Voicemail.
I hung up. Dialed again.
Voicemail again.
I texted. Inspector, I need to speak with you. Urgent. Please call.
Nothing came back, not even a read receipt.
I pulled the emergency contact card from behind the register, the one I kept in an envelope taped to the underside of the cash drawer. A backup number for the regional office. A name I’d never had to say out loud.
I dialed. The line rang eight times and went to a recorded message for a department that apparently closed at four-thirty on weekdays.
It was two twenty-two on a Tuesday afternoon and every door I tried was locked.
I put the phone down. Walked to the front of the shop and turned the sign to CLOSED. Pulled the shade on the window.
I’d been preparing for this since the day I arrived. Quietly, in the back of my mind, the way you prepare for a storm you’ve been told might come. The cash in the safe upstairs was a little more than it needed to be. The bag in my closet had clothes, toiletries, a prepaid phone always with charge. My car was parked in the alley behind the building with a full tank because I filled it every Sunday, rain or shine, and I never let it dip below half.
I didn’t panic. Panic was a luxury for people who hadn’t practiced this in their heads a hundred times. I inventoried. Cash, car, bag, route. Highway 12 east to the interstate, then south. Change direction twice. Pay cash for everything. Find a town nobody would look for you in and do what I’d done in Forsaken. Build. Perform. Disappear into the ordinary until ordinary became real again.
I was upstairs packing the bag when the bell rang downstairs.
I’d locked the door. I was sure I’d locked the door, but couldn’t remember actually doing it.
I went down the stairs with my heart hammering and my phone in my hand, already calculating distance to the back exit. The shop was dim with the shade drawn. A shape in the doorway, broad, backlit by the afternoon sun.
“Macy?”
Priest. Standing inside my locked shop.
“I left my sunglasses on the counter.” He held them up. “Door wasn’t locked, I thought I’d try my luck even though the sign was flipped. I thought maybe you were still in here.”
In my panic, I hadn’t locked the door, and this was the type of stupid mistake that could get me killed.
“Macy, are you okay? You look…you don’t look yourself.”
“I’m fine,” I said. Too fast. Too sharp. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
His eyes moved over my face. The shade drawn in the middle of the afternoon. The CLOSED sign. My hands, which were gripping my phone so hard my knuckles ached.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No. I’m just closing early. Headache.”
He didn’t move. He stood there in my dim shop with his sunglasses in one hand and his eyes on me, and he was weighing what I’d said against what he saw. He was a man who noticed details. I’d liked that about him since the first visit. I didn’t like it now.
“Priest.” My voice came out harder than I intended. “I’m fine. I just need to close up.”
He looked at me for three more seconds. Then he nodded. Slow, careful, the nod of a man who was accepting what he’d been told without believing a word of it.
“Okay,” he said. “But if you need anything. You’ve got the shop number for Iron Works from when we fixed your car?”
“I do, but really. I’m fine.”
Priest nodded slowly in a way that told me he didn’t believe me but he left anyway. The bell rang behind him and the door closed.
I locked it this time. Tested it and then tested it a second time.
