And Now She's Gone by Rachel Howzell Hall
To Gretchen, Jason, and Terry
Hey, look at us …
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
material place.
EMILY DICKINSON
SHE HAD TO LEAVE
1
She had to do it.
She had to glance in her rearview mirror.
Because a black SUV was rolling up behind her.
Closer …
A black SUV with the green Range Rover medallion on the left side of its grille.
Closer …
The truck stopped inches away from her car’s rear bumper.
The sound of music reached her first—Notorious B.I.G., “Hypnotize.”
Shit.
Maybe her worry was irrational. It wasn’t like she was on an abandoned road. She was on the west side of Los Angeles, and there was a sports equipment store over there. And a Taco Bell over there. There were storefront windows that promised Pho! Massage! Comic Books!
Didn’t matter, because right at that moment, she was the only woman in the world.
But the man behind her wore familiar-looking aviator sunglasses and— This truck could be his.
Shitshitshit.
Whenever she spotted a black Range Rover, the hair on her neck and arms shot up like straw. In this city, that meant she was a scarecrow four times a day.
She was trembling now, panic sizzling through her blood. She fought it, shallow breath by shallow breath, until she could take deeper breaths, until her fear huddled in that safe place behind her bladder. She kneaded her mind to remember any tiny detail that would tell her this was not the truck. Like … A yellow pine tree air freshener hung from the mirror. Like … A white scrape on the fender’s black paint.
No luck.
She was boxed in—car to the left of her, car to the right, cross traffic and red light before her. In the crosswalk, an old lady inched from one curb to the other curb.
What if he tries to open my back passenger door as I’m sitting here?
The doors were locked.
What if he tries to break a window?
Then she’d … blow the red light, try her damnedest not to hit the old lady in the crosswalk, but if she had to hit her …
No. She wouldn’t let him walk up on her again like that.
The driver removed his sunglasses.
Those eyes …
She squinted at the image in the rearview mirror. “That’s not him.”
Those eyes …
Too small. Too spaced apart.
He was not the man who had promised to kill her.
Not this time.
2
Los Angeles was a city of skies—and everyone in the city now sweltered beneath a dirty-blue sky. Later in the evening, that same sky would turn rose quartz and then, in the morning, Necco wafer orange. Because the marine layer, exhaust from cars and refineries, and brushfire smoke reflected the sun. It was a murder sky, killing four million people slowly … slowly … molecule … by molecule.
But Grayson Sykes wouldn’t die on this eleventh day of July because of that killer sky.
She planned to end her day with dollar tacos and strawberry margaritas with her coworkers at Sam Jose’s. They would talk about Zadie’s upcoming retirement, Clarissa’s upcoming bachelorette party, and Jennifer’s “thing” with her husband’s chief mechanic.
Gray had no wedding and she was far from retirement. “I just won’t eat heavy tomorrow,” “Are you serious?,” and “I did my steps today”—those were her happy hour lines. The quartet would eat, drink, and laugh; they’d cast lustful glances at men who should’ve been home with their wives, who should’ve been working out at the gym, who should’ve been at the office preparing PowerPoint presentations on midyear fiscal numbers.
Now, though, Jennifer Bellman sat in the lobby of the smoked green glass and metal building where Rader Consulting was located. Just a hop, skip, and jump away from the magnificent Pacific Ocean, Rader Consulting did it all—from pets to cons. Looking for lugs in all the right places, squeezing into spots where cops weren’t allowed to go. No warrants? No problem. Need info? Got it right here. From background checks to finding long-lost boyfriends. From simple internet searches and deep, dark web dives to, ahem, other methods.
The blonde was pretending to read the two-week-old People left on the coffee table. One of the primary skip tracers at Rader Consulting, Jennifer sniffed, snuffled, and clawed to find missing deadbeats and debtors. Men saw the hair, the boobs, the blouse that framed those boobs, and they never took her serious enough to keep their traps—or their flies—closed.
Gray asked, “Why are you sitting down here?”
Jennifer bit her bottom lip. “There’s a new tech titan on the third floor. Tall, Slavic hotness in a Hugo Boss suit. He needs to know that I exist.” A gossip, a ditz, a flirt—thrice-married (and still married) Jennifer could be all that and worse.
The “worse” now walked beside Gray to the elevator bank. “Where’d you go?” she asked.
“Pharmacy.”
“No offense, but I don’t know why we celebrate one hundred percent linen.”