Day Zero - Chris Jayne Stronghold

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next to her, but her hands were shaking so badly she fumbled it and it fell. A quick glance showed that it had landed well forward on the passenger side; no way could she reach it without stopping. Not knowing what else to do she kept driving.

      Gradually, she became more aware of her surroundings. The few pedestrians who were out on the street, walking dogs or jogging, were looking at her, their faces blurred masks of shock and horror. For a moment she wondered why, and then she realized she was going more than sixty miles an hour on a residential street. She checked the rearview mirror again, and, still seeing nothing, forced herself to slow down to normal speeds.

      Have to call 911. They were killing that man. Have to call 911. Why aren’t they following me? Have to call 911. They shot at me. She repeated it like a litany as she drove, and then it hit her: there had been no car parked in the area behind the Saldata house. Saldata’s vehicles were in the garage, behind closed doors. The reason no one had followed her was that they had no easy way to do that. Long seconds would have been required - even a minute or more - to go back into the house, through a small utility area, into the garage, then into a car. If the keys were not kept in the car, it would take even longer.

      Lori pulled up behind another car, forcing her to slow even more. The street she was on, Harbor Road, divided the waterfront properties to the east from the rest of the residential neighborhoods to the west. She might have gotten a good head start from any pursuit, but with ice cold certainty, she knew it was time to turn off of Harbor Road. Within a few hundred yards, she randomly picked a street and turned down it, pulling a quick U-Turn about a hundred yards down and then parking behind another car.

      Lori put the car in park but did not turn the engine off. She had absolutely no clue what to do next. Numbly, she looked out the windshield, looked back at Harbor Road. It had been nothing more than instinct that had made her make the U-Turn but she was glad she had; now she could see the traffic on Harbor, in the distance. Was she far enough off Harbor that she’d be hard to spot if someone had come after her? She thought she was; she’d passed dozens of residential streets and there was no way someone in pursuit could be looking down all of them, plus the full size sedan she’d parked behind largely blocked anyone’s view of her.

      Lori reached down and grabbed her cell. She typed in her passcode, and then she heard sirens. As she watched, about a hundred yards away, a police car and then another flew down Harbor going back in the direction from which she’d come. She paused, her fingers frozen on the cell phone screen.

      Could that have something to do with her? She couldn’t see how it could. Why would someone at the Saldata house have called the police? Unless, maybe someone who had seen her reckless driving had called to report a dangerous driver. That had to be it.

      Lori took a deep breath, started typing 911 again, images from the Saldata house crashing through her brain: so much blood, and the screaming, and Mr. Saldata chasing her. Had that really happened? It had been what? Barely five minutes, and it was already feeling unreal, like something out of a horror movie.

      Suddenly, Lori froze, staring forward, not seeing anything out of the window of the car. Her mind recreated the scene in the Saldata dining room. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. But then she knew it was.

      She stared at the phone in her hand wondering what to do now, because what could not possibly have gotten worse just did. The blood-covered half dead man she’d seen through the dining room door had been Senator Kyle Michaels.

      Two minutes later, she still sat, numb and silent her phone in her hand. Lori couldn’t make sense of it. How could the radio be saying Senator Michaels was dead? Could it have been a mistake? Hardly likely if the President of the United States was offering condolences to the family.

      Lori started shaking, more uncontrollably than ever, and as she watched, two more police cars flew down Harbor in the direction she’d just come from.

      Slowly, deliberately, she put the phone back down on the seat. What the fuck was going on here? Somehow a man- a United States Senator- whom everyone thought was dead was being tortured to death at this very moment less than five miles from here. She had to tell someone, but who? The police?

      Lori had lived in Miami for most of her adult life. Everyone knew that if you poked your nose in where it didn’t belong, you were taking a risk. The Colombian drug cartels were at war with the Mexican drug cartels. The Russian mob hated the Albanian mob, and almost all of it flowed through Miami one way or another. But none of that had ever affected Lori or really anyone she knew. If a client wanted to pay for a high-end dinner in cash, Lori politely accepted the envelope and took it to the bank, no questions asked. If you avoided certain neighborhoods and certain clubs, you could safely pretend that none of the organized crime would ever touch you. Michelle’s comment that Saldata’s first language was not Spanish came back to Lori; the man had shouted to someone in another language when he saw her. Whatever it was, it was not Spanish.

      She’d served parties at houses owned by foreign nationals often enough, and thinking about it she was pretty sure that the language had been Russian or something similar. Was Saldata even the man’s real name?

      Yet another police car drove down Harbor, siren screaming, and Lori could no longer assume that this had nothing to do with her or what she had just seen. Desperate questions rolled through Lori’s terrified brain. If Senator Michaels was still alive, who had been shot in the car on South Miami last night? Had anyone been shot? Again her hand hovered over the cell phone and again she hesitated.

      Another guest at the Saldata home last night had been the assistant chief of police in Miami. Where did he fit in? If she called the police, would she stay alive long enough to tell her story? Was that paranoia engendered by watching too many movies?

      On the other hand, the old saying came back to her: if they’re really after you, paranoia is good thinking. She’d just been chased by two men, one with a knife, one with a gun. She’d been shot at. The back window of her car lay in little chunks of glass everywhere. A man that the radio said was dead was in fact alive not five miles away.

      A little bit of caution was probably in order.

      Whomever these people were, they had the power, the reach, the clout to fake a senator’s death. Was she in more danger now than she had been in the house? She didn’t know everything, but she knew one thing: she had seen something that people would kill to hide.

      Lori looked around furtively. There was no one out on the quiet street at 10 AM on a workday, but a maroon Range Rover was a fairly distinctive car, one with the back window shot out more so. Eventually someone would notice her parked vehicle, would get curious and would call the police.

      She had to get off the street. She had to think, and for at least right now, she could not go home.

      And then for the first time in the last ten minutes, Lori caught a break. It hit her like a lightning bolt: she wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood. She’d gone over from Key Barca to Pinecrest; Jack’s great aunt, Sylvia, not only lived barely a couple of miles from here, Lori was fairly sure she could get there driving only on residential streets. That suddenly seemed like a better idea than ever when yet another police car flew down Harbor, lights flashing, siren shrieking. How many had that been? Five? Six?

      It didn’t matter. She needed to get off the street, and now. She quickly checked the street map in her smart phone and pulled out.

      Chapter 7

      Five minutes later, having navigated all the way without ever driving on a main road, she pulled onto the cul-de-sac where Sylvia and Rob Henson had bought their retirement home. When she and Jack had moved to Miami, Sylvia’s husband Rob, brother to Jack’s grandmother, had still been alive. They’d seen the couple casually a couple of times a year, but after Jack had been killed, Sylvia and Rob had reached out and moved into Lori’s life in a way that had been invaluable. Then Sylvia went through a loss of her own when Rob had passed away from cancer three years ago.

      Sylvia and Rob had been childless, and she’d been thrilled to become a surrogate grandmother

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