few seconds later, so did he.
The thin, shrill notes of someone whistling “All or Nothing at All” hung shrilly in the cool night air. They screeched down her spine like the chalk sometimes did on her blackboard when she wrote too fast.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Emma muttered to herself, the words keeping time with her ever-quickening steps. The decision to enter the alley hadn’t been one of her best. In a nutshell, she’d just acted like some clueless bimbo in a B-grade horror flick, and the person behind her had her just where he wanted her. And now she was going to die. She was going to die trapped in a horrible cliché.
Glancing back at him, Emma hugged the bags closer to her body, noting that he was still about fifty feet behind her. If she started to run, so would he.
Emma kept walking. Not yet. She wasn’t ready.
She should have driven, but nooooo. She’d caved to convenience and had bought a gas-electric hybrid car instead of a wholly electric model, and so she usually walked on most errands out of guilt. No matter how late at night.
A cool summer twilight breeze blew at her back, and she tossed her head frantically when her hair flew into her eyes. For crying out loud, some gang banging hip hop artist had been shot mere blocks from where she was right at this moment, and he’d had an entire entourage protecting him. She had a rape whistle and a pound of organic butter.
Emma glanced down at the bags she held. And some free-range eggs.
Her calves ached from walking too fast in her high-heeled boots, but she pushed herself further and faster. She would not die in that alley. She would not.
The faint notes of “My Way” floated on the air to sift through her hair and disappear on the evening breeze. Mother in heaven, he was closer now. Emma swept her gaze frantically across her surroundings, weighing her options. She could keep pretending she had no idea he was behind her and hope someone would stumble upon her and come to her aid. She could walk as quickly as possible through the rest of the alley and go directly to one of the big mansions on the next street. Or, she could drop the bags and run screaming back to the nearest well-lit commercial area, hoping she could beat her pursuer. The latter seemed like the best option—if she went up to a house and the inhabitants didn’t open the door, she was finished.
Choose.
The heel of her leather boot caught in a sidewalk crack, and her ankle buckled, causing her to lurch onto the carefully tended grass beside her.
She heard him laugh behind her, a low, rumbling, ominous sound.
An eternity later, she finally made it out of the alley, and she jogged to the nearest streetlight, basking in the glow of its warm yellow circle of light. People could see her. She was safe now.
And then she felt the breath of a stranger on the back of her neck, as someone behind her whistled “Strangers in the Night.”
That was it. The next level.
Emma dropped her bags, her groceries spilling and rolling onto the sidewalk at her feet. Screaming “Fire!” as she’d been taught in the free self-defense class on campus last semester, she threw her weight forward, running toward the front walkway of her house, just ahead. Something rippled in the darkness, in front of the fat little palm tree planted near the street, and she didn’t know whether it was a person, an animal or just her imagination. She prayed it was something that would save her. “Please,” she breathed.
The silk scarf she’d wrapped loosely around her neck slid smoothly across her skin and fell away—whether of its own accord or because someone had pulled it, she couldn’t say. Quelling the urge to look behind her, she kept running in her torturous heeled boots, scrabbling through her purse for that damned whistle on her key chain. She reached deep inside her for one last burst of energy, just enough to live through this…
Then she tripped.
Time slowed to a crawl as the ankle that had buckled earlier gave out once more. It was almost as if she were floating above her body, watching herself stumble, scream, fall. Watching her pursuer pull a Taser from the waistband of his grimy jeans. Watching herself scuttle backwards on her heels and elbows like a pathetically small and scared crab.
The moonlight glinted off the Taser above her. Attack. Immobilize. Isolate. The words of the self-defense instructor came back to her with stark clarity. The pavement cut into the palms of her hands. The sounds of cars whirring along the nearby streets and highways mingled with dance music and barking dogs. The breeze blew her hair into her eyes. And Emma waited, not moving, not blinking, for the man charging toward her to do all of the above.
His attack never came. He charged right past her, toward the squat trunk of the short, leafy palm tree in front of her home, several feet away. The darkness rippled again, and a second man erupted out of the tree’s shadow, chopping his hands so both thumbs hit either side of her would-be attacker’s wrist. The Taser flew into the air, landing harmlessly a few feet away from her. Emma scuttled sideways crab-style on her hands and heels until she could reach out and grasp it by its thick plastic handle. She wasn’t sure how to use it, but at least it was in her hand and not anyone else’s.
The two shadows circled each other slowly, one with his hands clenched into fists, and the other assuming a vague, martial arts-looking stance. The one with the fists—the Sinatra freak—swung wildly, and the other man curved his body into a bow, effectively dodging the blow. He followed defense with attack, delivering a well-controlled blow to the attacker’s temple with the back of his fist. A lightning-fast punch to the stomach, knee to the head and swirling roundhouse kick to the chest, and it was all over. Her former pursuer slumped to the ground, unconscious.
Emma zapped him with the Taser anyway. Or tried to. She thought she’d missed, but then the man’s body jerked upward and he went still. Whether he’d been intentionally following her or not, she had a great story for the next Take Back the Night rally on campus.
“Are you all right?” the other man asked her, his face obscured by the shadows. He held out a hand to her, and she grasped it, allowing him to pull her off the pavement to a standing position.
“I’m fine,” she gasped. “Thank you.” She glanced briefly at her pursuer, who lay spread-eagle on his back, groaning like a child.
“Get inside.”
Emma squinted into the darkness, wanting very much to get a look at the man who might have saved her. “Who are you?” she asked.
But all around her was darkness, and her rescuer was gone. A handful of dry leaves blew around her ankles in a crackling dance, and when she looked at the ground where her pursuer had fallen, she saw that he’d disappeared, too.
In the distance, she heard the sound of someone whistling, “Strangers in the Night.”
Chapter Two
“Both of them? Gone? Even after you’d zapped that guy?”
“Pretty much.” Emma pulled her reading glasses off her face and tossed them carelessly on one of the neatly stacked term paper monoliths on her desk.
“Creepy,” replied Celia Viramontes, St. Xavier University’s now off-duty head librarian. “But let’s go back to your mystery man. You never got a good look at his face?”
Emma shook her head. “He
