LITMIR.BIZ

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he mumbled.

      Kristi inwardly sighed. “Okay, let’s start over. Everything’s cool here, okay? I fixed the locks. I’ll give your grandmother, Mrs. Calloway, a key and she can see that you have one, though, I assume that you won’t come barging in here unless you give me notice…I think that’s in the lease, too.” She slid the chain out of its latch and let the door open wider, then stepped onto the small porch. “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot with you, Hiram. I’m just a little nervous, hearing that one of the missing girls lived here last term. Your grandmother didn’t mention it and it’s a little weird.” He stared at the floorboards of the landing. He didn’t look a day over seventeen. Hardly man enough to be a manager of any kind. “So, did you know her? Tara?”

      “Not really. We talked. A little.” He lifted his eyes to meet the questions in Kristi’s gaze. “She was nice. Friendly.” He didn’t have to say “not like you” but the unspoken accusation was there in his dark, murky stare. His features stiffened almost imperceptibly, but enough so that Kristi noticed the tightening of his jaw, the nearly involuntary pinching of the corners of his mouth. In that instant Kristi knew she’d been fooled by his youthful appearance. There was something sinister smoldering in his night-dark eyes, something she didn’t like. This was no boy at all, but a man in a boy’s gawky body. She hadn’t noticed it through the peephole or in the slit of the door when the chain was engaged, but now, face to face with Hiram Calloway, she realized she was standing next to a complex and angry man.

      She lifted her chin. “So, what do you think happened to her?”

      He glanced over the railing toward the campus. “They say she ran away.”

      Kristi said, “But no one really knows.”

      “She did before.”

      “Did she tell you about it?”

      He hesitated, then shook his head. “Nah. She kept to herself.”

      “You said she was friendly. That you talked.”

      A funny smile played upon those half-hidden lips. “Who knows what happened to her? One day she was here. The next, gone.”

      “And that’s all you know?”

      “I know that her old man is in prison somewhere and that she stiffed my grandmother.” He met her gaze deliberately. “Owed her back rent. Grandma says she’s a ‘flake’ and a ‘crook like her old man.’ Grandma figures she got what she deserved.”

      “Got what she deserved,” Kristi repeated slowly, not liking the sound of that. Far away, laughter crackled through the night.

      Hearing his words repeated made Hiram frown. “I’ll tell Irene you’ve got a key for her.” And with that he was gone, trudging down the steps and carrying his tools. Kristi stepped back into her apartment and slammed the door shut. She locked the dead bolt and chain and felt her skin crawl. Irene Calloway’s “good kid” of a grandson gave Kristi a major case of the creeps.

      CHAPTER 4

      BANG!

      A sharp gun report blasted through the thick dark night, the smell of cordite overriding the earthy odor of the wet grass, the horrible crack reverberating through Kristi’s skull.

      In horror, she watched as Rick Bentz went down, falling, falling, falling…near the thick stone wall surrounding All Saints College.

      Blood flowed. His blood. All over the street. Staining the concrete. Spraying the grass. Running in the gutters. Draining from him.

      “Dad!” she screamed, her voice mute, her legs leaden, as she tried to run to him. “Dad, oh, God, oh, God….”

      Lightning sizzled through the sky, striking a tree. A horrid rending noise keened through the night as the wood splintered and a heavy branch fell with a thud. The ground shook and she nearly fell.

      BANG! BANG! BANG!

      More shots! People were yelling, screaming through the hail of bullets. Someone was howling miserably as if he or she, too, had been hit.

      But her father lay still, his color fading to black and white.

      “Dad!” she screamed again.

      BANG! BANG! BANG!

      Kristi sat bolt upright in her chair.

      Oh, God, she’d been dreaming, the nightmare vivid and terrorizing. Her heart was thundering, fear and adrenaline screaming through her blood, sweat breaking out on her skin.

      She jumped, then looked at the clock and realized she was hearing the sound of firecrackers. People were ringing in the new year. Muted laughter and shrieking reached her ears. Church bells on campus peeled and over the din she heard the sound of horrible yowling, the noise she’d attributed to someone injured in the attack.

      “Dear God,” she whispered, her heart still thundering.

      Still a little groggy, she pushed herself up from the chair. She’d been reading about a serial killer and the imagined images still danced inside her head as she shoved her hair from her eyes and then walked to the door of her studio. Only her desk light was on, and aside from the pool of light cast from the small lamp, the room was in shadows. Peeking through the peephole in the door, she saw nothing. Just the empty stair landing where the dim bulb in the ceiling offered a hazy blue glow. Still the crying continued. Leaving the chain locked, she slid the dead bolt out of place and opened the door a crack.

      Instantly a skinny black cat shot inside.

      “Whoa…!” Kristi watched as the half-starved creature scurried under the daybed, the bedskirt undulating in the cat’s wake. “Oh, come on, kitty…kitty…no…” Kristi followed the scrawny animal, then got down on her knees and peered under the skirt. Two yellow eyes, round with fear, stared back at her. Somehow the damned thing had wedged itself between the top mattress and the lower trundle in a space barely wide enough for Kristi’s hand. “Come on, kitty, you really can’t be here.” She tried to reach into the tight space but the cat hissed and flattened itself deeper in the crevice, its body pressed against the wall. “I mean it, come out.” Again, she was shown a curling pink tongue and needle-sharp fangs. “Great. Okay.”

      Kristi pulled on the lower bunk and the cat dropped into the space between the mattress and wall. When she pushed the trundle back, she thought the cat would squirt out one end, but apparently the little thing found a hiding spot. No amount of moving the bed could dislodge the animal and Kristi wasn’t about to drag out the bed and slide into the tight space with a terrorized feline and its sharp claws.

      “Please, cat…” Kristi sighed. She didn’t need this. Not tonight. Besides, there was some damned rule in clause five hundred and seventy-six or something about not having any pets on the premises. She was certain Hiram could recite it chapter and verse. “Come on…” she said, trying to sweet-talk the frightened feline.

      No such luck.

      “Kitty” wasn’t budging.

      “Okay…how about this?” She scrounged in her cupboard, found a can of tuna, and opened it. Glancing over her shoulder, she expected to see a little nose or curious eyes or at least a black paw peeking from beneath the daybed.

      She was wrong.

      She put a couple of forkfuls of tuna into a small dish and half filled another with water, then set them close enough to the bed to entice the cat, but far enough away that Kristi thought she could grab it by the back of its neck and haul it outside. But she’d have to be patient.

      Not her long suit.

      She set the dishes on the floor and backed up. Then waited, watching the digital clock on the microwave as the minutes dragged by as if they were hours and more revelry sounded outside: people yelling, horns honking, fireworks exploding, footsteps on the porches below. Laughter. Conversation.

      Inside, the cat stayed put. Probably petrified with all the noise.

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