Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
A ction mode. It probably spoke to the life she’d had that Lissa always felt a strange sense of relief when something went wrong — she’d always been more comfortable in a crisis than she ever was while waiting for a crisis to come about. The world narrowed, reduced, simplified — everything she’d been fretting about since she’d taken on this troublesome client vanished, replaced by a calm, cool, almost icy certainty about what needed to happen next.
First, she pulled out her phone to check on the security systems — sure enough, the device was already vibrating against her leg, and the screen indicated a disturbance in one of the spare bedrooms on the house’s ground level. Another soft crunch of breaking glass reached her from around the corner of the house then, and she took a measured breath as she weighed her options. It sounded like the intruder hadn’t made it through the window yet — that meant she could theoretically catch him if she went around there now. But something made her hesitate. The window was some distance down the narrow path between the house and the tall fence — she’d be outlined in the light for quite some time before she reached him, and if he had a weapon, that was a dangerous place to be. Also, from a legal perspective, previous clients had had more success taking legal action against perpetrators who’d been caught actually inside the house, rather than outside of it. If Angela wanted a restraining order against this guy, she’d have more luck getting it if her bodyguard apprehended him inside her house.
The downside, of course, was that letting the guy get inside would put the client at considerably higher risk. At least, that was usually the case. When it came to clients as rich as Angela and her parents, however, there were ways around that particular problem. Lissa turned and moved back into the house, near silent, as her feet automatically found the parts of the floorboards that didn’t creak. She left the door open behind her, not wanting the click of the latch to scare off the intruder.
Angela, to her credit, noticed right away that something had changed. When Lissa stepped back into the little sitting room, she opened her mouth as if to continue her story where she’d left off, but one look at her bodyguard’s face put a stop to that. Instead, she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing yet,” Lissa said briskly. “But you need to get to your safe room.”
“Seriously?” Despite her doubtful tone, Angela was already getting up off the couch, sliding her feet into her fluffy slippers. “I haven’t even heard from him for — oh, wait. Oh, shit. I just remembered. I muted him.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Lissa said, suppressing her irritation at the wide-eyed look of significance that Angela was giving her. “Someone’s breaking into the house — we need to get you into the safe room right away.”
Thankfully, Angela responded to her tone of voice almost automatically — another little gift from her military training, Lissa thought with some amusement. The two of them moved quickly down the hallway toward Angela’s bedroom, where a discreet piece of wall panel opened to reveal a safe room beyond. The young woman fussed for a minute about wanting to stop to get her phone charger, but when a dull thud sounded from somewhere deeper in the house, that line of questioning was brought to a merciful halt.
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Angela said, just as Lissa was about to close the door on her. “He’s — I mean, he’s creepy, but he’s complicated, you know? It’s not like he’s one of those evil stalkers you hear about in true crime podcasts?—”
“I’ll come and get you as soon as it’s safe,” Lissa cut across her. “Until then, stay in the safe room. Okay?”
“Sure, but?—”
The door slid shut, cutting Angela’s last few words off — good soundproofing, Lissa thought with approval. Then again, rich people rarely cut costs when it came to their own safety. All the ones she’d met had a deep anxiety about enemies at the gates, faceless villains breaking in to hurt them or to steal their hoarded wealth away. Maybe this wasn’t even the creepy ex breaking in, she thought as she checked the security system again. Maybe it was just a garden-variety burglar, targeting one of the richest neighborhoods in the city. Well, he’d chosen a pretty terrible time, hadn’t he?
Lissa knew the police would be on their way already — the security system was rigged to make an automatic call in the event of a break-in being detected, and she’d confirmed in the app to ensure the alert wouldn’t be discounted as an error with the machine. With Angela secure in her safe room, there wasn’t really much that Lissa had to do. Honestly, if she hadn’t found this particular client so grating, she might have secured herself in the safe room with her. But she was a little curious to meet this guy, the man who’d been blowing up her client’s phone with such single-minded dedication. Having read so many of his overwrought texts, she was a little surprised that he’d actually gone as far as to break into her house like this. But the job was the job, and now that she’d dropped into action mode, she didn’t want to spend the rest of the evening sitting in the safe room with her client. At the very least, she wanted to get a good look at this guy — see exactly how much of a threat he really was.
He wasn’t hard to find. Lissa moved out into the dark hallway, moving silently, senses sharp and her hand on the grip of her pistol. There were still sounds coming from the spare bedroom where she’d heard the window being broken, and as she moved up noiselessly beside the door to the room, she could hear slightly pained grunting coming from inside the room. She amused herself for a moment with the image of a man awkwardly hauling himself over the window ledge and into the room — but then came a sound that shifted her onto a higher level of alertness. A dull, metallic sliding sound, and then a click. It was the sound of a shotgun, she’d have bet a month of her ludicrous salary.
Quietly, Lissa adjusted her estimation of this man’s threat level. He’d gotten his hands on a weapon somehow, and while the sweep she’d done of his online presence hadn’t indicated that he had the kind of background that would have trained him to use it effectively, that was — in this situation at least — even more of a worry. The only thing more dangerous than a man with a gun he knew how to use was a man with a gun he had no idea how to use. And it was in her best interests to assume the worst.
Lissa was already in motion. She’d planned to confront him in the spare room, but the gun changed all that — she knew she needed to get the drop on him. He’d been to the house before, she’d extracted that much information out of a strangely evasive Angela — embarrassed that she’d slept with him, probably, which meant he’d know which way her bedroom was. Lissa concealed herself in the doorway of the bathroom, which lay halfway between the spare bedroom and Angela’s room at the far end of the house. She’d wait for him to walk past the door, then step out and disarm him from behind. Simple.
The door to the spare room finally creaked open, and through the slightly ajar bathroom door, Lissa got her first glimpse of the intruder. It was the stalker, alright — one look at him put her alternate theory of an anonymous burglar to bed for good. He was dressed in all black with a beanie jammed down over his hair, but she’d spent enough time familiarizing herself with his file that she recognized him on sight. It didn’t take much longer to recognize that he was on something, either. His eyes were wide and his movements jerky — and hadn’t Angela mentioned he was friends with half the drug dealers in Chicago? That girl really did need to start keeping better company — Lissa could only hope that this particular incident would serve as a wake-up call, though part of her was grimly convinced it would just be added to her collection of long, meandering stories.
It was the gun she was most interested in. Just as she’d guessed, it was a shotgun, though an old one. From the uneasy way he was clutching it, she was comfortable in the assumption that her suspicions had been correct — nobody with any kind of weapons training would hold a weapon that poorly. Where the hell had he gotten it? She’d never been the kind of person who could recognize the make and model of a weapon from a thousand paces like some of her old Army buddies, and in the low light of the hallway she had no hope. It didn’t look like something he’d gone out and bought recently, though. Borrowed from a family member, maybe, with or without permission. At any rate, he was an armed man who’d broken into a woman’s house in the dead of the night — things weren’t going to go well for him after this, no matter how rich or well-connected he might have been.
He was almost at the bathroom door when the plan went abruptly south.