Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (66 page)

His comment, though funny, only illustrated that he didn’t get really understand the severity of the Mateo situation. If he had, he not only wouldn’t have been making a joke about it but he also would have been getting dressed, leaving, and never looking back.

I was being selfish by not reiterating how dangerous all of this was, and I knew it, but I reminded myself that I had trusted Robbie enough to fully disclose my past, something I had never done before. If he wanted to stay, that was a choice he had to make for himself. For once, I had found someone I was willing to tempt fate with.

I hoped it wouldn’t be the biggest mistake of my life.

“I have to go,” I told him, backing out of the bedroom. “Feel free to stay and get some actual sleep if you want.” I shot him a playful wink as I turned to walk away. I smiled to myself, thinking he wasn’t the only one with game.

“I might just do that,” he seamlessly replied. “I have to prepare for tonight. You’re so demanding.”

“Some of us don’t need preparation. We’re just that good.”

I closed the bedroom door behind me on my way to the bathroom and leaned against it for a moment. I was playing with fire, and I knew it. Some idioms were popular for a reason. It made me wonder just how long I had before playing with that fire got me, or both of us, burned.

chapter 8

Robbie

No answer. That’s what I got every time I tried the number she had given me before she left for work, and she hadn’t messaged me to let me know she was running late. I sat in my rental car outside The Crab Shack, but I couldn’t see her waitin
g in our spot―the table I’d specifically requested, where we’d had our first date. Her car wasn’t parked outside, either. Something in the back of my mind wrestled with these details. It was easy to try and blow it off like she was a normal chick who got caught up with her choice of outfit for the night, but Cristina was anything but a normal girl. And, by her own admission, she didn’t do late.

I tried to keep my spiraling mind occupied by calling the hospital. It wouldn’t have been completely out of the question for an emergency to have required her to work longer than expected without access to her phone. While I waited for someone in the Imaging Department to pick up, I fiddled with the fraying wrap on the steering wheel, plucking minute pieces off. It was a nervous habit of mine.

“Radiology, Pam speaking,” a voice said flatly on the other end of the phone.

“Pam, this is Robbie Townsend. Is Cris there?”

“She isn’t here, Robbie. She left before the end of her shift. She looked upset.”

“Okay, thanks, Pam.”

I hung up the phone while my mind reeled.
She left early . . . looked upset . . .

Something about those words didn’t sit well with me. There was something in her voice the previous night—even that morning—and I had recognized it when I heard it. Doubt, it was creeping in. She had tried to keep me at arm’s length until she let me in the night before, shedding her hardened exterior, if only for the night. She had let me into her mind and her body. And now, I feared, she was shutting me out.

Or at least she was trying to.

I was born and raised to be a stubborn ass. I’d spent my adult life honing that characteristic. No little fiery Puerto Rican
chica with a shady past was going to get rid of me that trait easily. If she wanted me gone, she was going to have to stand her ground and debate the issue to my face.

I had no intention of making it easy for her, either.

Pulling out of the restaurant parking lot, I made my way to her apartment. The one I’d left only hours earlier. I played different scenarios over and over again in my head so that she couldn’t blindside me. I was prepared for any shenanigan she might sling my way.

It didn’t take long before I found myself in front of her downtown apartment building, looking up at her living room window. The lights were off, which I did not take to be a good sign. I couldn’t tell if I felt angry, irritated, or resigned to the direction my night was taking, but it didn’t matter. I knew I was going to get out of my car, walk into her building, up the stairs, and knock on her door regardless of which emotion ultimately won.

So that’s exactly what I did. Two minutes later, I was staring at a slightly askew number three on her apartment door, preparing to knock. I lightly rapped on the wooden door, not wanting to appear aggressive. I may have been irritated, but showing her that by pounding on the door hardly seemed the best course of action. When she didn’t respond, I knocked again, only harder. Then I waited, leaning into the door to listen for any noise that might have come from within.

I heard nothing.

“Cristina,” I called. “We need to talk about this.”

Nothing still.

I knocked harder.

“Cristina, don’t do this. Don’t shut me out without giving me a chance first. A
real
chance.”

After a long pause and a heavy sigh, I turned to leave, feeling both neutered and defeated—a combination I wasn’t a fan of. Just as I took my first step away from her door, I heard something from deep within the apartment. It was a faint, nearly indiscernible noise, but I knew my ears weren’t deceiving me.

I had heard a muffled cry.

I turned back to face her door and called her name a third time, trying to door, which, to my rising irritation, was locked. The jig was up; I knew she was there. Unfortunately, knowing that she was purposely trying to evade me tipped my mood further in the direction of anger. I pounded on the door, insistent that she let me in. I may have been a lot of things in my time, but a chump wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t going to be played like that, not by her. Not by anyone.

“Open it, Cristina,” I yelled at the door, the sound of my own voice loudly reverberating against it. I continued to rattle the handle, hoping that I could wrestle it open. The sound the door handle made was distracting. I almost missed her reply because of it.

“You need to leave, Robbie. It’s over. We’re done,” she called, still deep within her apartment. “Whatever you thought was going on isn’t.”

“Bullshit!”

“It’s not bullshit,” she replied, hesitating slightly. “That’s just the way the wind blows sometimes.” I stopped short, every pore on my body instantly sweating. “Do you hear me?” she continued, her voice more calm and eerie than before. “You need to go.”

“Fine,” I bit out, trying to keep hostility in my voice to cover my rising fear. She had said that Mateo was like the wind, that he’d find her one day. She was right. He clearly had.

Fumbling to get my phone out of my pocket, I stepped down the stairs just far enough to be out of earshot. Once the dispatcher came through, I gave the most hurried description of the situation and location before putting my phone down and creeping back up the stairs to her apartment door. I figured if I disappeared from the call, they’d be more concerned and put a rush on it, though telling them that a multi-felon stalker had his ex-girlfriend hostage in her apartment might have gotten their attention, too.

Staying low, I maneuvered myself into the corner, with my ear pressed against the wall that featured the front door to her apartment. I needed to buy time until the cops came. Cristina had said Mateo was violent, and the thought of him hurting her had my balls in my throat. What kind of man just sat by idly while a woman’s life was in danger. Especially a man who may or may not have been falling in love with that woman.

Unacceptable.

I needed to act, foolish though I knew it was. Nobody had ever accused me of thinking things through, at least not when I was off-deck, but I was always loyal to a fault. My friends and family knew this about me, and I would be damned if that asshole harmed one hair on Cristina’s head so long as I had air in my lungs and a beat in my heart.

There was no time to form a plan of any sort. I didn’t know where he was, if he was armed, or what exactly he was capable of doing. If I took Cristina at her word, there was little Mateo wouldn’t do. I needed something—a distraction—to take him off guard. I looked across the hall to see a fire extinguisher staring at me from the opposing wall, and I risked being heard in order to sneak over and pull it from its mount. It would serve two purposes really: it was a great substitute for a flashbang and it was heavy as shit. If I had to hit him with something, the fire extinguisher would pack a punch and then some.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I stood up and, throwing the entire weight of my body behind it, I kicked the apartment door down, fire extinguisher at the ready. As soon as I saw him round the corner from Cristina’s bedroom at the far end of the apartment, I let the foam fly. Unrelentingly, I unleashed the compressed contents throughout the room, moving laterally while I made my way into the living room. Mateo wouldn’t have been able to see me, but he knew where I’d just been standing, which was precisely why I didn’t want to just stand there and wait for him to come to me. My goal was to get to Cristina as quickly as possible. The Cristina that was screaming wildly from the bedroom in the back of the apartment.

“Gun!” I finally heard her say, her words penetrating my adrenaline-soaked mind. “Get out! He’s got a gun.”

A blast echoed through the tiny home, filling the space.

Cristina didn’t make a sound after that.

“Cris!” I shouted, storming through the cloud I’d created in an effort to get to her as quickly as possible. My progress was quickly brought to a halt when I was met with a wall of muscle and the butt end of a gun.

“I’m going to make this hurt,” his gruff voice growled, wrestling me to the ground and pinning me there. He punctuated his menacing statement with a crushing blow to my temple. My left ear started to ring immediately.

In my struggle to escape Mateo, I realized that the screen of fog that had only moments earlier been advantageous to me was now anything but. I couldn’t see my surroundings or the gun I knew he likely still had in his possession. Worst of all, I couldn’t see where Cristina assumedly lay bleeding, possibly even dying. The cops may have been on their way, but I began to believe that they were going to roll up on little more than a double homicide if I didn’t find a way out of the mess I’d made, and fast. But it was infinitely hard to think when that thug kept raining punches down on me.

I needed to secure an advantage against him.

And that’s when I remembered the canister. I had dropped it when Mateo initially took me to the ground, but I knew it couldn’t have gone far. Still on my back, I wriggled away from him, frantically reaching around on the floor for the heavy piece of metal.

“Bingo,” I whispered to myself before another punch snapped my head to the side. “My turn,” I yelled. Getting a good hold on the grip of the extinguisher, I swung the heavy barrel wide in order to gain maximum momentum. The sound it made when it connected with Mateo’s head was sickening, but satisfying all the same.

I scrambled to my feet, hoping to see where the gun had gone. I’d heard it fall when I hit him, but I still couldn’t see well due to the remnants of fog I’d created with the fire extinguisher and the blows to the head I’d sustained. When I heard him rustling on the floor, I blindly swung it again in the direction of his rustling. The barrel of the extinguisher connected hard with the thick side of his abdomen. I heard him exhale sharply as the strike knocked the wind out of him.

Still unable to see things clearly, I got down on my hands and knees to search for the gun as I made my way to Cristina’s room. I needed to see if she was okay. She still hadn’t made a sound since the gunshot. Frantically, I called to her, shouting her name over and over again, but the response was the same: utter silence. With my pulse beating loudly in my ears, I came upon her. She wasn’t moving. I could see there was blood, but I couldn’t tell where exactly it was coming from.

I wanted to assess her more closely, but I could hear movement in the living room. I knew if I didn’t secure that weapon before Mateo did that both Cristina and I would be dead. Fighting my desire to go to her, I crawled back out to where Mateo was slowly pulling himself up off the ground. The room was clearer now, and I could see blood trickling down his face as he turned to pin his cold, dead eyes on me. How she could have ever loved a man that looked like evil incarnate was beyond me, but that was hardly the time to judge. I needed to find that gun.

“I hope she was worth dying for,” he sneered, spitting the blood that had run into his mouth out onto the carpet.

“I hope you like prison, because I’m pretty sure that’s where you’ll be heading soon. Maybe you can find a new girlfriend there.”

“Funny guy . . . we’ll see how funny you find me when I’m crushing your throat with my bare hands.”

“I’ll be laughing on the inside,” I countered, slowly searching the room for the gun while I kept Mateo in my sight. The damn thing was nowhere to be found. And neither were the cops for that matter. It seemed like it had been at least twenty minutes since I’d made the 9-1-1 call. Maybe they weren’t too excited to roll up on a hostage situation with a known felon. Having squared off against Satan himself, I couldn’t really blame them.

Apparently having had enough talk for the evening, Mateo lunged at me and sacked me football style. We crashed through the coffee table, shattering both the glass and the frame. The fall hurt, and I knew I was cut, but there was no time to worry about that. With his hands wrapped around my throat, Mateo was trying to make good on his promise. He had a solid fifty pound weight advantage on me. Combined with his body position, things were not looking good for me. I was naturally strong from working on the decks of crabbing boats for my entire adult life, and adrenaline was giving me an added edge, but he had rage and a raw craziness behind him.