September sunlight streamed through the windows of the white Crown Vic that Paula had purchased secondhand from Gram Kate when Gram gave up driving. The brightness of it caught the fire in Paula’s vibrant hair. The hours-old color shift from dark auburn to a spirited red was light-years from her mind as she set out for Chicago. She was twenty minutes from home when her cell phone chirped.
“Paula? It’s Jake. I’m in Chicago, at Shelby’s apartment. Joy’s here.”
“At Shelby’s? What in the world is she… How did she get there?” cried Paula.
“She caught a ride to Bloomington, took the bus here and caught a cab. Relax, she’s safe and sound,” he said quickly.
“Thank God! Put her on.” Relieved tears blinding her, Paula pulled over to the side of the road.
“Now before you go ballistic, keep it mind I was careful. Except for the scary dream I had when I dozed off, it was just a boring old bus ride,” said Joy before Paula could say a word.
The conversation that followed did little to alleviate Paula’s long-term concerns. Joy’s intended meeting with Colt hadn’t materialized. Terse, willful and frustrated, Joy didn’t ask for Paula’s help. Or her understanding. Quite the reverse—she was openly defiant.
Jake offered to bring Joy home with him that evening, saving Paula the trip. But Joy’s escapade solidified Paula’s determination to talk with Colt and determine her next move. She would do it in person, God willing.
Two hours later, with 150 miles of interstate and a maze of traffic-choked Chicago streets behind her, Paula’s chest hurt. Her side, too. The pain was sharp, like a runner’s stitch. But the marathon was mental. She might have spared herself this day’s torment had she tracked Colt down once she learned she was pregnant. But at the time, his abandonment had been one blow too many. She was still reeling from the loss of her parents.
Paula braked for the light at a dreary inner-city intersection, whisked off her dark glasses and double-checked Monique Lockwood’s address.
The numbers corresponded with those on a house that had been converted into apartments. It was three doors down from a busy service station. A video store, a mom-and-pop grocery, and a house with tattoo parlor signs in the windows occupied the remaining corners of a junction where commerce and residential collided. Rap music blared from a passing car radio. A pneumatic tire wrench rat-a-tatted. Exhaust fumes poured from an idling car to mingle with clouds of industry and spread a pall over the neighborhood.
The light flashed green. Paula pulled ahead, seeking a parking space. But the curb was full to the end of the next block. She needed gas anyway. Paula circled the block and turned into the service station. But all the pumps were in use.
With a mental note to fill up later, Paula parked out of the way at one end of the station, grabbed her pocketbook off the bench seat and locked her car. Her pale-pink suit with its trim jacket and streamlined skirt hugged fit curves as she made her way around the chain-link fence bordering the station. Wild chicory grew in the wire meshing. Its blossom was as blue as Paula’s eyes and as out of place as she on this noisy street.
Her platform sandals hit the pavement, covering the growing racket of an uneasy mind as the distance melted away. Twin wires poked from a hole where a doorbell had once been. Paula curled her fist to match the knot in her stomach and rapped three times. But her prepared speech vaporized as the door swung open, not to the unknown Monique, but to Colt himself.
At point-blank impact, each impression was hard on the heels of another: his black T-shirt, jeans and open tailored jacket, his leanness, his gun-metal gaze, his fingers curling to scratch a short-clipped scalp. Shorter than she remembered, but the same ripe-wheat hair.
Missing was the rugged good looks that had captured Paula’s girlish fancy all those years ago. Like varnish that had spilled from a careless brush, scars stood in bold relief, crisscrossing prominent cheeks, proud nose and high brow. As if discerning her shock, Colt’s mouth flattened, underscoring his displeasure.
“We need to talk.” Paula minced no words.
“If you’re looking for Joy, she’s not here,” he countered.
“I know where she is,” replied Paula. “I came to take her home.”
“With or without seeing me?” he asked.
“That depends on you. Though you could refuse to see her,” she added.
Colt’s face remained tight, like molded plastic that had buckled in the sun. But those eyes! Lightning struck from their depths. Inquisitive, intelligent, intuitive. Something else, too. Some thing parental and fierce. It devoured Paula’s slim hope that they could come to an agreement that would settle the matter without further trauma or intersecting their separate lives.
She drew a tight, shallow breath before raising her eyes to his again. “May I come in?”
Colt shot a furtive glance over his shoulder. “You’ve picked a bad time.”
“Are you alone?” Paula asked.
“Yes. But I’m in the middle of something. I’ll be free shortly.”
“I’ll wait, then.”
“There’s a gas station on the corner. Wait there,” he said, and would have closed the door in Paula’s face except that her quick foot made a barrier. She pushed with both hands to widen the gap, and darted inside.
Thwarted, he said flatly, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Joy,” retorted Paula. “Do you want to see her or don’t you?”
“I do. But not here. Not now.”
“And not behind my back. At least let’s agree on that much.” Paula laid out what she wanted to hear the same way she had once laid out his clothes.
Colt’s jaw tightened. “I had nothing to do with her running away.”
“Not directly, perhaps.” Yielding to the fierceness of his expression, she gave him the benefit of the doubt, but added, “I’m not leaving until we’ve talked.”
Abruptly, he stepped aside, and closed the door. It was a hollow victory, indicative of nothing. Paula crossed to a well worn sofa and looked back to see him peer toward the street through a crack in the faded curtains. There was a catlike caution, a grimness about him Paula didn’t recall from the past. She jumped when he drove home the deadbolt lock.
His limping stride ate up the distance separating them. Paula settled at one end of the sofa. She tugged at her hemline, waiting for him to join her. Instead, he crouched down at the coffee table, and thumbed through a stack of postcards. Photo albums, letters and loose pictures were scattered at his feet.
The circumstances that had brought her to this juncture cycled through Paula’s mind. The waiting was like heat under a teakettle, building to a whistling boil. “Are you about done?” she asked at length.
Colt looked up at her, and then at the papers he’d strewn about.
“What am I thinking? You never were much for prioritizing,” she said, tension mounting.
“Is that why it took you so long to tell me we have a daughter?” he asked.
“We don’t, I do. And I didn’t tell you—she did.” Paula took issue.
Colt conceded her point with a chilling sweep of gray eyes, and wordlessly returned to the task at hand. Vignettes from the past washed over Paula as she watched his deft right hand flip a scenic postcard and scan the message. Hands that had once caressed and cradled and courted her favor.
Paula slammed the door on her thoughts, and worked instead to fully grasp the reality of the man before her. A man she had once so idolized, now scarred and broken. This was no time for sympathy. He would spurn her pity just as he had spurned the love she had once given.
Paula laced her fingers in her lap and checked the jittery impulse to tap her foot. The silence stretched between them. Again, the tension mounted, expanding like a balloon about to pop. So much so, she jumped when he cleared his throat.
“That should do it.” Colt set a single postcard to one side and came to his feet. “I’m free now to hash out visitation arrangements. Where would you like to finish this discussion?”
“Not so fast. I’m a long way from granting rights of any kind.” Paula started violently at an erratic popping sound from the street. The glass in the front window exploded from its frame.
In one fluid movement, Colt grabbed the postcard, lunged over the coffee table and drove Paula to the floor. “Keep your head down!” His cry rent the air.
The echoing staccato, the breaking glass, his crushing body went over her in an explosive wave. Even as she shrieked, he was rolling off her, warning, “Keep down! Crawl! Go! Go! Go!”
Even as he prodded her into retreat, it penetrated Paula’s fractured mind that the popping sound was gunfire. Colt bulldozed her on hands and knees into the kitchen. He shoved a table in front of the door leading from the living room, then flung open the back door.
“Wait for me!” Paula cried out in terror.
Colt turned back for her. Or so she thought until he ducked into the pantry and disappeared through a rug in the floor. Rather, a trapdoor with a ruglike covering.
“Wait! Don’t leave me!” she sobbed.
Colt caught her by the ankles and guided her down after him into the dingy crawl space. Dank air pressed close as he pushed her to one side, then stood on a paint can to reach the pantry door through the open trapdoor. He shut it, then pulled down the trapdoor, closing out all light except a glimmer peeking through a narrow grimy window.
He dropped beside her. “Are you hit?”
Unharmed, and numb with disbelief, she stammered, “Why would anyone…who would want to…are we going to die?”
“Shh! Get a grip,” snapped Colt.
Finding him only a stripe less frightening than the terror above, Paula huddled trapped in a half-standing position in a four-foot-high tangle of plumbing pipes and furnace duct. Claustrophobic, she fought engulfing panic. Horrific bumping and banging above gave way to heavy footsteps and swearing men. The pantry door creaked. The footsteps stopped.
Paula squeezed her eyes shut. She whimpered for air. Stars flickered behind her eyes. Colt clamped a hand to her mouth.