of personal belongings in my wake.

If nothing else, go down fighting
. But I knew those old words and that belief were as hollow as the mantras I'd repeated over and over and over on the way here, and I gave in. Curling my head down into my knees, I rolled onto my side in the street. Even to save myself, I couldn't work past my panic and the fear. I felt so weak. So, so weak. I hated that feeling
more than anything in the world. But I couldn't do anything about it.

The endgame came in a flurry of fisticuffs, arms and bodies and men shouting and muscle against muscle. I cringed again, waiting for pain. Silver streaked through the air, and out of the corner of my eye I watched a gun flip end over end until it smashed down hard on the pavement some distance away.

I sensed the presence above me before he even opened his mouth. The British-accented voice yelled, “I've got her!” Then two arms slid under my armpits, and I was wrenched up from the street. “I've got her,” was repeated, the voice growling and angry.

How strange
. The emphasis was all funny. The emphasis was on the
I've
, though I had no idea why in a moment of such terror I would even notice.

I waited for the end, but my captor merely crushed me against his suit, my face pressed into his chest. “Sorry, Mason,” he said. “You lose. A bit out of shape, aren't you?”

“I tripped on a goddamn Big Gulp cup,” the second man said sullenly.

My captor started backing away, and I was dragged along like a rag doll. The toes of my sneakers scraped across the pavement as I hung limply in his hold, my eyes squeezed shut. “This is where it ends,” he said.

I didn't know how a person might prepare herself to die, and when a gunshot rang out in the next second, I thought I might never have time to figure it out. I fell away from the man holding me, landing hard on the pavement. But I wasn't the one who'd been hit. The most polite curse I'd ever heard flew from the lips of my English captor, who gripped the
top of his arm with the opposite hand. I watched in a kind of trance as razor-sharp lines of red appeared between his fingers.

“This is where it begins,” the American voice said, distinctly triumphant.

The two men looked at each other. A beat of silence passed between them. Then, with matching battle cries, the two charged each other again like horseless knights in some kind of 7-Eleven-sponsored urban joust; my former captor, the British guy in the suit, versus the other guy wearing a simple T-shirt and jeans. They were smashing their fists into each other again and grappling like a couple of high school wrestlers all because . . .

Because . . .

Let me get this straight. Are they fighting over who gets to mug me?
There was no time to process that question. Hoping to God I wouldn't get shot, I lifted myself to my knees. Shutting out the sound of the struggle and testosterone-fueled grunting, I continued crawling hand over hand, knee over knee, down the middle of the street toward home, shaking so hard I could barely propel myself forward. It felt like I was moving slower than was even humanly possible. The likelihood of escape—

“L. Roxanne Zaborovsky!”

I stopped crawling. Only my closest friends knew about the L. It wasn't even on my driver's license.

“It's me! Mason Me—” The announcement was lost in a kind of gargle. The speaker had probably just been hit in the face.

Frozen in midcrawl, I finally looked over my shoulder. It all happened really fast from there. The
T-shirted guy was struggling in a choke hold, the suited man behind him. The darkness had leached to a smoky gray, making it easier to see their faces. One I didn't recognize at all. The other man, in the T-shirt and jeans . . . I could hardly believe it. Mason Merrick?

Mason Merrick
.

His eyes met mine, and in the next second he'd made some fancy move and turned the tables. Suddenly it was Mason sitting on his adversary's chest, punching the guy in the face. He actually took a moment to look over at me in the heat of the struggle and yelled, “Get in the car!”

The car?

I'd crawled up next to Mason's car. It seemed long odds on a typical bumper-to-bumper San Francisco curbside, but I'd somehow crawled up next to it. I recognized the Mustang immediately; it was the one he used to wash and wax outside my house ad nauseam.

I reached for the door handle, my fingers trembling so badly I could barely work them, and opened the door. Launching myself inside, I banged my shin hard on the stick shift. I locked the door, pulled my feet up on the seat, wrapped my arms around my knees, and stared down at the keys in the ignition, which were faintly tinkling against one another while I did my best to will myself home to my room. I never should have come out tonight. I knew it. Self-fulfilling prophecies have always been my downfall.

When I looked out the window, Mason was still on top of his adversary but had one arm out searching blindly for the gun. It was just beyond his reach. He
had to sacrifice his hold, but he got what he wanted by arching his back in a desperate grab.

The Brit freed himself, but he didn't get far. Mason swung the weapon around, pointed it onto the Brit's face, and yelled, “Advantage.”

Favoring his bloody arm, the Brit slowly got to his feet. I thought he was going to lunge forward, but the two men both went slack, simultaneously turning away from each other to check . . . their cell phones? They just as quickly and just as calmly put them away again, and picked up the intensity of their conflict as if it had never waned in the first place.

The heat inside the car spiked. I automatically reached out to turn down the temperature, but the car wasn't running and the heating system wasn't on. Outside, the air had thrown off a chill that prickled my skin. Inside the car it was sweltering, hotter than seemed reasonable, logical.

I pressed my body back against the seat, my skin crawling as claustrophobia set in. Sweat slipped down my burning face onto my sweatshirt. I grabbed for the window handle, but the mechanism was stiff and my fingers too damp to get a grip.

Out the window again, I saw Mason was in the other man's face, gesturing in my direction, taunting, flailing his gun around. The other man was in some pain. He finally put his good hand on his hip, swore violently at the ground, and surrendered.

It was almost too easy, I thought, and any relief I might have felt at Mason's victory was tempered by the oddness of the circumstances and my discomfort over Mason having shot the guy, even if it seemed in self-defense. At least I felt like I could now take a
chance on leaving the safety of the car. I was suffocating. I thought I might be sick from it all. My sweaty fingers finally bested the handle and I pushed the door open.

I basically fell out of the car, and for a moment I just lay on my back in the filthy street, staring up at the stars with my arms splayed above my head like a corpse, and breathing in huge gulps of cold air. It seemed to me that the sky should have been light gray by now, but it looked pitch-black again.

“Pack it in, Leo,” I heard Mason say. “No straight line here, buddy. You'll have to go around.”

I turned my head and saw the man called Leo shake his head and walk away. His good hand clasped his bloody arm.

Mason quietly watched him go, then stuffed his gun in the waistband at the back of his jeans and looked at me. I scrambled to my feet, swaying backward against the car as the blood rushed to my head.

“Hey, Rox,” he said. He grabbed my messenger bag and started stuffing my belongings into it.

I was grateful for a few extra moments to compose myself. The last thing I wanted was for Mason Merrick to see me completely fall apart in front of him. By the time he reached my side I was as close to normal as I was going to get. Assuming normal was speechless and gaping.

If you'd asked me back when my first college roommate, Louise, broke up with Mason Merrick whether or not I'd ever see the guy with the two last names again in my lifetime, I'd have said the chance was nil. Then again, the last time I saw him he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and eating my sugar cereal,
and I'd have given even lower odds at the chance of finding myself in a situation with him involving weaponry beyond a cereal spoon. In the span of one short night, both unlikely events had come to pass.

Thing is, I don't believe in coincidences.

Mason handed over my bag and, as if nothing unusual had happened, asked, “You okay?”

I stared at him for a moment, then blurted, “Am I
okay
? No!”

“How do you feel?”

Totally disoriented
. “Not well. If you need something more specific, I'm somewhere between a heart attack and a nervous breakdown.”

“That guy's not going to hurt you again. Not while I'm around.”

I didn't know where to go with that. I was a mess. Actually, I was beyond even the concept of a mess, mentally and physically. I looked down. My palms were scraped up; the knees of my sweats were shredded and absolutely filthy.

Mason looked over his shoulder, turned back, and casually picked up where he'd left off, as if we'd bumped into each other at a party. “It's been a long time, Rox. It's good to see you again,” he said with an odd hitch in his voice.

“Stay away from me.” Clutching my bag against my chest, I turned and started booking it.

“Hey! That's it? I just saved your ass!”

I glanced back at him and picked up my pace.

“Hey!”

I was so getting out of there.

“Roxy, stop!”