Chapter One #4
The woman wandered to the back corner of the café and sat down.
Drea looked at the clock—fifteen minutes until closing. She should’ve asked Marco to stay a few more minutes to give her time to call her mom again. Hopefully she’d fallen asleep watching whatever reality TV show she was bingeing on. But what if she hadn’t?
The woman was engrossed in her phone, the coffee untouched on the table. José had a firm policy. Locking the door to stop more customers coming in was fine. Kicking customers out before they had finished their drinks, not so much. If she was going to be here a while, Drea needed to call her mom.
Tapping her nail on the counter, she considered grabbing her phone. The woman looked harmless.
“Excuse me,” she said as she approached the table. “I just have to grab my phone from the back. I’ll only be a moment if you need anything.”
“I’m fine. Have yourself a hot date tonight?”
“If only,” Drea said with a sigh “My mom is really sick.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. You’re a good girl to want to check in.” The woman let out a long, weary sigh.
“Do you have children?” Drea asked, curious about the sudden shift in mood.
She shook her head. “If I did, I would hope they’d call me when I was sick.”
Drea popped into the break room to get her phone.
Five minutes, no more, she promised herself as she walked back into the hallway to get a signal. With a quick “sorry” in her head to José for breaking the rules, she dialed her mom.
“Hello?”
The sound of her mom’s voice brought a rush of relief. “Hey, Mom. How’s it goin’?”
“Are you home soon? I’m lonely,” her mother griped.
She’d heard the complaint a million times since high school when she’d received the devastating news about her mom’s lungs.
As she’d become more housebound, it had gotten worse.
But in moments like this, as her mom’s situation deteriorated, Drea took a small amount of comfort that she was still here to berate her.
She looked around the break room to the tatty bits of paper adorning the staff notice board.
Gone from an A student to a job at José’s.
Drea remembered those nights when her friends had invited her over for study groups and she’d had to say no because she was working.
She’d been lonely then, too. The nights when she would sit in her room, trying to cram all her revisions into a few miserable moments, and the smell of cigarette smoke would drift up from the porch.
Not even the fear of dying was cause enough for her mom to quit.
“I’ll be home a little later tonight, Mom. I have to clean and lock up.”
“Well, hurry. And bring some chocolate cake with you.”
Drea agreed and ended the call. No How are you, Drea? Did you have a good day? I appreciate you working twelve hours. Just straight-up complaining. Oh. And cake. Don’t forget the fucking cake.
Slipping the phone back into her apron pocket, she walked past the kitchen and pushed the door into the café open as the lights suddenly went off.
The woman from the front came flying past, heading toward the break room, a tall man wearing a leather jacket in pursuit.
It was too dark to fully see who it was, and it happened so fast she couldn’t take in any details.
Drea felt something cold and hard press against her temple and she swallowed the scream of panic bubbling in her throat.
“Now, sugar, we just want to talk to your friend. You can make this easy or hard.”
The slow drawl of his accent placed him from somewhere in the South. The whisper of his breath across her ear placed him to her right shoulder, but she wasn’t stupid enough to risk looking over it to see him.
“Easy means you forget you ever saw me and life goes on.”
Drea’s heart drummed violently against her ribs, her breath so fast the world was starting to spin.
“Hard means you don’t do that and—” Click. The gun. Drea jumped, and the person behind her laughed. “You get the idea. So for a little insurance, give me your driver’s license, please.”
Drea walked slowly toward the break room.
The back entry was wide open, no sign of the woman or her assailant.
Her hands shook as she reached to push the door to the break room open, kicking the laundry basket over in the darkness.
A small light in the bathroom provided a minuscule amount of illumination.
Opening her locker, she saw the binder and remembered the beautiful picture Cujo had drawn on it of her as Belle from Beauty and the Beast. She grabbed her purse, withdrew her license, and passed it over her shoulder.
“Well, my humblest apologies for this intrusion on your evening, Ms. Andrea Caron. It’s been my pleasure.”
Drea’s skin crawled as he ran the muzzle of the gun along her jaw.
The door to the break room whispered shut.
Drea dropped to her knees, the hard floor a painful yet meaningful connection to something solid.
Compay Segundo played quietly through the speakers; otherwise the café was silent.
She climbed to her feet, grabbed her phone, and stumbled to lock the rear door.
Moving shadows created by passing cars outside the café made her heart leap, and she reached for the light switch, flicking it on and off furiously to no avail.
She sprinted through the store to lock up the front. Once the building was secured, she directed the flashlight on her phone toward the back corner of the café, half expecting the blonde woman to be sitting there, but all that remained was a solitary cup.