Nowhere to Run (6 page)
She rechecked the locks on her door, then made sure all the windows were closed, then rechecked everything again before heading to her closet, pulling out the shoe box on the floor, the one she’d buried beneath a pile of shoes that she never wore. Placing the shoe box on the bed, she lifted the lid, then gently reached inside for her handgun. She hadn’t purchased it; Della had confiscated it from Hague years before when he’d been suicidal and had found it at some gun show. Back then, Della thought Liv was an ally, that they were both interested in Hague’s well-being, but she’d slowly lost faith in Liv over the years. Now, Della only warmed to her when they had a common enemy like Lorinda. Liv had gotten the .38 out of the deal, however. Sometimes she asked herself why she had a gun. She knew how to load and unload it, but she wasn’t proficient in its use. Still, it made her feel secure, just knowing it was at hand, and tonight she put the .38 under her pillow and fell asleep wondering if she should load it, never wakening to do so.
Chapter 4
On Friday Liv was late for work and caught the stink-eye from Paul de Fore as she hurried through Zuma Software’s front door. She’d almost parked her car in front of the building instead of the employee lot on the west side, just to save time, but she sensed that might come back to bite her somehow, so she backed into her usual spot and walked around to the front, taking the heat from Paul as she strode quickly to her desk. Paul had no serious authority to admonish her, but that never stopped him. She listened with half an ear for his footsteps, expecting him to follow after her to give her a good tongue-thrashing, but he got tied up at the door when Jessica Maltona slipped outside for a coffee on an unscheduled break.
“Hey,” he yelled after her. “You can’t leave without authority! Mr. Upjohn will hear about this!”
Definitely a tool.
Liv ducked down below the half-wall of her cubicle, switching on her computer and locking her purse in the drawer as she settled into her rolling chair and wheeled up to the desk. She laid down the package from her mother, eyeing the manila envelope thoughtfully as she waited for the machine to click and burp its way to “ready.”
It was the envelope that had made her late, or more accurately, the contents within. She’d pored over the pieces again this morning while she was drinking her coffee and the time had swept by so quickly that she’d looked up at the clock and gasped, and then raced to the office.
Was the stalking, angry man in the photo Hague’s zombie, and therefore the person the police had dubbed Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man? Was he her mother’s friend? Her lover, maybe? Why was he in the photos? And what was its meaning to Liv?
What did she know about her mother, really, she asked herself now. Only vague childhood memories that had been tainted and colored with time.
About lunchtime Aaron came around her partition and rapped his knuckles on her desk while she was on the phone with a supplier missing an invoice. She shook her head at him, and he motioned for her to meet him outside. Nodding, she waved him off, and as soon as she finished her call and hung up, she grabbed her purse from its locked cabinet, got up from her chair, straightened it, threw a glance at the package which she’d now stuck in the slot of the message holder at the side of her desk, then turned—and nearly ran smack into Kurt Upjohn, owner of Zuma Software.
“Hi,” Liv said in surprise.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
Upjohn was a short man with a tight mouth, a smoothly shaved head and one earring. He wasn’t all that bad looking, but he was always filled with tension, like a coiled spring, and it invariably made Liv feel uncomfortable.
“Just . . . getting ready for my lunch break.” She picked up her mother’s package and stuffed it into her purse, deciding she didn’t want to leave it at her desk after all, then slung the purse strap over her shoulder.
“Kinda late for lunch.” Upjohn frowned. He liked his employees to take their meals at noon and be back at one
P.M.
sharp, one of his personal quirks that didn’t seem to be grounded in anything that made sense.
P.M.
sharp, one of his personal quirks that didn’t seem to be grounded in anything that made sense.
“I’ve been running late all day,” she admitted.
“Phil said he gave you the financials from last quarter. . . .” He sounded cautious, his brows pulled together.
“Um, no. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen them.”
And why would he give them to me, anyway?
Liv thought. Phillip Berelli was Zuma’s internal accountant whereas she was an inputter, not an analyst.
And why would he give them to me, anyway?
Liv thought. Phillip Berelli was Zuma’s internal accountant whereas she was an inputter, not an analyst.
“Okay.” He seemed relieved. “Maybe he said something else.”
Liv lifted her shoulders and after a moment Upjohn walked off. She’d heard rumors about Zuma, about how they could be in financial trouble, but if they were she didn’t know anything about it. She had pieces of the financial mosaic, but getting the whole picture was way above her pay grade.
She’d heard other rumors as well, though. Like how Zuma’s war games were so accurate and well thought-out that there was some military connection—the think-tank guys upstairs being secret government employees—and that Zuma Software itself was merely a cover.
Even with her paranoia, Liv didn’t buy that one. She’d seen the guys upstairs when they came out of their locked room, walked down the stairs, and passed by her with barely a look as they headed out the front door. Invariably, their conversation made her feel like she was listening to the goings-on inside a thirteen-year-old boy’s mind; mostly they talked about other games and popular movies and their eyes darted quick looks at Jessica Maltona’s breasts when they thought she wasn’t looking. Jessica was the only other woman on the main floor with Liv. Count in Aaron, Paul and Kurt Upjohn, and that was the extent of the business staff, except for Phil, the accountant, whose office was upstairs with the game builders.
Aaron was just stubbing out a cigarette when Liv opened the unlocked exterior door and met him on the side patio. “Man, this place is boring,” he said, punctuating his statement with a yawn.
Liv merely nodded. Her mind’s eye wouldn’t stop going over the papers from inside the package whenever she had a free moment. The birth certificate named her biological parents. She’d never known who they were. Hadn’t really cared. But now she wondered if she should make an attempt to meet them . . . like maybe that was important to Deborah? Did that sound right? It was much more likely that her mother had just wanted Liv to have the information in case anything happened to her. . . . Maybe she was toying with the idea of suicide when she’d made up the package? Or, maybe she’d sensed something else . . . something coming toward her . . . something—
“Hey.” Aaron snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Come back.”
“I was just . . . thinking.”
“I could see that. Did you hear what I said?”
She tried to run back the last few minutes, but it was useless.
“I said,” Aaron reminded her in a measured tone, “that I think I’d like to meet Tiny and get to know her on a more personal basis.”
“Tiny . . . oh, the cat. Yes. Well, about that—”
“You don’t have a three-hundred-pound cat.”
“Well . . . no.” She smiled.
“Figured.” His answering smile was faint. “Just thought maybe you and I . . . could do something? Before I’m gone for good.” He made a face, as if he’d tasted something bad.
“What does that mean?”
“My 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.
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