CHAPTER 16
Grant
Hazel rushed out of the indoor dining room, bursting through the front entrance, doors flung to the sides. White powder, as if she had been baking all morning, dusted her uniform, arms, and legs. Her fingers were twitching. She didn’t give anyone a second glance. Including me.
“Is she even on her fifteen?” one of the waitresses asked.
Without considering the consequences, I followed her. Left my post. I hated to let my old coworker down, but a job like this wasn’t a priority to me.
Hazel wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the shaking. Tourists parted ways, some cursing at us, angered by our lack of courtesy in interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic, but Hazel didn’t notice. She looked up at the screen covering the overhang, a fake blue sky with puffy white clouds, music blaring from the speakers around us. She blinked back tears. Finally, she spun around and saw me.
“You know that was all I could think about for months?” she said, her voice quivering. She had to yell over the music. “I couldn’t stop seeing his face. His gray eyes staring back at me. Never to wake again. Every morning. Every night. Every fucking moment.” She shook her head. “I thought I was in hell. I thought I had been taken by the devil and was sentenced to die for my final crime.”
It filled me with sorrow to hear those words, to know how much truth there was in them. Zaid’s intention had been to punish those who followed Eric, and when it came to my position? I trusted him to know the difference between the innocent and the guilty. But I knew I was wrong now. I pulled Hazel into my arms. She was stiff.
“I didn’t give him the coke,” she said. “I told him not to take it. That it was mine. But I keep thinking back over that night. Should I have taken my purse with me? Should I have sniffed it before I had gone to the party? Could I have saved him?” Her voice cracked, and she added, “Would I have survived?” Tears pooled in her eyes, but before they could drop, she wiped them away. “I see him all of the time,” she cried, “The only time I forget is when I’m with you.”
I kissed the top of her head. I usually held back my words, but at that moment, I wanted to say something. To comfort her.
But I was at a loss for what to say.
“They left another message,” she said. She handed me her phone. I recognized it. A picture of the two of us talking at the bar. The words written underneath it:He won’t be there forever.
The message was right. It was why I had put a tracking device in Hazel’s phone, why I made her come with me on most of my errands. It was why I got a part-time job as a security officer in the same restaurant as her.
Peaches was not my scene, nor was it Hazel’s. But out of the choices I had given her from the connections I had, it was the one Hazel had chosen. The only one on Fremont Street.
The stalker was here. Somewhere. Wandering around, hiding in the thick of tourists.
“He put powder in my locker. White powder. Red spots. How sick, right?” she pretended to laugh.
He? How was she sure of the gender?
“Did you take a picture?” I asked.
“No. I ran.” She raised her eyebrow, looking up at me. “Like you told me to. Why?”
When I had given her that advice, that wasn’t what I had meant, but we could deal with that later. “We should go to the police,” I said. But a twinge of despair hit me hard. They couldn’t do anything. Not in her case.
“You know as well as I know, that until something actually happens, this isn’t seen as threatening. They won’t do anything. And even if they did, the stalker would wait until they were gone. Until the police thought I was no longer an issue.”
It hurt to hear her say that. To know that she was right. I couldn’t give her a false sense of hope. It wouldn’t have helped her anyway.
“Do you want to work there?” I asked and gestured in the direction of Peaches.
She scowled. “Fuck no.”
“Let’s go, then.” She raised an eyebrow. “We’ve gotta get our stuff.”
We walked back together slowly. I put an arm around her. The waitresses gawked at us, acting as if the relationship had suddenly been revealed. Hazel might not have been my girlfriend, but she was the only woman I was interested in. She was the reason I was there. I hadn’t hidden that from anyone. I had tried to make it obvious. The only bigger signal I could have sent would be kissing her in public, but I didn’t want to get fired on my first day.
But quitting on the first day? That was a different story.
We told the manager we were quitting, and he rolled his eyes. “Really?” he asked. I nodded. Hazel looked away. “Fuck me. You’re at least going to clean the mess you made, right?”
Was that tone necessary? I put a hand in front of Hazel to stop her. “Someone broke into her locker.”
“Really?” He rolled his eyes again. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
