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Sarah hesitated, her mind returning to that moment. What her attacker had said, as he held the gun in her face, his other hand reaching for his belt buckle?
‘Got no gun. Got no boyfriend. You’re out of options. No one’s coming to save you now…don’t know what you expect a dead man to do.’
She shuddered as the words thundered through her head. She repeated them to Tom.
‘You think he killed Alex then chased you down?’
‘No. Maybe. He said Alex wasn’t going to show up.’ Sarah lowered her eyes to the table, fighting the possibility that Alex was never coming back.
‘The two hours are up. And he’s not here.’ Tom was matter-of-fact.
Anger bubbled in her gut. She grabbed hold of it.
‘And? He’s not here. That’s all we know.’
‘Sarah—’
‘No.’ She stood. ‘I need to find him. He might be hurt or trapped.’ She patted her jacket pocket and found her gun still nestled inside. The one she took from the dead man still against the small of her back.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘What?’
‘There’s a bandage under your shirt.’
‘Oh, no. I mean, yes. But not last night,’ Sarah had barely given any thought to her healing wound. ‘It’s, ah, courtesy of Brian Isobel.’
She removed the dead man’s gun and checked the cartridge. Four bullets remained.
‘We need to go back.’ She placed the gun back inside her waistband and made for the door.
Tom remained seated.
She pulled the door open. ‘What are you doing? We need to find Alex.’
‘What’s the point? He’s gone. Dead, dying, disappeared. It’s all the same.’ Tom was staring at the wall straight ahead.
She stood back in front of the detective, squatting down at eye level. ‘No, it’s not.’ She spoke slowly. ‘We need to find him, and you need to help me.’
Finally, Tom shifted his eyes from the wall. ‘I don’t need to do anything.’
Sarah’s heartbeat began to accelerate. ‘Yes, you do. We have to find him.’I can’t leave him. I can’t be without him, not again.
Desperation squeezed her lungs and she couldn’t breath. The room blurred and started to tilt. She tried to speak, to argue the point but no words came. She reached out for something to hold onto but instead, fell into a void.
Awareness slowly crept backinside her, nudging her awake. Sarah’s eyes fluttered open, involuntarily, just for a second. She wanted to stay lost in sleep. Thoughts were not forming coherently yet, but she knew what waited for her was not a brand-new day to be savored and explored.
Darkness lurked at the edge of her consciousness, slowly taking shape. The feelings came first. Despair, pain. Who was that? She saw a body lying in a pool of blood. Alex. She felt his eyes on her and reached for him as he vanished. In the distance she could hear something. It was familiar. She couldn’t place the sound but it triggered a memory. Something that sat just beyond the shadows growing in number, invading the last of the comfort of unconsciousness. It grew louder. It was persistent, consistent.
Tick, tock.
Somewhere in the room, a clock ticked and it brought all of those images into sharp focus. The washers and dryers in a dark concrete room, guns drawn but not fired, a belt unbuckled and all of her childhood humiliations restored in magnificent technicolor. Someone was screaming, overlaying an appropriate soundtrack to the horror that was unfolding in her mind. The room spun as she tried to find the source. It was so close. It grew more piercing by the second, reverberating around her head.
Someone was calling her name, but she couldn’t locate the voice over the screaming. The screaming was relentless, desperate for Sarah to find it and make it stop. With a sudden clap of clarity, she realized the sound was coming from inside her.
She jolted awake, all of her senses on fire. She tried to find an anchor, something to hold onto while she found her bearings. She heard her name being called again but nothing was familiar. She was lying in a single bed in a small room. An old lamp sat on an otherwise bare table. One chair was neatly tucked underneath. Another chair seemed to be trying to hold onto its occupant as he leaned towards her.
Tom. It was Tom.
