Allison Brennan - Killing Fear

Bus passengers were detained outside the suburb of Alpine off I-8. A light drizzle rained down as the passengers hovered under a fast-food awning, but Will barely noticed.

Theodore Glenn was not on the bus. He was not among the passengers. And he stood listening to the old bus driver with fear.

“We was only on the road twenty minutes when the old man complained he was sick. I left him at the Motel Six right outside Calexico.”

“Do you normally stop the bus if someone is ill?”

“’Course not, we got a toilet on board. But he looked white as a sheet and said it was his heart. I didn’t want him croaking on my watch.”

“What time was that?”

The driver made a point to look at his log. Will grabbed it from him. There was no mention of a stop outside Calexico. The log indicated no stops until this one.

“Did you stop or not?”

“Look, if I make an unscheduled stop, I got this huge pile of paperwork to deal with, and the guy was sick and-”

“What did he look like?” Will interrupted, keeping his voice low and even.

“Old. Least sixty, sixty-five. White hair. Lots of it, but white as snow. He’d have been tall if he wasn’t so crouched over and walking with a limp. Coughed the entire time. No one wanted to sit near him. I was glad to dump him off.”

“Did you see him get on the bus?”

The driver shrugged. “Sure.”

“Are you certain?” Will asked, his voice rising.

“Yeah, I did,” the driver said, defiant.

Will strode over to the group of passengers waiting to continue their trip.

“Raise your hand if you remember the stop at Motel Six where a sixty-year-old white-haired man was let off the bus,” he asked them. Virtually all of them raised their hand.

“How many of you would be able to recognize that man?”

A couple people put their hands down, but most kept them up.

“How many of you saw that man board the bus?”

After some hesitation, one by one the hands went down. The only hand remaining was a young boy of about ten.

Will went over to him. “What’s your name?”

“Keith Gomez.”

“Are you traveling alone, son?”

He nodded. “My mom and dad got divorced. I come on the bus to visit my dad every other weekend. I’m going back home to my mom. She’s going to be worried if the bus is late.”

“We’ll explain it to her, Keith. You saw the white-haired man board the bus.?

He shook his head.

Will frowned. “You kept your hand up. I thought you understood that meant that I wanted only those people who saw him get on the bus.”

“He didn’t. See, there was this other man. He was sitting in the back, right next to the bathroom door. As soon as the bus started to go, he went in there. He was coughing a lot. He was in there a long time. Like ten minutes. When he came out he looked different. He had brown hair, then he had white hair. He saw me staring and winked at me.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“He was coughing a lot and told Fat Ernie-the bus driver-that his ticker wasn’t good. What’s a ticker?”

“It’s slang for heart,” Will said.

“So Fat Ernie dropped him off. Ernie said it was to sleep off a bender. What’s a bender?”

“When someone drinks a lot of alcohol in a short period of time. What did the white-haired man look like before he entered the bathroom?”

The kid shrugged. “Brown hair. Sort of old, like you.”

Will unfolded Glenn’s mug shot and put it on the table in front of the kid. It instantly grew moist in the drizzle. “Is this the man you saw?”

The kid nodded. “Yeah, but he looked a little different. I think that’s him.”

Will stood and walked over to Blade and the others. “He’s not going to be at the motel, but someone should check it out. I’m going to check the bus. The kid said Glenn changed his appearance in the bathroom.”

Will boarded the bus and went straight for the bathroom. Pulling on gloves, he went through the trash. He found a receipt and bag from a costume shop in Calexico. On the bag Theodore Glenn had written:

By the time you read this, I’ll have Robin.

Hurry home, William.

Robin stared at the gun in her hands. She’d been holding it since the last time Mario checked in with her. He was outside her door, the only entrance and exit into her third-floor loft. One of his men had made sure all the fire escapes were secure and watched the doors into the building and underground parking garage.

Quiet. Too quiet.

Will hadn’t called, but she couldn’t expect him to from the field. He was working. How could she do this every day he went to work? Worry that he wouldn’t come home?

Stop. She was making excuses. On the surface, because of her fear that what she and Will had was too good to be true; but deep down she knew it was because she feared Glenn would make good on his threats. That he would kill Will. And her. That this entire ploy was a ruse to put Will within Glenn’s reach. Dear God, if he killed Will…A groan escaped Robin’s lips. Though intellectually she understood that she wasn’t responsible for the deaths of her friends seven years ago, in her heart she knew Glenn’s obsession with her had contributed to the murders.

She turned her gun over and over in her hands. “I will kill you, Theodore Glenn. I promise, I will kill you.”

Pickles leapt onto her bed and made her jump. He purred loudly and massaged his paws on her lap.

She stared at the lamp in her room. Even if she turned it off, she still had the small light in the kitchen on. She hadn’t really tried to be in the dark since the last time she freaked out, and that was years ago.

She turned off the lamp.

Her apartment plunged into darkness. Pickles me-owed as her grasp on him tightened. She let go and he jumped down, running under her bed. Her breath came in quick gasps. She tried to focus on the dim light coming from the kitchen, but it seemed to be moving farther and farther away. Her heart raced and she frantically reached out for the lamp, fumbled, knocked it onto her carpet.

“No, no, no!”

On her hands and knees she found the lamp and turned on the switch. It flickered and came on. She righted the lamp on her nightstand and hated herself for her fear. Dammit, she was thirty-one years old! She’d faced belligerent customers, hurtful boyfriends, and Theodore Glenn in court. Back then she had testified against him with less palpable fear than she had right now when submerged in darkness.

Isabelle had suggested a psychiatrist would be able to help with her phobia, but Robin didn’t want to admit that it was a mental problem. How could she expect Will to sleep every night with the lights on? Last night she knew, even after his exhausting week, that he’d been awake half the night.

For Will, she would find a way to get over this. Maybe with him in her bed, she wouldn’t need a light to feel safe.

“Sorry, Pickles,” she said to the cat still hiding under her bed. She put the gun down on her nightstand so she could take a hot shower. Water always made her feel better. The ocean, the bath, the shower, didn’t matter what, water was soothing.

Halfway to her bathroom, the light went out. Damn, the bulb must have been loose when she knocked the lamp off the table. She felt her way toward the bathroom door to flick on that light. Her heart was beating rapidly, but she felt like she was in control. A start.

Until her hand reached the light switch, turned it on, and nothing happened.

No bathroom light.

No bedside light.

Not even the kitchen light above the stove glowed.

She breathed deeply, but couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She felt along the wall toward the partition that separated her bedroom from the rest of the apartment.