Nowhere to Run. Nancy Bush

father . . .” He looked back inside through the glass door with an unreadable expression. “He and my mom don’t get along. At all. Ever. She hates it that I’m here. Says it’s too dangerous.”

      “Dangerous?” Liv repeated.

      “Oh, it’s all bullshit. She doesn’t even mean it. She just mainly wants to irk my father any way she can. And it works, ’cause he starts yelling that he should just fire me to get her off his ass. And she tells him where to stick it, and blah, blah, blah. It just goes on and on. God. They can’t stand each other.”

      “But you’re leaving Zuma?”

      “I overheard the old man tell her that he was really gonna do it this time. By the end of the week.” Aaron shrugged. “Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But if he does, I’ll survive. Just wanted to make sure we could stay friends.” He peered at her through heavy blond bangs. A scraggly beard darkened his jaw. His clothes looked like they’d come straight from the clothes hamper and his pants rode low enough on his hips to make her wonder exactly when gravity would win and puddle them around his ankles.

      She liked Aaron. She really did. But not in the way his eyes said he was hoping for. “We’re friends,” she said lightly.

      “Olivia . . .” he said, disappointed. “Give me something more than that.”

      “Good friends?” To his crushed look, she added, “Maybe later, we could talk? I’m just on my way to lunch now. I’m late already.” She half-turned back to the building.

      “Sneak out this way,” he invited, opening the gate. Now, this was definitely against all the rules. “Paul won’t like it.”

      “Paul doesn’t have to know.”

      Liv felt a stirring of rebellion fueled by the encouraging light in Aaron’s eyes. Add to that, she didn’t want to turn him down again, for anything. She hesitated a moment, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “All right.”

      He swung open the gate. “I’m not trying to push you, or anything. I just would like to . . . keep things going between us.”

      “Okay.”

      He smiled and swung the gate shut behind her, satisfied.

      “But when I come back through the front door, Paul’s going to rip me a new one,” she said.

      “Call me on my cell. I’ll sneak you back in.”

      “I don’t have a cell.”

      “Oh, God, that’s right.” He shook his shaggy locks. “I’ll leave the door propped open.”

      “Nah, I’ll go through the front and just take the heat.”

      “Check the side door. If it’s open, it’s open. If it’s not, the old man or somebody caught me.”

      “You don’t have to do that.”

      “Hey, I’m a short timer. I want to.”

      “Okay, then.” Liv waved to him as she headed out. Aaron was a slacker and a truant and a bit of a slug, but at least he amused her. Everybody else on the main floor seemed to have had the humor centers of their brains lobotomized.

      She went to a local deli whose chicken salad was to die for and ordered a chicken salad sandwich, Diet Coke and a packet of Miss Vickie’s Jalapeño Chips. She sat at a bistro table and watched the passers-by outside the window, her mind flitting back to the packet and Hague and his comments about the zombie man.

      If I look he’s always there. Out of the corner of your eye . . . there!

      Gooseflesh rose on her arms beneath the three-quarter-length sleeves of her V-necked shirt. It was late August and hot, and she could feel her skin break into a sweat.

      Since she’d pushed her lunch break till after one, it was two-twenty by the time she made it back to the building. This time she did park her car in the front, way in the front, so no one saw her car return so late. Then she hurried around to the right edge of the parking lot. She might be able to sneak by as a pedestrian if she kept the parked cars between her and Zuma’s main doors and therefore screened herself from Paul’s line of vision. As she ducked along, she peeked a time or two through the glass windows of the front atrium but she saw no one. She found her way to the side entrance and saw that the door was firmly shut. Uh-oh. Somebody was onto Aaron.

      Sighing, she retraced her steps to the front doors. She had five different excuses to tell Paul, none any good, and decided to just breeze in as if she owned the place and let him rain the litany of her transgressions down on her head. Take the bitter pill and get it over with.

      Drawing a breath, she strong-armed the mahogany front door and wondered why Paul wasn’t standing at the ready, poised to berate her. As the door swung shut behind her she stepped through the atrium and turned toward Jessica’s desk, a question on her lips as the door swung shut behind her, and then she saw the carnage in the office.

      Paul de Fore was splayed on the tile floor face down, blood pooling beneath his open mouth from a gunshot wound to the back of his head. She could hear moaning from beyond him. In a dream state she stepped over Paul and went to Jessica’s desk, giving a quick look over the top to see the receptionist on the floor behind her chair, curled up in the fetal position, blood blooming around the mounds of her breasts from a wound to the chest, small mewls issuing from her lips.

      A roaring started in Liv’s ears. She glanced to the partition of her own desk, her blood pounding, a voice screaming loudly. She clapped her hands over her ears to stop it and realized the shrieking voice was coming from her.

      She clamped her jaw shut; her lips trembled violently. Heart beating so hard she could see it jumping through her clothes, she cautiously stepped forward, half-expecting the gunman to jump from behind the partition. She was quaking so much she could scarcely stand. From around the corner that led to the executive offices, she saw the outstretched hand of a man wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt: Kurt Upjohn.

      Liv staggered toward him, peeking reluctantly around the corner. Upjohn was lying half-in, half-out of his office. Beyond lay Aaron’s body. Both of them were riddled with gunshot wounds.

      Kill you. Kill you!

      Backing away, she threw a glance toward the stairway and the geeks upstairs and Phil. That door was always locked. Shivering as from ague, her brain unable to process, she staggered back to Jessica’s desk and hit the main phone line, punching out 911.

      “Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?”

      “There’s—been a shooting,” she said in a stranger’s voice. She gave the address, then the receiver clattered from her hand as the operator begged her, “Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up,” and she didn’t. She simply let the receiver drop to the ground just like she had in her kitchen a few nights before.

      She stood frozen for the space of five rapid heartbeats.

      Then with a cry she ran back out the front door, her thoughts pinging around in her head as she considered how close she’d come to being gunned down as well.

      It’s you they’re after. You! Always you, the paranoid voice in her head warned. Go home. Get your own gun. And RUN.

      “Nine!” Detective George Thompkins bellowed from his swivel chair at the far end of the squad room.

      Detective September “Nine” Rafferty, named and nicknamed for the month she was born, jumped as if goosed. She’d been filling out some paperwork but the tone of George’s voice drove her instantly to her feet. She was a newly minted detective and so she stood ramrod straight. “Yes?”

      “Just talked to D’Annibal. He’s on his way in.” George cast a glance to the darkened glass cubicle that was their superior’s, Lieutenant Aubrey D’Annibal’s, office. D’Annibal was on the last hours of his vacation and that left George in charge, a dubious honor for a dubious commander. George