Under Wraps (11 page)

“Parker?” I asked the second I heard the phone connect. “Detective?”

Detective Hayes’s voice was sleep-heavy and gruff. “Parker is fine, Lawson.”

“Wow,” I said, pushing the button on the elevator. “You knew it was me. You are a good detective.”

“Good enough to have caller ID. Did your new houseguest take a bite out of you or is there another reason for this?” I heard him pause; then I heard the groan of a mattress, “One A.M. phone call?”

“Maybe.” I bit my lip, glancing once more over my shoulder at Mr. Sampson’s office. “I think my boss is missing.”

“Your boss? You mean Mr. Sampson? Missing? How do you know that? Where are you?”

“At the office. I’m about to get in the elevator. I came down here because Nina told me that she didn’t chain up Pete—Mr. Sampson—tonight. I was worried so I came to do it myself.”

“It’s not a full moon, right?” Hayes let out an inelegant, bored yawn. “Maybe he just went home.”

“His den.”

“What?”

“His den. He has a den, not a home … exactly. And no, I don’t think so. The office—something happened here. Everything is broken, shattered and … and one of the chains was broken. It had been torn from the wall.”

“So what does that mean? I thought you said that Nina didn’t chain him up. Why would the chains have been broken if Mr. Sampson never got chained up?”

“Mr. Sampson knows that he needs to be chained up. Always—full moon, or not.” I slumped, waiting for the damn elevator. “So, sometimes if we’re busy, Mr. Sampson will start chaining himself. If he does it early enough, it’s not a problem. But if he starts to change … if he starts to change before he’s completely secured—”

“He can do things like tear chains straight out of cement.”

“Yeah.” The elevator
dinged
and the doors slid open, to my immense relief. I rushed inside, mashing my fingers against the CLOSE DOOR button.

“Do you think he’s dangerous?” All the sleep was gone from Parker’s voice now.

“No,” I said, annoyed, “I think he’s
in
danger.”

The elevator doors slid shut, the phone still pressed against my ear. “There is a murderer on the loose and frankly, a task force of police officers who are out looking for a giant dog to shoot. I think someone may have gone after Sampson. Parker?” I frowned into the mouthpiece. “Parker, are you listening to me?” My cell phone went silent, the frowny little
call dropped!
icon on the screen.

“Stupid cell phone,” I muttered, riding the elevator to the ground floor of the police department.

I half ran, half walked through the bustling police department offices, my heart thundering in my throat. When I pushed through the back door into the department parking lot, one of the overhead lights was buzzing and blinking annoyingly. I stepped into the outside darkness and hurried through the lot that had emptied considerably, and when I approached my car down the block, the behemoth SUV and paper-stacked station wagon were gone, too. I was about to push my key into the lock when I heard the rustle of feet on gravel, and the unmistakable metallic smell of blood wafting on the air. I resisted the bad-horror-movie urge to yell out
Hello? Is anybody there?
into the darkness, and instead focused on getting my car door open and me behind the wheel before I wet my pants.

I yanked open my car door and was halfway through it when I felt the moist breath against my neck, then the viselike grip on my shoulder, yanking me out of the car. I yelped as fire roared from my shoulder to my chest and I was pulled, my forehead crashing against the hard metal door frame, the skin above my left eye splitting and immediately starting to ooze blood. I couldn’t make out the face in the darkness, but I knew that it was coming toward me, teeth bared, fingers gripping. Blood stung my eye and so I clenched my eyes shut, ready for the toothpicklike snapping of my bones. I opened my mouth to scream, but my voice was gone, strangled, lost in my own throat.

And that was the last thing I remembered.

Chapter Eight

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Opie’s face hovering above me, his watery eyes studying my forehead. His big nostrils flared, and I heard him say, “She’s coming around, sir.”

I tried to sit up, but my head and shoulders protested, the searing pain roaring through my body. My head throbbed, felt raw and cold above my eye, and my stomach seemed to curl over on itself. I blinked twice, trying to avoid the angry fluorescent glare above my head.

“Where am I?” I finally muttered, my lips sticky and stiff.

“She’s talking!” Opie said, his small hazel eyes not leaving mine. “What should I do?”

Police Chief Oliver looked down on me next, the dark brown of his eyes highlighting the huge purple bags underneath them. He was an enormous walrus of a man with a heaving chest puffed out and decorated with police paraphernalia, and a fine trail of drying marinara sauce on his navy blue tie. He crouched so that he was eye level with me.

“Are you okay, Miss Lawson?” he asked slowly, enunciating every word.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to take in the scene. “What happened?”

The chief stepped back and clapped Opie on the back. He said, “She’s going to be okay, Franks. Let’s just give her some room,” and both men stepped away from me.

I rolled my head, my skull filling with a new needling, angry pain. I tried to blink it away and then focused on the wall in front of me until I realized that I was stretched out on a sticky pleather sofa in an office that smelled of feet and corn chips and was stacked with bargain basement office furniture. “Where am I?” I repeated.

“It’s okay, Sophie. You’re fine. You’re in my office,” the police chief answered, and I felt his warm hand closing over my wrist, felt his finger find my pulse point and pause. “Don’t try to move,” he said when I attempted to sit up again. “You had quite a scare out there tonight.”

I struggled to a sitting position despite Chief Oliver’s warning, and yelped at the dull ache that blossomed from my shoulder and inched across my chest. I gently touched the cool spot above my eyebrow and winced, pulling my fingers away and examining the sticky traces of drying blood on them. “Am I dead?” I asked mournfully.

Opie grinned stupidly, and Chief Oliver set my wrist down, patting my hand gingerly.

“No, honey, you’re just fine. It seems you ran into”—I watched his eyes shift uncomfortably—“a bad element. What were you doing all alone in the middle of the night anyway?”

I thought of UDA, of Mr. Sampson and the broken chains. “Looking for my kitty,” I answered finally.

“Well, you should do that in the daylight hours and in a better part of town. You’ve got a pretty nasty bump on your head and you’re a little bruised up, but I think you’re going to be just fine. Officer Franks can drive you home.”

“No,” I said, planting my feet firmly on the floor. “I ran into a bad element? What does that mean? What happened to me? What, exactly, happened?”

I might have been paranoid, but I would almost swear that Officer Opie and Chief Oliver shared a look. I considered that it could have been the “nutty cat lady is getting hysterical” look, but I thought there was more to it. “Please,” I said. “I need to know.”

“Gangbangers, likely,” the chief said, nodding officially.

“Gangbangers?” I asked skeptically.

Though I didn’t remember much of the night and admittedly, my experience with gangs could be summed up by the toe-tapping musical brawl from
West Side Story,
I would have been willing to bet money that today’s gangs hadn’t evolved to bared teeth, claws, and superhuman strength. I winced again when I took a deep breath that sent pinpricks of pain throughout my chest and back. “You’re sure it was a gang? Did you see them? Did you see anyone?”

The chief raised one challenging eyebrow, and Opie nodded his head wildly, his strawberry-blond hair bobbing against his forehead. “Gangbangers, definitely. We didn’t see ‘em, but that’s what they were. Definitely,” he said.

The chief stepped away from me and eyed Officer Opie. “Franks, why don’t you help Miss Lawson to her feet?”

“I think I’m good.” My legs were a little shaky, but I opted to steady myself against a cold metal file cabinet rather than risk my chances with Opie’s awkwardly outstretched stick arms.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” I said, “but I’m feeling much better now. I just need to get home and rest.”

“I’ll drive you,” Opie said, dangling a chain full of keys in front of me. “We can take my squad car.”

I looked from Opie to the chief and realized that I’d be lucky to walk out of this station under my own volition (rather than be thrown over the shoulder and carried out by Opie), let alone be allowed to drive my own car home, so I agreed to let Opie drive me.

“But I need to stop by my car first,” I said quickly, “just to grab a few things.”

The chief nodded, and Opie led me out of the office and into the cold night air. We walked in awkward silence across the parking lot, and I sucked in a tortured breath when I saw my car in its space on the street.

My car, my little green baby, my first big-girl purchase, was a complete mess of crumpled steel and scratched-up paint. The driver’s side door was smashed in like a tin can, and the cut on my forehead throbbed when I examined the forehead-sized crack in the passenger-side window. The driver’s seat was shredded, and cotton stuffing bloomed from tears in the passenger seat, too.

“Those gangbangers,” Opie said, clucking his tongue, “they can really do some damage.”

I nodded solemnly and stuck my head into the car, feeling around on the carpet for my keys. I remembered the sound they made as they fell onto the floor, right before I felt the wind get knocked out of me. I shuddered, then closed my fingers around the keys.

“Okay,” I said to Opie. “I’m ready.” I cocked my head, swallowing over the lump that rose in my throat when I took a last look at my shredded interior. I blinked.

“Wait.” I slid back into the cab of the car and leaned down to where a long, jagged gash had been made in the center console. There was a spray of cotton from the shredded seat, a sprinkling of broken glass, and a tuft of dark fur.

I picked up the fur and stuffed it in my pocket.

After an uneventful—and quiet—drive home in the squad car, Opie pulled up to my apartment building. I plastered a smile on my face and turned toward him, wincing softly as the new bruises on my shoulder and rib cage protested.

“Thanks for the ride, Officer Franks. I can make it from here.”

He looked skeptically at the clean, well-lit sidewalk in front of my Nob Hill building and wagged his head, his eyes wide and ominous.

“I don’t think so, Sophie. There’s a bad element out there.”

I squinted out the window at the deserted street, fairly certain a lone tumbleweed would roll by at any minute.

“Gangbangers?” I asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

Opie didn’t answer, and before he could go for the door handle, I rested my hand on top of his.

“Officer Franks, what really happened tonight?”

Opie stared out the windshield, and I watched as he gnawed on his bottom lip, deep in thought.

I took a chance. “I really don’t think it was gangbangers.” I touched the broken skin above my eye, fresh pain blooming at the slightest touch. “I don’t think they do this kind of damage. This almost seemed … personal. Don’t you think?”

“We got to you just in time,” was all Opie said.

“Well, when you got to me, what did you see?”

A full thirty seconds of silence passed, and then Opie looked me full in the face and said, “We should get you upstairs.”

He insisted on walking me to my front door and standing far too close to me while I pushed the key in the lock. Then Opie slipped in front of me and into the apartment, doing a
Law & Order-style,
guns-drawn exploration of the house while I eyed him disdainfully from my spot in the hall. When Opie was certain no gangbangers were using the plastic ficus for cover, he left.

I immediately fished in my bag for my cell phone and sighed when I saw that Parker had tried to call me six times. I dialed him, and he picked up on the first ring.

“Lawson!” he shouted into the phone. “What the hell? I’ve been trying to call you for hours! Is everything okay?”

“It’s Sophie,” I sighed, “and yes, I think so.”

“Is everything okay at UDA? Where’s Sampson?”

“Yeah, yeah, the UDA is fine. But I don’t know where Mr. Sampson is.” I slumped into the couch, and found myself bawling.

“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” I heard Parker say between my hiccupping wails. “Slow down.”

“Something attacked me!” I sniffed. “They said it was gangbangers! But I don’t think it was gangbangers!”
Sniff, sniff, wail.
“My car is broken! Like a tin can!”

“Stay right there. I’m on my way.”

Barely fifteen minutes had passed when there was an insistent rapping on my door. My heart thundered as I stood on tiptoes and peeked through the peephole, seeing Parker’s head, distorted and huge in my view.

I opened the door timidly, just an inch, and my eyes settled on Parker’s. His were deep navy blue and intense.

“You didn’t ask who it was.”

I rolled my eyes, the relieved joy of seeing him standing in my hallway seeping away. “I have a peephole. And what is this, some kind of after-school special?
I’m
the victim here.”

Parker pushed the door open and walked past me. “And
I’m
trying to make sure that it never happens again.”

I closed the door and tumbled the lock, glancing once more out the peephole for Parker’s benefit. Then I sat on the couch, and Parker settled down next to me.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” he said.

But I couldn’t.

My eyes were locked on Detective Parker Hayes sitting on my couch at 3 A.M.: dark hair disheveled and unabashedly sexy, his square jaw littered with razor stubble, T-shirt on backward, his undershorts sticking out of the top of his sweatpants.

“Is that Daffy Duck?” I asked, eyeing the black cartoon ducks on his waistband.