Zen’s Crash (Savage Legion MC #12)
Chapter 1
Lexi
I jolt awake to my father screaming for me to get to the safe room.
“Oh God, not another drill,” I mutter to myself as I roll out of bed, grab my laptop, and stumble out of my bedroom and down the steps to the ground floor of our dream home.
My father has always been wildly paranoid, which means we’ve moved to a new ‘dream house’ every four or five years since I can remember. During my childhood, my mother was focused on buying her dream home and settling down, so my dad phrased every new move as the final one, but I always knew there was more to it than that. I race down to the basement, still feeling sad that she died of cancer before realizing her dream of settling down in her forever home. Now, I’m trapped in the nightmare she left behind.
I burst into the safe room, only to find my father isn’t there. I put my laptop on the table and quickly turn to go and find him. That’s when I see him standing at the door, looking more freaked out than ever before.
He has both hands on the door and has already shoved it mostly closed. I can only see his face and one shoulder in the opening.
Playing his game, I tell him, “Come on Dad, get in here. We have to be safe together, remember?” That was always the deal in our family. We all go to the safe room as a family and wait out the danger. Right now, he’s the only family I’ve got left. So he needs to get his ass into the safe room, just on the off chance we really are in danger.
His expression is grim. “Not this time, Lexi. God, there’s so much I haven’t told you, and now it’s too late.”
I take a step towards him, realizing for the first time that something different is going on tonight. “What are you talking about? Get in here and lock the door. Then you can tell me all about it.”
“I’m sorry, Lexi. I really am.” The tone of his voice and his cryptic words take a toll on me.
“Dad, you’re scaring me.”
“No need to be scared, princess. I’m locking you in. Stay quiet, no matter what you hear.”
The door shuts with a finality that resonates through the small space. I scramble into place at the table, fire up my laptop, and hack into our security feed, the one my dad normally controls. My heart is pounding, the hairs on my arms are raised, and I’m getting sick to my stomach with worry. This isn’t my dad’s regular run-of-the-mill paranoia. Tonight the danger is real, I can feel it all the way down to my bones.
When the feed comes up, my blood runs cold. My hand automatically goes to the keypad and punches in 911 on my G-Fi app. When the dispatcher asks what my emergency is, I tell her, “Someone has broken into my house. He’s pointing a gun at my dad. I need the police right away.”
The woman quickly verifies my address and phone number before asking, “Are you in a safe place right now?”
“Yeah, I’m in my basement, but you have to hurry. The intruder is walking around like he owns the place, and he’s already made my dad get down on his knees.”
“Stay on the line and remain in place. Officers will be on the scene shortly. In the meantime, I have some questions. Do you recognize the intruder?”
“No. He’s wearing a balaclava. I can’t see his face.”
She keeps asking questions and I answer as best I can, but my attention is squarely centered on the scene unfolding before my eyes on the security camera. My dad never wired his old-fashioned security setup to capture audio, so all I can do is sit here helplessly with the dispatcher yapping in my ear.
I watch the intruder yell and scream at my dad while gesticulating wildly with the gun, and I pray it doesn’t go off accidentally. Suddenly, he stalks across the room and hits my dad several times over the head with the butt.
H-hurry!” I stammer, mortified at what I’m seeing. “He’s beating my dad.”
Finally, the intruder stops hitting my father’s now bloody head and starts pacing around, ransacking the place. I can hear the dispatcher reassuring me that the officers are on their way. However, I can’t tear my eyes away from what’s going down in our living room.
The intruder is angry, that’s obvious from the gestures he’s making. He goes straight to the mantel and picks up a picture of me and my dad fishing in a nearby stream. We’re both wearing waders. I’m wearing shorts and a long t-shirt that barely covers them. I realize in this moment that it might look like I’m not wearing bottoms. He turns the picture frame around to show my dad and taps my image with the end of his gun. My father freezes, stealing a glance at the security camera.
The intruder looks over to see what caught my dad’s attention. When the angry man catches sight of the camera, he goes a little crazy. He walks over to it, but from my perspective, it seems like he’s stalking right up to me with his big gun in his hand. He lifts the picture and taps my image with the end of his gun again and then points his gun at my dad before making a go-away gesture towards the door.
I’d have to be an idiot not to understand what he’s saying. He’ll let my father go if I trade places with him. Since the police are on their way, it seems like the only way to buy me and my dad some time.
I fly out of my seat and try to get out of the safe room, only remembering too late that my dad told me he was locking me in. I scramble back to my computer and try to hack deeper into the software to find out if there’s a way to unlock the door electronically. Meanwhile, the intruder is getting more and more exasperated by my refusal to comply.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him shoot the camera. I panic inside because there’s only one reason he’d do that. He doesn’t want anything recorded.
My shaking hands come up to the keyboard and I switch around to the other cameras in the house until I find the one from our entry way. That’s when I see the bastard standing over my dad. My dad is slumped on the floor, not moving. From this angle I can’t see blood or a bullet wound, but I’m almost a hundred percent sure he shot my dad.
The intruder’s head jerks up like he can hear something I can’t, probably sirens. He bolts for the back of our house and I switch to a different camera, watching until I catch him crashing through the back door to make his escape. I should switch to the exterior cameras and look for clues about who he is or at least what he’s driving. But those cameras will capture the footage whether I’m there to see it in real time or not. I go back to the living room camera and watch to see if my father is moving.
I realize the dispatcher is still on the phone, saying the police are seconds away. I tell her, “It’s too late. The intruder shot my father and he’s not moving.” I don’t say he’s dead because I don’t want to say it out loud for fear of manifesting it into reality.
The dispatcher assures me, “We have an ambulance right behind the police. Don’t give up hope.”
“I wish I could go to him. Maybe I could save him?”
“If you’re sure the intruder is gone, you have my permission to go to him and start first aid.”
I’m angry that this woman thinks I need her approval to try and save my dad’s life. I’m too defeated at this point to even argue with her. I want out so I tell her, “We have a safe room in our basement. My dad locked me inside when he realized there was danger. Someone will need to come down and unlock the door from the outside.”
“Oh God, of course. I’ll send someone down immediately and we’ll do everything we can to save your dad.”
I’m feeling some strange kind of emotion that’s a mixture of premature grief, shock, profound sadness and a kind of white-hot rage I’ve never known. All this time, I just thought he was some kind of paranoid survivalist. But he knew someone was hunting us and did everything in his power to keep us safe. I should have listened to him and believed him when he said we weren’t safe. Now, it might be too late.
When the police burst into the house, I feel hopeful that they might be able to save him. But they don’t even try. One of them reaches down and presses two fingers to his neck and gives the others a guarded shake of his head. What’s wrong with these assholes? They should at least try to give him CPR. I’m busy calculating how many minutes it’s been since he was shot and maybe stopped breathing and it’s only been two or three. If they’d just do their job, maybe they could save him.
I hear someone outside the door and the sound of metal clanking. I move until I’m standing in front of the door and prepare to bolt when the door opens. When the heavy door creaks open, I make a run for it, but two big hands catch me before I can make it more than a few feet.
“Let me go!” I scream. “I want to see my dad.”
A deep voice responds, “No, ma’am, you don’t.”
I whirl around to gape at the somber-faced officer, “You guys didn’t even do CPR,” I snarl.
He still has hold of my arm and gives me a little shake. “There wasn’t enough of him to save. It was a head shot with a .45-caliber handgun at close range.”
When my legs fold under me and I come crashing to the ground, he’s there with another cop. The second officer frowns at him but talks to me. “What Officer Wilson said is true. Your father died instantly. I hope it gives you some small measure of peace to know that he didn’t suffer.”
I bring my legs up, drop my head down and wrap my arms around the top of my knees to block out the sight of them. I whisper to myself, “But he did suffer. That asshole beat him before shooting him in the head.”
The first officer’s voice turns steely, “We’re going to track down the man who killed your father and he’s going to be tried, convicted, and spend the rest of his life behind bars.”
Suddenly, I lift my head and there is a female officer kneeling in front of me instead of the two male officers. She doesn’t smile but her facial expression is open and sympathetic. “Who… who are you? I ask in a shaky voice.
“My name is Barbara Calhoun. I’m a victim support officer, I’m here to support you and act as a liaison between you and our detectives.”
“There are detectives here?” I only ask because I’m surprised they got here so quickly.
“Not yet, but they will be here very soon. Right now the officers are just trying to keep everyone from contaminating the crime scene. The detectives will call in the crime lab and they’ll process the evidence as soon as possible.”
I just sit there staring at her like she has two heads. I can’t process that my father was just murdered, and an actual crime lab will be crawling over our house with a fine-tooth comb looking for evidence. And whoever did this is still running around free. I feel like locking the door to the safe room and never coming out again, because it’s the only safe place in my world right now.
But alas, that is not to be, because Officer Calhoun tells me, “Once you leave today, you won’t be allowed to come back until the crime lab releases the scene. Is there someone you can stay with?”
I lower my head onto my knees again. Trying to figure out where I can go, I mumble, “I guess I can stay with a friend for a few days.”
“That would be much better than staying alone right now. I’ve got a few more basic questions for you and then I’ll get you to pack a bag, and we’ll wait on the detectives to get here. You’ll have a few days to decide on a funeral home because it’ll take that long for the coroner to finish the autopsy and decide on a cause of death.”
My head slowly comes up and I stare at this woman who’s supposed to be a support cop for victims. She’s saying all the wrong things and making me feel worse after such a tragic event. I don’t hold back when I open my mouth. “What the hell are you even talking about? You, me, and every cop in this house knows he died from a gunshot wound to the head. It was apparently so obvious that your police friends didn’t even feel the need to try to do CPR on him. I’ll take a wild guess and say that’s what the coroner is going to find to be the cause of death, and it won’t take him days to arrive at that conclusion.”
The woman looks me in the eyes and says, “Alright, I deserved that one. Moving forward let’s try to find a more positive way to communicate about this tragic life event.”
I can’t believe my dad is dead and this police officer is worried about me being polite. I slowly zone out, answer her questions, and then stumble upstairs to pack a bag.
I grab my backup laptop while she guards the door to keep officers from wandering in while I’m changing out of my pajamas. The laptop in the safe room might be my favorite but all my devices are set to shut down after seven minutes and I keep all my digital information locked in a cloud with a twelve-digit alphanumeric password. Fat chance of the cops getting anything off any of mine or my dad’s devices. He’d drilled covering your ass maneuvers into me until I was sick of hearing about it. The thing that strikes me as truly odd is that until today, I didn’t think we had an ass to cover.
Once the detectives arrive, things get complicated. They have lots of questions. My dad raised me to be tough but by the time they’re finished with me, I end up having a bit of a breakdown and they take me to the ER to make sure I’m stable enough to be safe. News flash, I’m not, and they keep me for five days for complicated grief therapy.