Don't Leave Me Read online

  Claudia waved to her parents, who were just loading their matching golf club bags into her dad’s small pickup. Maybe golfing was the pastime that would stick before one of them got bored and suggested something else.

  She pulled out of the driveway, knowing she was late again. She heard her iPhone beep, her phone tucked in the side of her brown leather purse. She reached for it and saw the message: Where are you???? Second cup of latte I’m on and I’m tired of sitting alone.

  Okay, she really needed to work on her timing. She watched the road as she texted, keeping an eye out for cops, too. On my way. Five minutes, I swear. She added a smiley face and dumped her phone on the passenger seat. She heard another beep, but this time she left her phone where it was. When she drove past the coffee house eight minutes later, every parking space in front was taken, so she kept driving around the block, closer to campus, seeing the barren desert on the other side as the sun slipped lower on the horizon.

  After pulling a U-turn, she parked two blocks away between a black truck and a white cargo van in front of the Waverly, a three-story complex of apartments that housed mostly college students. There was music pumping from one of the open balcony doors, and around the side a dumpster flowed over with garbage, rank in the heat. The streets were far from empty as she stepped out of her car. She clinked the lock on the key chain and lifted her purse over her shoulder, wearing sandals with a slight heel that she knew made her long legs even longer.

  A crack in the air had all the hair on the back of her neck standing up. The fear that hit was followed by one thought: What the fuck was that sound? Her first reaction was to hit the ground when she heard two more pops, this time knowing it was a gunshot, two more, maybe three. She had no idea as her hand went over her head and she ducked. She heard yelling and running, feeling the direness of the situation. All of it was nothing like on TV.

  The fear that pumped through her had her moving away from the openness toward the building, the bushes. That was all she focused on, getting the fuck out of there, someplace to hide until sanity or help or something that could right this craziness arrived. It was out of her peripheral that she saw people running everywhere and nowhere. It was chaos, a blur, as she stumbled and moved over a rock, seeing the side of the building as her salvation before her foot caught on something solid.

  She went face first, landing on her stomach, her hands scraping the pavement. She was wet as she rolled to the side and pulled her feet up, seeing blood on her arm, her hand, and pooled on the ground around her. She felt nothing in the confusion, the silence around her, not knowing whether she’d been hit until she stared at what had tripped her: the lifeless brown eyes of a young man staring back at her.

  Chapter 2

  There were cops everywhere. It wasn’t so much as if they’d just arrived but that she’d walked into something that had been brewing and was now at full scale. She heard shouting, saw a cop crouching as he ran from the building, gun held high, cocked. A few people were running ahead of him, and she stared in horror, expecting a bullet to take one of them. Her senses were on overload as she listened to sirens, many coming closer and in the distance. She didn’t know where to look, what to do, or where to go as she leaned against the building, staring at the unmoving body and the pool of blood.

  She was shaking, and she crept closer to the man and lifted her hand to his neck, feeling for a pulse, but there was nothing, so she moved around the side of the building, her hands against the wall as she tried to get away from this craziness and whoever it was who’d lost their mind. The pop pop pop of more shots sounded and had her suddenly fearing she was in the middle of a war zone as she ducked, adrenaline pumping. She crawled, keeping her head down, when she spotted people ahead, crouched on the ground. There was a wire fence, a tarp behind it, a shopping cart packed full, and a garbage can. She crawled closer, seeing a woman in a black T-shirt, her brown hair tied back. There were two children crying. They were young, maybe eight, ten, dark messy hair, summer clothes, hiding beside a shopping cart filled with bags and a suitcase. Her stuff, theirs, maybe? There was a man, an older one, skinny, with gray hair.

  “Come this way,” he said. “Cops gone crazy.” His bottom two teeth were missing, she could see, as he talked, reaching a bony hand to the kids, but no one moved to him.

  She saw cops down the alley ahead. She thought to raise her hand to get their attention, their help, but then she thought better of it. Best to be quiet so the crazy shooter wouldn’t pick up on her and where she was. Claudia didn’t know what the hell to do. She was frozen, looking right and then left and behind her, all the while keeping her head down.

  The woman was shaking her head. “Who the fuck is shooting?” she said, her voice raspy, her hands around the kids, a boy and a girl. Maybe they were hers. Claudia didn’t know for sure as she took in the man, who then scooted away around the corner of the fence, his pants dirty, shirt out. Then there was running again, and voices. She saw a cop chasing after someone, two men, dark hair, fast. She couldn’t see much else.

  “You over there, hands up!”

  She had to crane her neck behind her as she saw another man moving toward her, his gun raised, pointed. He wore plain clothes, jeans and a T-shirt, a badge at his waist, dark glasses. Her hands went up, her heart pounding long and loud in her ears, jammed in her throat. For a second she couldn’t breathe. The kids were crying, and she couldn’t see the gray-haired man anymore. He was long gone, she figured. The woman—Latina or mixed, she wasn’t sure—had hard eyes as she lifted one hand, the other around the kid she kneeled in front of.

  “Do you want to get shot?” the cop yelled, and for a minute Claudia thought he was yelling at her, but it was the woman. He gestured with his gun between them.

  “She’s got a kid! There’re kids here, you asshole,” Claudia said. It just came out, and she knew it was a mistake by the expression on his face. He was jabbing his finger at her, and there was another cop behind him in the standard tan uniform, gun raised and looking nervous, which shot a chill through her.

  For the first time in Claudia’s life of only eighteen years, she felt fear so deep and icy and paralyzing that she figured her chance of being shot outweighed the likelihood of her walking out of this alley in once piece. All her focus went to his finger on the trigger, how tense he was as he yelled at her and the woman, the kids. She figured it could go either way. He could pull that trigger at any moment. It was pure instinct to drop to the ground and kiss the pavement.

  “Down, get down now, hands linked behind your head!” It was the other guy yelling to her, and maybe the woman too.

  “Come on, get down,” she said to the kid who was crying and had to be shitting his pants. The other was quiet as the woman went down on her stomach, yelling something to the cops. She felt the full weight of the cop’s knee in her back as he grabbed her arm, wrenching it, a sharp pain in her elbow and shoulder. She cried out on instinct, her head turned as her chin scraped the pavement. Metal cuffs pinched and bit into her wrists.

  Her face hurt as she took in the kids crying, the woman yelling. The uniformed cop still had the gun and grabbed a kid. She couldn’t see the other cop, as the one with the bad attitude and plain clothes had her facedown on the ground. She had to crane her neck to catch just a glimpse from her peripheral of another cop with a badge, dark pants, and a black shirt who walked over to the cart behind her, where the woman was on the ground, being cuffed. The guy was focused on that cart. She saw the gun in his hand as he reached into it, and when he pulled his hand out of the cart filled with bags and suitcases, she realized he was holding nothing. Had he holstered the gun? She hadn’t seen him do that.

  She blinked, unable to move her wrists, which were bound behind her back. The weight of the cop no longer pressed her into the pavement. Her sweat dripped in the heat, but she shivered from the chill in her veins as she realized what the cop had just done. She stared over to him, and she realized in horror that he was staring at her too with eyes
that would haunt her forever—icy blue. He had dark hair and a square jaw. He was standing over her, a man with all the power, the control, knowing she’d seen what he’d done.

  “Search it!” he yelled to someone, taking another step toward her. It was the silent warning, something in his expression that had her freezing, fighting to breathe. Never before had Claudia experienced someone having this kind of power over her, feeling absolutely helpless and not knowing what would happen next.

  She heard another voice, another man. “Gun here!” he called out.

  Then she was grabbed roughly and dragged to her feet, her shoulders wrenched. Her wrists had to be bleeding, and she couldn’t see anything of the woman, the kids—just yelling, screaming and crying, then denials about the gun.

  “It’s not mine! What the fuck, asshole? It’s not mine, it’s planted…”

  That was all she heard, and then nothing that made sense, because she was held by strong hands and turned away, dragged away. She couldn’t see the woman, but she smelled the blood, the sweat, and she swore that the scent she was breathing in, around her and in her, was fear.

  Chapter 3

  The room was concrete, maybe eight by ten, and there was a window by the door that she couldn’t see out of. The table she was chained to was metal, and her wrists were red from how tight she’d been cuffed. She couldn’t see her face, but she was sure she’d scraped it from the stinging and burning as she stared straight ahead to the metal door with no window, willing it to open as she tried to make sense of what had happened. Her toe was throbbing, and she didn’t know if the blood that covered it was from her or the dead man she’d tripped over.

  The door opened, and two cops walked in. One wore a tacky suit, his brown hair in bad need of a cut, and the other wore a black shirt and had icy blue eyes. It was the man she’d never forget. He was taller, and his eyes were an odd shape, smaller than she’d expected from a man his size. They seemed so cold. His red lips stood out from his face, which was tanned from the sun. His badge was tucked into the belt of his jeans as the other guy pulled out a metal chair across from her and sat down. The icy cop leaned against the wall as if to drive the message home that she was completely at his mercy. She turned her gaze to the other cop in the bad suit and noticed that his pale skin seemed almost sickly and his bottom teeth were unusually crooked.

  “Claudia, I’m Detective Hargraves. This is Detective Llewellyn,” the pale cop said and gestured to a file on the steel table in front of him. It was a motion to let her know he had all the information and she had nothing.

  Llewellyn didn’t move from where he leaned against the concrete wall behind Hargraves, arms crossed, watching. She pulled at the cuffs, hearing the clang of metal again, wondering why she was being treated like a criminal. “I want to use the phone, please,” she said again just like she’d asked the other three times—or was it four now? She’d lost count.

  No one was listening. She’d been stuck in here waiting alone after telling them her name, and she’d been fingerprinted and her mouth swabbed for DNA. She was pretty sure they couldn’t do that. She thought so, anyway. This was kind of a gray area, she assumed. Chase was a lawyer. He’d know.

  “My name is Claudia McCabe. I’d like to make a phone call. I’ve asked already,” she said, lifting her hand and yanking, the pain jolting her wrist. The metal scraped the bar she was cuffed to and made an awful racket.

  They said nothing to that, and Hargraves folded his arms on the table, leaning closer. “Suppose you tell us what happened at the Waverly.”

  What the fuck? She glanced up to the other cop, whose eyes for the first time reminded her of death. It wasn’t that she knew it, but she sensed that whatever she said here to him could and would decide whether she walked out of here or not. Maybe she was crazy, but she also imagined they could make her disappear without anyone knowing where she was.

  “I wasn’t at the Waverly. I was going to the coffee house around the block when I heard the shots,” she said, wanting this nightmare to end.

  “But you were found behind the Waverly and were seen running, and the blood you’re covered in is from one of the dead.”

  Okay, this was crazy. “I tripped when I was running from the gunfire. I fell over the body. Everyone was running. Are you insane? I was trying to get away from the gunshots. What are you insinuating?”

  “Yet you were found where the gun was,” Hargraves added, and something in his expression sucked all the air out of her chest. She wondered if her eyes widened, as her body shot forward in shock, surprise, horror. The gun the cop had stuck in the cart, were they seriously going to pin this on her? She wheezed and then coughed.

  “Or maybe the woman you were with was the shooter. We’ll know soon enough,” Hargraves said, appearing bored as if they’d figured everything out and come to their own conclusions about what had really gone down.

  “You can’t be serious. I didn’t shoot anybody. I don’t even own a gun. I’ve never fired a gun! Now you think the shooter is a woman who was hiding with kids? There was another guy too, but then he was gone.”

  The cop against the wall was interested. Llewellyn, that was his name. He uncrossed his arms, and her eyes went to his fists at his sides. She wanted to take it back.

  “What guy? Who?”

  She thought about the older guy with the missing teeth. She knew her eyes were wide as she stared from Hargraves to Llewellyn, whom she’d seen stick the gun in the cart. She shrugged.

  “How long have you known Zoe Doucette?”

  “Who?” She looked between them.

  “The woman you were found with,” Hargraves said.

  “I don’t know her or the kids or the guy. I was running, trying to get away from whoever was shooting, to find some place to hide.”

  “You carry a pistol, right?” Llewellyn stepped closer, raising his eyebrows as if to drive the point home. Was this how interrogations went? She really was scared shitless.

  “No, I don’t have a gun. I don’t own a gun. I’m in college, I’m a student. I already said how many times that I’ve never fired a gun, never held a gun.” She could feel the panic and fear as the focus of what had happened was being pointed at her. It couldn’t be that easy. Didn’t there have to be evidence to prove beyond any doubt, or was that too just a myth? She really needed someone in here on her side who knew what her rights were. She wanted to call Chase, her brother, even though they weren’t close. He’d know what to do, she was sure of it. She still didn’t have a clue what had happened out there at the Waverly when she’d parked her car, gotten out, and walking into something that still made absolutely no sense.

  Hargraves had opened the file in front of him and lifted a paper as if reading. “You have a father who’s linked to some pretty bad people. Your father has a gun.”

  She wondered if they had a script they were working from. What was it about this gun she feared they were working to pin on her? “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. Her dad had a past. That was all she knew. He was a reformed gambler, and until a few years ago she hadn’t even known he was alive. She’d never seen a gun in the house, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t have one. She firmed her lips, as sharing anything was only getting her deeper into something she didn’t have a clue about.

  “Your father is Jerry McCabe, is he not?”

  Maybe there was more she didn’t know. “Yes, that’s my father. Do I not have a right to a lawyer, a phone call? I want a lawyer. I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said, wondering now what Jerry had done.

  The cops both looked to each other. Would they ignore her again? How much longer would she have to sit in the concrete room? She had to pee, and she was afraid she was going to wet herself. She willed this to end.

  Hargraves leaned back in the chair, the metal squeaking. “Why? You’re not under arrest. We’re just having a conversation.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly as she looked down to where she was cuf
fed. “Then why the fuck am I chained to the table?” She stared at the cuffs when a big hand appeared with a key to unlock them. The cuffs dropped, and she stared into Llewellyn’s icy, unfeeling eyes, light blue but so dark.

  “Just had to be sure you weren’t one of them,” Hargraves said.

  She still didn’t have a clue what the fuck was going on. It was instinct to rub her wrists, which throbbed mercilessly from how tight the cuffs had been. “One of who? What are you talking about?” Her throat was raw and dry, and she kept rubbing her wrists.

  “From what we can figure, the homeless have a drug war, turf stuff. Some of the dealers live at the Waverly, where it happened. The men shot were linked to some bad people. So you didn’t know anyone at the Waverly?”

  She just stared at Hargraves, wondering what he was trying to pin her to. “No,” she said. Some of her acquaintances lived there, college kids she didn’t really know, but she sure as shit wasn’t about to share that right now, considering she could taste freedom. She could see the door.

  “Guess we’re done for now. Just don’t leave town, Ms. McCabe,” Hargraves said as he stood up and buttoned the front of his cheap brown suit jacket as if she were just another task he’d dealt with.

  She was furious, wanting to tell this jackass to fuck himself. She wanted to hurt him like he’d done to her, but she had to remind herself that would only make it worse, because both these assholes had a badge that protected them. She just wanted to get out of there, put this night behind her. “And the woman arrested with me, and what about the kids?” she said, her hands flat on the table, seeing the door and possible freedom but feeling it could be yanked away in a moment.