alert.” He jotted the words on the board. “And now, let’s talk about avoiding confrontations.”
* * *
MIKE DISMISSED CLASS at seven. One or two students lingered, asking questions about some of the points he’d covered in class or what points he’d be covering in their class two days later. He answered succinctly, hiding his impatience. But it was with relief that the last student left and he hurried to his small office off the gymnasium. It was little more than a ten-by-ten box, but it had a desk, a phone and a window looking out on the parking lot.
He caught sight of Charlie Winters walking across the wet parking lot. She’d donned a well-worn leather jacket over her T-shirt and baggy sweatpants over her yoga pants, but there was no way to miss her dark red hair dancing in the cold wind blowing down the mountain or the coltish energy propelling her rapidly across the parking lot.
She stopped behind a small blue Toyota that had seen better days. But she didn’t get into the car immediately. First, she walked all the way around the vehicle, examining the tires, peering through the windows, even dropping to the ground on her back and looking beneath the chassis.
Finally, she seemed to be satisfied by whatever she saw—or didn’t see—and pushed back to her feet, dusting herself off before she got in the Toyota and started the engine.
As she drove away, Mike turned from the window, picked up the phone on the desk and punched in Maddox Heller’s number. Heller answered on the second ring.
“It’s Strong,” Mike said. “You said to let you know if I had any concerns about the new class.”
“And you do?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Concern may be too strong a word. At this point, I’d call it...curiosity.”
“Close enough,” Heller said. “So, you want a background check on someone?”
“Yes,” Mike said after another moment of thought. “I do.”
* * *
CHARLIE KEPT AN eye on the rearview mirror as she drove home as fast as she dared. She’d like to get a shower before her early-morning phone conference, and she was already going to be cutting it close. Could she really keep this up two days a week, given her boss’s delight in scheduling early meetings?
Besides, after this morning’s class, she wasn’t even sure it was worth her time. All that stretching and they didn’t do anything but go over the basic tenets of self-defense. On a chalkboard. Hell, she’d already covered those basics with a one-hour search of the internet. She didn’t need an academic journey through the philosophy of protecting oneself.
She needed practical tools, damn it. Now. And she didn’t want to spend the next few weeks twiddling her thumbs until Mr. Big Buff Badass deigned to detach himself from his chalkboard and teach them something they could actually use.
Channeling her frustration into her foot on the accelerator, she made it back to her little rental house on Sycamore Road with almost a half hour to spare. As had become habit, she waited at the front door for a few seconds, just listening.
There was a faint thump coming from inside, but she had two cats. Thumps didn’t exactly come as a surprise.
Taking a deep breath, she tried the door. Still locked.
That was a good sign, wasn’t it?
She unlocked the door and entered as quietly as she could, standing just inside the door and listening again.
There was a soft prrrrup sound as His Highness, her slightly cross-eyed Siamese rescue cat, slinked into the living room to greet her. He gave her a quizzical look before rubbing his body against her legs.
“Did you hold down the fort for me like I asked?” She bent to scratch his ears, still looking around for any sign of intrusion. But everything was exactly as she’d left it, as far as she could tell.
Maybe she was being paranoid. She couldn’t actually prove that someone had been following her, could she?
There hadn’t been a particular incident, just a slowly growing sense that she was being watched. But even that sensation had coincided with the first of the dreams, which meant maybe she was imagining it.
That could be possible, couldn’t it?
She went from room to room, checking for any sign of an intruder. In her office, her other cat, Nellie, watched warily from her perch atop the bookshelf by her desk. If there had been an intruder, the nervous tortoiseshell cat would still be hidden under Charlie’s bed. So, nobody had been in the house since she left that morning.
Beginning to relax, she took a quick shower and changed the litter box before she settled at her computer and joined the office conference call.
Because she worked for a government contractor, Ordnance Solutions, most of her conference calls consisted of a whole lot of officious blather and only a few nuggets of important information. This call was no different. But she wrote down those notes with admirable conscientiousness, if she did say so herself, especially with His Highness sitting on her desk and methodically knocking every loose piece of office equipment onto the floor.
She hammered out the project her bosses had given her during the conference call, a page-one revision of the latest operational protocols for disposal of obsolete ordnance from a recent spate of military base closures. Most of the changes had come after a close reading by the company’s technical experts. Charlie was used to working her way through multiple revisions, especially if the experts couldn’t come to an agreement on specific protocols.
Which happened several times a project.
Nellie, the cockeyed tortie, ventured into her office and hopped onto the chair next to her desk. She let Charlie give her a couple of ear scratches before contorting into a knot to start cleaning herself.
“Am I going crazy, Nellie?” Charlie asked.
Nellie angled one green eye at her before returning to her wash.
The problem was, Charlie didn’t have a sounding board. Her family was a disaster—her father had died in a mining accident nearly twenty years ago, and her mother had moved to Arkansas with her latest husband a couple of years back. Two brothers in jail, two up in South Dakota trying to take advantage of the shale oil boom while it lasted, and her only sister had moved to California, where she was dancing at a club in Encino while waiting for her big break.
None of them were really bad people, not even the two in jail. But none of them understood Charlie and her dreams. Never had, never would.
And they sure as hell wouldn’t understand why she had suddenly decided to dig up decade-old bones.
And as for friends? Well, she’d turned self-imposed isolation into an art form.
She attached the revised ordnance disposal protocols to an email and sent it off to her supervisor, then checked her email for any other assignments that might have come through while she was working on the changes. The inbox was empty of anything besides unsolicited advertisements. She dumped those messages into the trash folder.
Then she opened her word processor program and took a deep breath.
It
