“Layne, I don’t have someone tailing you,” he slowly says.
His gray eyes pass over me worriedly. His muscles twitch when he rises and make his tattoos stand out. He walks in front of me in just his boxers, pulls open the door and gestures for me to get out.
“It’s not safe if they know you’ve got connections with us.”
“Kyler…” I have no idea what to say, so I don’t finish that sentence.
A feeling of discomfort comes over me. He didn’t send that man. Then who is it? Why was he standing in front of my house? His presence bothered me a whole lot when I’d thought it was Kyler’s doing, but now? My stomach churns and my chest feels as if it’s being crushed, overwhelming me. Still, I step onto the landing, because what do I say to him? That I now think Connor’s killers are after me and my daughter? Should I beg for his help? He doesn’t owe Connor or me anything. Without looking at me, he closes the door. I gasp for air, but straighten myself, causing the anxiety to subside a tiny bit.
Damn. I suppress the urge to knock on his door again. But I’m not his problem and I know it. This ismyproblem. I’m the one who has to make sure my daughter is safe and maybe, just maybe, I’ll manage to get justice for Connor.
With a drooping head, I descend the fire escape and am blocked by Paxton. I’m not at all comfortable with that, and Icross my arms before raising my chin defiantly at him. A false image of self-assurance.
“Leave him alone, Layne.” He takes a drag from the cig between his thumb and forefinger, looks at the ground, then tilts his head so he can look up at me.
I ball my fists, but leave my arms crossed. “Stay out of it.” Pax is still the same meddler as he was then. Rolling my eyes, I step past him.
Before I realize it, he’s put his hand on my upper arm. “I’m serious. If you want you and your daughter to be safe, for Ky to be safe, then leave him alone.” His cold, dark-brown—almost black—eyes bore into mine.
“Is that a threat?” I shift my weight to my other leg and tilt my head to imitate him.
With a sigh, he rubs his forehead. “No, it’s the truth. I’m not the one making sure you’re no longer safe. Others will make sure of that.” Paxton shrugs his left shoulder and walks away from me. “Leave him alone, Layne.”
I put up my middle finger to his back and walk to my car. Jerk.
With a deep sigh, I get in and put the key in the ignition. The problems just seem to pile up and the whole MC starts to get on my nerves. Maybe Paxton is right and I need to let it go. Of course, the saying “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” exists for a reason. As long as I don’t have any incriminating evidence, I can’t be a threat to anyone, can I? Even though I desperately want to know who killed Connor and, more importantly, why, everything seems to tell me that it’s better not to.
I drive off the property and decide to go to the supermarket. It’s quiet on the road, and soon I enter downtown Folsom. An uneasy feeling comes over me, as if eyes are on me, and immediately I look in the rearview mirror. There’s a red truck driving behind me, with a man behind the wheel, and on the sidewalk a mother is walking with a small child beside her. Noneof them pay attention to me, and yet goosebumps spread down my arms.
As I approach the Whole Foods parking lot, I turn on my blinker and take the turn. I find a spot, park the car, and turn off the engine. I decide to sit for a few minutes to check if my feeling’s correct or if I’m being paranoid and let my gaze wander across my surroundings, but nothing strikes me as odd.
In the supermarket, I scavenge all the groceries on my list, and even though I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, I constantly feel like I’m being watched. I pull a carton of milk from the shelf and when I turn, it looks like someone’s ducking behind a rack. But by now I’m so anxious that it’s probably just a customer walking down an aisle. Still, I walk around the corner and look down the aisle, where indeed another woman’s standing with a shopping cart and a pack of whole grain cereal in her hand. Shaking my head, I quickly move on.
Once I’ve paid for the groceries, I load them into the car and take them home.
After spending a few hours obsessively cleaning the house, I decide I’m going to drive to the dam and get in my car. Rebel has since called and asked if she could stay for dinner at Piper’s and watch a movie, which I agreed to.
Soon I’m on the same route I rode down thousands of times on the back of Kyler’s motorcycle. I park in the public parking lot to walk up the path that takes me closer to the water. I veer off the path and arrive at the huge boulder where Kyler and I used to spend hours. We would look out over the lake and talk about anything and everything. I put my hands on it and climb up.
The view is still exactly as I remember it. The water in the distance is calm and there are few hikers out on this weekday. Every now and then someone passes by in the distance, but otherwise I’m completely alone. So it doesn’t take long for my thoughts to wander back to Connor and especially to the last fewweeks together. I try to figure out if those were different, but I can’t think of anything. As usual, he went out the door in the morning and was back around dinner time. We ate together at the dining table in our kitchen, with his eyes mostly on Rebel. He barely spoke about his work, but he never had. After all, he worked for an accounting firm so in terms of content there wasn’t much I could add, and he always said he had us at home and didn’t feel like dealing with numbers any more. It had always been like that, so I didn’t think anything of it.
Now, I wonder if he still worked for the accounting firm. But I couldn’t imagine that he’d been fired, or that he wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t he have told me?
Had I been too naive?
I’d chosen Connor because he made me feel safe with his ordinary job at ordinary hours. I’d never thought anything of it, because to me, anything illegal involved strange working hours, motorcycles, cuts, and gangs. But what if… What if he did end up in some shady business?
By now dusk’s starting to set in and I decide to go back to my car. At home, with a pizza, I can look through Connor’s papers for anything suspicious. Maybe I, or the police, overlooked something after all.
As I get closer to the parking lot, goosebumps start to spread over my arms again. A knot forms in my stomach and my breathing gets ragged. The anxious feeling from the supermarket is back and I check my surroundings nervously.
Shit, shit, shit.
I quicken my steps hoping it’s my own paranoia and not—
“Hello Mrs. Hayes,” a deep voice behind me says and my shoulders deflate. I’m literally a hundred yards away from my car in a deserted parking lot.
With more bravado than I actually have, I turn toward the man. A broad-shouldered brute with trimmed hair stares at me.His hand is tucked into his jacket, and the slight bulge in the coattail reveals that his fingers are wrapped around the cold, heavy weight of a gun. After all, why wear a coat at dusk when it’s eighty degrees and who else has their arm put behind his coattails like that?
