Better Safe Than Sorry
Rusty Redmond had spentfive years on the New York City police force’s SWAT team before leaving to start his own firm. Before joining the police, he’d served in the army, enlisting right after high school and earning GI funding for college. He’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan and had seen enough assholes in the world to learn every trick they could pull when they thought they were clever. They never were, and Rusty always took down his target.
Building a client list from scratch still proved to be a challenge, even as he gained good reviews from his first assignments—politicians, pop stars, and the NYU undergrad daughter of a multimillionaire under threat of kidnapping after she failed to pay off her drug dealer. That girl had been a doozie, trying to lose him every time she went out to get high with her friends. He’d helped arrest the guy who was threatening her but hadn’t convinced the girl that drugs were potentially a damaging path to take. Not his problem, though; he wasn’t her parent. He wasn’t anyone’s parent, luckily, which was a bit of a miracle after the number of one night stands he’d had in his life. With the risks he had to take in his line of work combined with the amount of travel and overnights required, how could he even consider a long-term relationship?
He’d be lying to himself, though, if he said he wasn’t jealous of his friends who’d settled down and found partners who stuck by their sides through all of the scares and the bullshit and the daily grinds. Some of them even had kids now. That wasn’t on the radar for him—perhaps if he met the right girl?— As if the “right girl” existed. Just fairy tales, he thought.
Rusty was in the middle of readingTardigrade Titans, Issue 3, Volume 1, a rare comic put out the previous year by an obscure artist he tracked like other people did their favorite bands. He’d just turned the page while adding sliced cucumbers to a salad when his cell rang with a number he didn’t recognize.
“Rusty Redmond, Redmond Guardian Service,” he said.
Rusty was used to talking to panicked people, and he could tell the woman on the other end of the line was putting up a big effort to keep her voice from shaking. But, beneath her words about notes and flowers and a black Escalade, he heard the tremors.
“I know I’m overreacting…” Kaylin said. He interrupted her.
“You’re not.”
“I think it’s a man and he knows where I live. And he was watching me when I left my house this morning. He heard what I said and responded to it in a note. Is that a coincidence? Could he be, like, a neighbor?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rusty said. “You don’t need to panic. Guys like this prefer a slow burn when ramping up their…”—he paused, not wanting to scare her with the word ‘stalker’—“efforts. But I’m going to come over. We should assess your security tonight.”
“Good. And I don’t care about how much it will cost. I just want to feel safe again,” she said.
“We can talk about it later.” He put his salad bowl back in the fridge. “I don’t risk lives over cost.”
“You think my life is in danger?” Kaylin went from forced calm to frantic.
Shit, Rusty thought.Blew that.“That’s the worst-case scenario,” he said. “But safe is always better than sorry. So, tell me where you live; I’m coming now.”
5
You’re Not What I Expected
Rusty didn’t wastetime with subways or rideshares and instead took his car out of the coveted spot he found just down the street from his house and made his way over to Kaylin’s place. The condo building looked antiquated, and Rusty couldn’t help but wonder about its history. He loved old buildings and even took great pleasure in remodeling his own archaic residence into an office for his business with an owner’s unit on top. He’d inherited the old three-story brick building from his grandfather, who’d rented it out as apartments until the leases and the tenants ran out. Rusty lived in one of the old apartments now and had a halfway decent downstairs office after several months of work.
He knocked on Kaylin’s door, expecting to be met with a woman and an apartment as sanitized as the gray exterior out front. Instead, a woman with curves to die for and frazzled brown hair—like she’d been caught in a crosswind—and crooked glasses on her nose opened the door. She wore hospital issue scrub pants and an oversized T-shirt with David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust across the chest. He realized he was staring at her chest, taking in both what was on it and what was under David Bowie’s forehead, stretching the screen-printed ink to flakes. She held a pint of ice cream with a spoon sticking out and a cat wearing a collar emblazoned with “JEDI” rubbed her leg with its chin. Rusty loved cats.
Kaylin studied the man before her for a moment. He was tall, with a musculature of a Spartan warrior from the movie300, and brown hair in a buzz haircut. “Please tell me you’re Rusty and I didn’t just open the door for a stalker,” she said. “Oh crap, I shouldn’t have said your name. Now you’ll tell me you’re Rusty and I won’t know if you’re lying.” She clutched the doorknob, blocking the entry with her body.
Rusty held up his hands. “I’m going to show you my ID.” He reached around to his pocket and took out his wallet. Kaylin wondered how a wallet could even fit into jeans that tight. She resisted the urge to lean around him and see just how snug they were in the back.
He held up his driver’s license for her to read. “Rusty Redmond,” he said. “Redmond Guardian Service.” He handed her a business card. She took it and read it.
“Okay. You can come in.” She stepped aside and as he passed, Rusty was gripped by the sudden urge to find her waist beneath that baggy shirt. He also wished he could take that shirt off of her and keep it—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was his favorite Bowie album. The T-shirt looked vintage. Where did she get something like that—a gift from a boyfriend maybe? She closed the door and took a bite of ice cream, sliding the spoon between her perfect lips. He tensed, forcing his body not to betray him right there in the entryway.What is it with this chick—some kind of pheromone? No wonder she has a stalker, he thought. The urge to grab her right there and lay her down on the high-gloss hardwood of her foyer grew stronger inside of him.
“So,” he said, trying to get his mind back on track. “Can I see these notes? You have to tell me everything.”
Kaylin led him to the dinette set in his kitchen and offered him a soda.
“Do you have tea?” he asked.
“Coffee,” she replied, holding up a jar of instant grounds.
Rusty grimaced. “Water’s fine.”
She poured him a glass and recounted the events from finding the first note through to the black car she noticed following her on the way home from work. She let the ice cream melt on the table as she talked, interrupting herself only to get up and pull a package of Oreos from a cabinet.
“Stress eating,” she said. “I’m not normally this unhealthy.” She bit into a cookie. “Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t cook much.” She didn’t know why she was telling him that but something about him put her at ease. She looked at him—this chiseled man with shoulders that seemed almost as broad as she was tall—and couldn’t even think clearly before opening her mouth.
