Chapter 2 - The Shadow in the Parking Garage and the Missing Shoe That Left a Trail on Wet Asphalt
The cold Baltimore rain was turning into a grey, miserable sleet by the time Emma pushed through the heavy automated sliding doors of the emergency entrance, ignoring the nurse at the front desk who was shouting something about a discharge form she hadn't signed.
She didn't care about the form.
She didn't care about the prescription slip crumpled in her coat pocket.
She needed to get back to her studio apartment on Fayette Street, lock the deadbolt, bar the door with a chair if necessary, and figure out how to disappear before Wade Mercer—or whatever terrifying syndicate creditors Vincent Rourke had hinted at—found her again.
As she stepped off the curb into the dimly lit visitors' parking garage, the sharp, raw pain in her ribs reminded her of every second of the confrontation outside her building two hours earlier.
She looked down at her feet.
She was still wearing her right sneaker, stained with mud and a streak of dried blood, while her left foot was encased only in a thin, water-logged cotton hospital sock that was already soaked through from the puddles on the concrete.
One shoe missing, she thought bitterly, remembering how she had kicked off her left sneaker while scrambling over a low iron fence to escape Wade’s grip.
The memory sent a fresh wave of panic surging through her chest.
She pulled her wool coat tight around her shoulders, her fingers searching for the keys to her secondhand Honda Civic in her pocket.
The keys weren't there.
She stopped dead in the middle of the empty, echoing parking garage, her heart skipping a beat.
No. No, no, no.
She had dropped them on the sidewalk outside her apartment when Wade grabbed her arm.
She didn't have her car.
She didn't have her phone—it was still sitting on the nightstand inside her apartment, charging beside a half-empty mug of cold chamomile tea.
She was stranded, penniless, bruised, and completely exposed in a city where men like Vincent Rourke operated in the shadows while men like Wade Mercer scavenged in the gutters.
"Looking for these?"
The voice came from the deep shadows beside a concrete support pillar five yards to her left.
Emma spun around, biting back a cry of pain as her cracked ribs protested the sudden movement.
A man stepped out from beneath the flickering overhead sodium light.
He wasn't Vincent Rourke.
He was younger, wearing a dark waterproof trench coat with the collar turned up against the sleet, his hands tucked deep into his pockets. He had a clean-cut look, like an off-duty corporate lawyer or an ambitious municipal accountant, except for the cold, unblinking flatness in his grey eyes.
"Who are you?" Emma demanded, backing away until the small of her back hit the cold metal door of a parked sedan.
"My name is Marcus," the man said, his tone perfectly polite, almost conversational, which made it ten times more terrifying. "Mr. Rourke asked me to ensure you get home safely."
"I don't need Mr. Rourke's babysitters," Emma snapped, her voice shaking despite her best efforts to sound brave. "I can take a cab."
"There are no cabs in this sector at three in the morning, Miss Calloway," Marcus replied, gesturing smoothly toward a sleek, black unmarked sedan idling quietly near the exit ramp with its headlights off. "And even if there were, your stepfather isn't waiting at your apartment anymore."
Emma froze.
"What did you say?"
"Wade Mercer left your building about twenty minutes after you arrived at the hospital," Marcus said, stepping a little closer, though he kept a respectful, non-threatening distance. "He tried to kick your front door in. When that failed, he attempted to jimmy the lock on the back window."
"Where is he now?" Emma whispered, a cold dread washing over her veins.
Marcus smiled—a very small, very brief movement of his lips that didn't reach his eyes.
"He took a detour."
"A detour to where?"
"Mr. Rourke had a few questions for him regarding the brass key," Marcus said simply, turning and walking toward the idling black sedan. "Shall we go, Miss Calloway? Or would you prefer to walk home in the sleet with one shoe?"
Emma stood alone on the wet concrete of the parking garage, the wind howling through the open architecture, carrying the distant smell of the harbor and the unmistakable iron tang of approaching violence.
She looked down at her hospital sock, completely soaked through with freezing water.
Then she looked at the black sedan.
May you like
She knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that stepping into that car meant crossing a threshold she could never walk back across.
And yet, as she took her first limping step toward the vehicle, she knew she had already crossed it the moment Vincent Rourke looked at her mother’s locket in Treatment Room Nine.
Related Stories
