Page 1 of Safeguarding the Witness

Chapter One

“Hello. Anybody home?”

Her voice echoed through the small two-bedroom bungalow. Nobody answered, which meant her father hadn’t returned from the unexplained trip he started ten days ago. Yesterday, he texted that he’d be in touch with good news. About time! She could use some relief from constant isolation. Apart from her father, she had no one. She was tired of hiding, keeping the doors locked and the windows closed.

On this cloudless June day, the interior of her Denver rental house felt as hot and dry as a closed convection oven, baking all day while she worked at the garden shop and tree nursery. She trudged across the front room into the skimpy kitchen, where she opened the door to the fridge and allowed the cooled air to gust over her bare arms and legs.

Heavy knocking rattled the front door in its frame. She looked over her shoulder. Anything could be out there, anyone. Curtains on the picture window in the front room were drawn, as always, so nobody could see in. The downside: She couldn’t see out.

On tiptoe, she crept toward the flat pine door, cringing at every creak from the worn hardwood floor. Two paces from the peephole, she realized she hadn’t locked up when she entered. Distracted, worried about Dad, she’d made a possibly fatal mistake. She lunged for the deadbolt. Too late. The handle turned, and the door swung wide. A stranger crossed her threshold, lowered his sunglasses and asked, “Are you Mollie Harper?”

Startled, she took a step back. Who the hell is this guy? His dark hair was trimmed. He wore a suit and necktie like the DOJ officers who sometimes visited, which didn’t mean she could count on him. He knows my name, my real name. Her father’s alarmist warnings were coming true.

“Mollie Harper?”

She looked out the doorway, past his shoulder, and saw a scrawny man in a baseball cap and a black mask. Standing at the curb, he raised a handgun and aimed at her. Acting on instinct, she shoved the man in the suit and yelled, “Look out!”

The ear-splitting blast from a semiautomatic shattered the air. Bullets slammed against the front of her house. Mollie froze, momentarily paralyzed by panic. Would somebody call the cops? Not likely. In this neighborhood, gunshots were not uncommon, and people didn’t go looking for trouble.

The Suit slammed the door behind him. He drew his own weapon—looked like a Beretta from a shoulder holster and grabbed her hand. “Come with me.”

In a show of belated resistance, she dug in her heels. For all she knew, he was worse than the guy outside. “Get your hands off me.”

“Tillamook.” He spoke the secret password from her father. “Come on, Mollie. I say ‘Tillamook’ and you say…”

“Easy, breezy.”

“And I say, ‘Very cheesy.’”

Stupid code word. Dad must have sent him. She had to cooperate. “I need my gun.”

“We don’t have time.” He towed her through the bungalow as if he knew where he was headed. Things were moving too fast for her to make considered decisions about what to do and where to go, but she was always poised to run. They burst through the back door into the late afternoon heat. Legs churning, they charged across the parched backyard and into the alley.

She heard gunfire behind her as she ran hard and fast. The soles of her sneakers pounded on dusty asphalt. In high school and college, she’d been on the track team but not as a sprinter. She was a distance runner, better at stamina than speed.

He dived behind a dumpster and pulled her along with him.

Struggling for breath, she leaned against the cinder block wall of the corner laundromat. Tension squeezed her lungs. Breathe, dammit. She gulped down air as she slid down the wall into a squat, trying to be invisible by melting into the graffiti scrawls that claimed this territory for some gang or another. Though she’d lived here for almost a year, she hadn’t bothered learning their names. All were enemies. Drug merchants. Thieves. Killers. Everybody was to be suspected, even this guy who had dragged her away from danger. Or into it? Even though he knew the code, she didn’t trust him. Still struggling to catch her breath, she started to stand, preparing to flee on shaky legs.

He pushed her back. “Stay down, Mollie.”

“Why…” Words squeezed out between gasps. “…do you think…that’s my name?”

“You fit the stats. Five foot eight, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, blue eyes. Your hair is sometimes brown, sometimes red, and right now blond. Close to your natural color. You have a mole on your right cheek just below the corner of your eye.”

“Coincidence.”

“Don’t believe in them.”

“Nor do I,” she said.

“You have a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on your leg.” Crouched beside her, he pointed at the tat above her ankle-high sock. “Right here.”

The touch of his forefinger against her skin gave her an electric jolt that caused her to look him over again. How could she possibly be feeling an attraction to this stranger while being pursued by a gunman? She must be more desperately lonely than she’d realized. “Why are you here?”

“To find you,” he said as if stating an obvious fact. “We need to get away from here before this guy scores a hit.”

Not a lot of other options. She was unarmed, except for her tiny canister of pepper spray and a four-inch ceramic pocketknife. In the pockets of her wide-legged Bermuda shorts, she carried only her wallet and a cell phone. “What if I don’t want to go with you?”