Chapter 2
Then came stretching. It was a negotiation between her body and the cold floor of her apartment that happened every morning.
She pulled on her leggings, t-shirt, jacket, and her shoes.
She paused at the bathroom mirror long enough to brush her teeth and check to make sure her braid from the night still held.
She tightened the band at the end of her thick plait and glanced at her nails.
She always went with the French manicure.
She’d gone with the short oval this time instead of the square tip.
That was the only modification she’d made to her routine in years.
The gel polish was still fresh. She’d had them done two days ago at the place on Charlotte Avenue she'd been going to for four years. The nails were her one thing of vanity. She didn’t wear makeup or get her hair highlighted.
Everything else she did on the cheap or the practical or the not-at-all, but every two weeks, without fail, she sat in that chair and had someone do something purely for the sake of looking nice.
Her partner, Delvecchio, called it her guilty pleasure.
She called it none of his business. Meh … they were both right.
She grabbed her keys and headed out for her normal run at Shelby Bottoms Greenway.
Four point two miles, river on the left, trees on the right, the city just far enough away you could pretend it wasn't there.
She'd been running this route for two years. It was her thinking trail. Her decompression and rev-up loop. She’d solved three cases on this trail, at least partially.
There was something about the rhythm of running that shook things loose in her brain that sitting at her desk couldn't.
There were two other cars in the lot. She recognized one.
A blue Civic belonging to a guy who ran with a golden retriever.
He always nodded at her like they were fellow members of some exclusive early-morning lunatic club.
Which, hey, they were. She nodded back whenever she saw him.
That was the extent of their relationship, and it was perfect.
She didn't see the retriever or his owner, which meant they were already on the trail. She also didn't see the truck with its lights off parked back against the tree line where the lot lights didn't reach.
She rolled her shoulders, stretched a bit more, and started running.
The first mile was always the worst.
Her body's idea of the first mile was that she was thirty-two years old, and running was an unreasonable request. Her brain reminded her that management would be hearing about it.
By mile two, things smoothed out. By mile three, she was in that perfect space.
That blissful state where the thinking happened sideways, on the periphery, the way you sometimes saw things by not looking directly at them.
She knew the process and looked forward to each stage.
She was thinking about the Delgado case.
A smash and grab on Broadway, but it wasn’t.
There were three incidents on the same block.
The same MO of a two-man team who’d been working tourist traffic.
But in order to connect them, she needed a name or a positive ID.
That would place the asshats at the third incident.
The security footage in the area was garbage.
Of course, it was; it was always garbage, but there was a pawn shop two blocks over that had better cameras, and she'd been meaning to pull that footage for a week but kept getting pulled onto other things.
Mile two point three.
She registered the sound at the edge of her awareness.
Footsteps behind her, fast, and closing.
Her brain did what her brain did, started the script of a runner catching up or a jogger passing.
All of which were perfectly normal, except the thought hadn't finished yet when something else fired underneath those thoughts.
Older than a thought. Something was wrong.
She turned.
He was already inside her space.
No time. No room. She got her left arm up and caught part of the blow, but he was committed, and she wasn't set. The branch connected with the right side of her head with a sound like a door slamming in an empty house, and the world went sideways extremely fast.
The ground. Her cheek hit the asphalt.
Get up. Her training, her instincts, and her will to live screamed the words. She had to get up. Her body said absolutely not. Her brain said get up right now. Her body said you don't understand what just happened to your head. Her brain said I understand fine, get up, or you're dead.
She got up.
Not fast. Not graceful. On her hands and knees first, one palm bleeding where she'd caught herself, the world doing a slow, unhelpful rotation that she did not have time for.
She could hear him. Close. Still close. She turned toward the sound, and he was there, right there, already reaching for her.
Six years of jiu-jitsu fired before her vision finished clearing.
She got her hands on his wrist. Torqued.
Stepped into him. The hip throw was textbook.
It was also not quite enough. Her head was wrong, her balance was wrong, and she was working with about sixty percent mental clarity.
He was bigger than she'd calculated, and he adjusted fast, faster than she expected.
Instead of going down clean, he caught her jacket, and they went sideways together into the tree line.
She hit the ground on top of him and immediately drove her elbow back and connected hard with his head. He made a sound. Not a scream. A short, controlled exhale, like a man making a note of something. She scrambled for distance. Got her knee under herself. Turned to get up …
He grabbed her wrist.
One second. Maybe two. His grip was gloved and very strong, and he turned her hand over like he was checking something.
She felt it, that deliberate motion, not restraint, something else, something that didn't make sense.
Then he looked, and whatever he saw either satisfied him, or it didn't matter anymore.
She kicked his knee, hard, and scrambled to the path.
She heard him grunt in pain and scramble behind her.
She reached down for her personal weapon, which was strapped to her ankle, but he pushed her back in some kind of bull-rush tackle, and she lost grip of her weapon.
She screamed, “Help! Call 911! Call 911!”
The second branch came down in the same place as the first.
* * *
She came back to herself, face down in the leaf litter off the trail. A dog’s nose snuffled near her neck.
“Are you okay?” The dog’s owner had his hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am, are you okay?” he said and shook her.
She lay still for a moment. No more than three to five seconds as she took inventory. Head. Ribs. Hands. Legs. Everything responding. Everything was screaming about it, but they were responding.
She rolled onto her back. The dog licked her face. “Maggie, stop.” The man pulled the golden away.
“I’m okay. I must have …”
“Did someone do this to you?”
“Yeah. I’m going to call my office.” She patted her coat for her phone.
“No, you should call the police.”
Haven pulled her badge out of her pocket and flashed it at him. “I’m okay. Seriously. Did you see anything or anyone?”
“No, just you. We ran this way after we heard you call for help. I shouted back and told you I was coming.
“Okay, thanks. You go ahead and go. I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” No. Everything was spinning, her head hurt, her body was screaming obscenities at her, and she wanted to puke, but she wasn’t going to let anyone know that. Not just yet.
“No. I’ll wait until you’re ready to stand up at least. I can’t leave you like this.” He wasn’t going to leave.
She waved at her body. “I’m going to take that slow. If you could go to the parking lot and get me a drink of water, maybe?”
She didn’t want any water, but she wanted peace so she could think.
“Sure, right away.” He put Maggie’s leash in her hand. “Maggie, down.” The dog lay down beside her. “She’s not much use for protection, but she’ll keep you warm.” He left at a dead run.
The trees were very tall. The sky between them was getting lighter. She could hear birds somewhere.
She was alive. She sniffed … What was it? An odor lingered more in her mind than in the air. Was it Maggie? No … she’d smelled it before he’d hit her the second time.
She sat up slowly. Her vision did the rotation thing again, worse this time, and she put her hand flat on the ground and waited it out.
After the world stopped playing tilt-a-whirl, she took stock of her injuries.
There was blood on her palm, her new manicure was chipped and scraped, with one nail snapped clean off at the base.
She registered that with the detached clarity of a concussion, still deciding how bad it was going to be.
Maggie’s tail whomped the ground, and Haven put a hand on the dog’s back.
The fur was soft and strangely comforting.
She winced when she turned. Shit. A cracked rib, maybe.
There was a complaint from her left side when she breathed deeply that had the feel of something wrong with her bones rather than being muscular.
But above everything, her head was the concern.
She reached up carefully and touched the right side of her head.
Wet. Not soaked. A cut from the branch, probably.
Head wounds were mostly dramatic. Or so she told herself.
She found her phone in her jacket pocket, then saw her gun still in her ankle holster … barely. Fuck, she should’ve gotten to it quicker. Her mind flitted over the events. She couldn’t pinpoint a time when she could’ve reached for it sooner.
She glanced down at her phone. The screen was cracked, but it still worked.
She called dispatch at 6:29 a.m.