A Cold Day In Hell

At the sound of a man’s voice, she paused again and looked around. She couldn’t see anyone. No moving shadows. Maybe she’d imagined the voice.

The lights inside Out Back seemed a long way away. The wind plucked at Emma’s curly hair, tossed it across her face and back again. She fought with the umbrella. Branches shook on a row of trees between the parked cars.

The wind died.

Emma’s skin crawled but she carried on.

“Wait, Mrs. Duhon! I want to talk to you.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” Emma made sure she was in the middle of the open space between the rows of cars. She calculated how far she’d have to run back to the restaurant.

“You don’t think about Denise anymore, do you, Mrs. Duhon?”

Emma’s heart seemed to fill her throat.

“You’re too important to waste your time on the past.”

Denise. Poor, dear Denise. Dead two years now, murdered at the hands of a sick pervert. Emma and Finn had literally run into one another after a whole lot of years. They had stood talking and catching up on their lives, when Denise’s body had tumbled from a nearby garbage container. The killer had been caught, but the horror never quite went away.

“Of course I think about Denise. She was my friend. I loved her.”

“Did you? Doesn’t stop you from carrying on like she never lived. Do you think that’s fair? I don’t think it is. Do you remember how Denise died?”

Emma considered running. She was fit, she always had been. Of course she couldn’t move the way she did when she wasn’t pregnant, but what choice did she have?

“I always said pregnant women were sexy.”

Emma didn’t know the voice. A shadow separated itself between two trees.

She was a little closer to Out Back than he was and he wasn’t likely to draw attention to himself by causing her to fight him…she would fight him if she had to.

Since she was a bit nearer to the building, she had a chance of catching him off guard by running. She sidestepped back the way she’d come.

“Aw, you don’t want to do that. All I want is to talk. You start trying something fancy and you could do damage to that baby of yours. You wouldn’t want that.”

Emma opened her mouth but only a rasping sound came out. She needed to scream and yell and draw attention to herself.

“You want your baby, don’t you?” he said, his voice difficult to hear now. “They say you didn’t think you could have one. What a shame if you killed it now.”

She backed away from the place where the shadow hovered, skidded on one heel and dropped her purse. She left it where it fell and turned to run. Clumsy, she was so clumsy.

“No, no, no,” he shouted. “You stop that right now or you’ll hurt yourself. You’re overreacting.”

She kept running, the weight of the baby pulling her forward.

“You want to murder your kid? Is that what you want? You want to kill that baby you don’t deserve?”

His voice kept up with her.

Emma’s knees shook. She felt tears on her face.

He had followed, and he intended to catch her. The notebook flew from her hand and she saw a sheet of yellow paper dip and sail. She managed to hold on to the umbrella. It had a point at one end. She might need that.

“Why are you runnin’? What d’you have to be afraid of? Your conscience? Stop, right now.”

No, no, no.

She heard the singing sound of something lashing through the air. A cord or rope coiled around one of her shoes. Emma couldn’t run anymore.

The toe of her other sneaker jammed against a crack. Her umbrella slid through her fingers and tangled with her legs. Stumbling toward a parked pickup, she grabbed for the truck’s tailgate.

Emma missed; she hit her shoulder and hip on cold metal. Sound hammered, louder and louder, in her ears. She was going down.

Her hands slammed into the gritty ground, then her belly. Tearing pressure under her diaphragm winded her so hard she couldn’t breathe. Then her knees gave out.

She skidded under the back of the pickup.

“You stay where you are, and keep still,” the man said. He kicked the sole of her shoe and acid rushed to her throat. “You move before I say and you and that kid are finished—if the kid isn’t done in already.”

4

“Don’t let his taillights get too far ahead of you.”

“I’m doing the driving,” Eileen said, without raising her voice. “You’re safe with me. I won’t lose Sonny.”

At least he hadn’t made the mistake of suggesting he take the wheel. He could only imagine what the response to that would have been. “I trust you, Eileen. You’re a good driver.” His face felt tight. Everything about this evening was wrong—or had gone wrong.

“Thanks,” she said and he could hear the sarcasm in her tone.

There were things Eileen didn’t know, like the true story behind Sonny being in Pointe Judah. Angel didn’t want her to find out. She had already carefully minced around whether or not Sonny was a good role model for Aaron. She hadn’t been so subtle that Angel missed the message, but at least she didn’t know how close she was to the truth.

Sonny was a kid with potential—and a lot of past baggage weighing him down. Angel’s job was to keep the boy alive until certain people forgot about him—if they ever did.

She stared sideways at Angel. “I think Sonny was telling us Aaron got shot but he didn’t like saying it right out.” Her voice shook.

“That could be. He didn’t sound completely sure.”

“Aaron will be okay, won’t he?”

She wanted him to say yes, because that’s what she needed to hear. “Of course he will,” he said. He’d better be, and there had better not be anything that suggested whatever had happened was anything other than an accident.

“Could have been a hunter who made a mistake,” Eileen said.

Angel wasn’t aware of hunters firing indiscriminately in the swamps. “Could have,” he said. “This rain makes it hard to see. Sonny’s getting farther away.”

“I don’t mind anything but the fog,” she said, leaning forward. “Look how thick it’s getting.” She rolled her window down an inch and succeeded only in letting cool, heavy vapor into the van. “Your headlights bounce back at you.”

She reached for the gearshift and her fingers closed on the thigh he’d hitched up instead. Eileen whipped her hand away. Angel felt singed. He got a backlash, a hot backlash all the way to the base of his spine. They had touched so little—mostly accidentally.