He was lying face up. A red puddle had formed a halo around his head.
He wasn’t—was he—he wasn’t—was he dead?
As I stood there trying to process what I was seeing, the wind sent a recycling crate skidding across the cracked pavement.
I jumped.
I glanced up the alley, then down. Nothing was there. Nothing but the wind. And a dead man staring up at the cloud-streaked sky.
Behind me, I heard something scrabble across the low, flat roof.
I pivoted and glanced up. Saw a form silhouetted against the sky. Shock gave way to panic as I realized he had a gun in his hand. As I realized that he had also seen me.
I should have lunged toward the door.
But a familiar numbness was spreading over me. The prickle on my scalp, the sudden dryness in my mouth. I was living my nightmares all over again.
As I had done too often in the past, I reverted to form. I froze.
Please. Please. Please.
My thoughts latched onto that one word and refused to let it go.
If I could just punch my code into the keypad, I could slip back inside and pull the door shut behind me.
But I couldn’t do anything at all.
My fingers wouldn’t work.
Please. Please. Please.
I willed them to function, but they had long ago learned that in a dangerous situation, the best thing to do was nothing. Any movement, any action on my part had always made things worse.
And so I just stood there as my thoughts stuttered.
Fragmented.
And then a garbage truck came rumbling around the corner.
Chapter 2
The truck shuddered to a halt. The horn blasted. A head appeared from the window. “Hey! Can you tell that guy to move it?”
I didn’t answer because I was trying to remember the code for the keypad at the door and because the person lying in the alley was dead. His head was leaking a puddle of blood.
I tried to delete the image of the body by closing my eyes.
It didn’t work.
When I opened them, I realized I was kneeling in the alley beside the dead man.
How had I gotten there?
I put a hand to the pavement and pushed myself to standing. Took a tottering step toward the door. The man with the gun might still be up there on the roof. I had to get back inside.
I put a finger to the keypad, but I still couldn’t remember the code.
I can’t remember the code!
I put a trembling hand to my forehead. Closed my eyes. Took a deep breath.
Opened them.
Come on, Whitney!
3357.
Relief collapsed my shoulders and forced the air from my lungs. But it was premature. My fingers still wouldn’t work.
Come on, come on, come on!
One of the garbage collectors had hopped down from the truck and gone up to the victim. “Hey! Hey, man, you can’t just—” He swore. “Miss! Miss? This guy is dead!”
I turned around just in time to see him throw up.
I tried to refocus on the keypad, but my heart was pumping so hard, so fast, that my vision was pulsating. I blinked hard.
“Miss?”
I didn’t want to turn around again because I’d have to look at the body. And I didn’t want to go to the corner and shout for help because what if it gave the shooter a better angle to kill me too? Most of all I didn’t want to just stand there, out in the open, trying to punch in the code.
The garbage collector swore. “This is messed up! I’m calling the cops. Hey, you! Hey! Miss!” I heard him, but I didn’t turn around because I’d finally solved my problem. I was going to walk past the truck to the end of the alley and around to the front of the building to get back inside the shop. That way it wouldn’t matter if my fingers didn’t work.
I don’t remember doing it, but I must have because suddenly I was tugging on the heavy glass door at the front of the shop. The wind pressed against it, trying to stop me, but I battled back. It abruptly gave up, as if in surrender, and I flung the door open, stepping from the tempest into a pool of still, cool air.
“Whit?” Corrine called my name from behind the counter. “What are you doing here? I thought you left.”
“I did. I—”
“You okay?”
A couple of the customers waiting for drinks turned toward me. One of them gasped.
Someone came up behind me and put a hand to my shoulder.
I whirled around, striking the arm away.
“Hey!”
I blinked. Recognized the cowry shell necklace of Ty. “S-s-sorry.”
He put down the wet cloth he was holding. “Did you fall or something? You’ve got blood on your head.”
“I do?” I put my fingertips to my forehead. When I brought them down, they were stained red.
Ty wrapped an arm around me. “You okay?” He led me to an empty table. “Come over here. Sit down.”
I sat.
The people at the table next to me got up and moved away.
I tried to focus. Tried to push words from my brain to my mouth, but nothing happened.
“I’ll go get the first-aid kit.” Ty tried to leave but I wouldn’t let him.
I grabbed hold of his T-shirt. “Not mine.”
“What?”
“Not mine. The blood. It’s not mine.” And then, finally, I found the words I wanted to say. “Call the police.”
* * *
It didn’t take them long to arrive.
They fanned out into all of the stores on the block. As one of the officers escorted me back to the alley, I saw they’d left police cars at either end; the squad lights flashed a silent warning. With a garbage truck, two police cars, an ambulance, and a whole crew of investigators, the alley was hosting more traffic than the major thoroughfare on the other side of the block.
The garbage collectors were not pleased. They tried to argue that they were behind on their schedule and they hadn’t really seen anything anyway.
The police didn’t care.
We were the only leads they had.
As one of the officers grappled with the crime tape, trying to wrestle it from the wind and thread it from the door handle of the shop next door and out to the dumpsters at the opposite side of the alley, another knelt beside the body.
A man introduced himself. He leaned toward me, past one of the investigators, extending his hand. A gust of wind tossed me a whiff of his woodsy cologne. He squeezed my hand more than he shook it. “Hey. Leo Baroni. I’m a detective with the police department.”
There was a hint of New Jersey in his accent. And in spite of the humidity, Detective Baroni was wearing a suit jacket. The inner elbows were creased, as if he’d been wearing it for a while.
His black hair had decided to break free from the gel he’d run through it. It spilled back onto his forehead from both sides of his part.
He gestured me over to the wall of the building where the wind couldn’t reach, then took a notepad and a pen from his jacket pocket and began to question me.
“You said you came out of the door at 1:51?”
I nodded.
“That’s very precise.”
“I’d just clocked out. And I didn’t want to be late for my—” My coaching appointment! My heart skipped a long beat and then tried to make up for it in double time. I pulled my phone from my backpack, thumbed it open, and pulled up my schedule. “Sorry. I just—I’m late for work.”