“Son of a bitch. It’s you,” Randall muttered under his breath. “It’s not possible.” He jumped off me and started running toward the crane wreckage.
Still on my back, I stared at the shadow for a split second, trying to make him out in the rain. I couldn’t get a good look, but I felt his presence. I felt his powerful gaze punching a hole right through me, drowning out everything else, including the shock of having almost been raped. There was just him. And me.
The sky turned back to black, and when the moonlight broke through again, the man was gone.
I got to my feet, trying to breathe. This can’t be happening. It can’t. The devil wasn’t real. The devil didn’t come to save people.
Off in the distance, I heard a horrible scream. Randall begging for his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
After the attack, I drove to my motel, unable to remember a second of the trip. Not one sliver of time after I heard the terror-filled screams of a man having his life ripped away. When I came around, I was taking a shower.
Numb. I felt numb.
Well, mostly.
Somewhere deep inside, I felt lucky, too. God only knew what Randall had planned to do to me, and now the monster was dead.
No, I didn’t see him die, but the whimpering sounds had been that of person in incredible pain, an oratory nightmare I couldn’t pry from my thoughts. Still, the next morning, when I woke up in my crappy, all-brown motel room, I was sure the entire event had been a dream. A bad, bad dream. Until my cell beeped inside my purse.
I peeled my tired body from bed, noting a sharp pain in the center of my back. The rock. I’d landed on a rock. Last night had not been a dream.
I stumbled over to my brown leather purse hanging from the brown pleather armchair next to the window. I’d only kept my cell charged to keep time and watch a few movies I’d downloaded, so I was surprised to have service.
“Where are you?” I muttered, digging through my huge purse—flashlight, wallet, granola bar, and makeup bag. “There.” I looked at the screen. It was someone from Ripley Construction.
“Hello?” I said.
“Thank God your phone’s working. Where the hell are you?” said Rosie.
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “My motel. What time is it?” It was still dark outside.
“Nine thirty. I just got a call from the home office. Mr. Ripley’s pissed.”
Nine thirty? I never slept in this late. I pulled back the curtains to expose the dark gray clouds and gusting winds outside. Everything was coated in a gloomy hue. Like my mood.
“Seriously, girl. What happened with the forms?” Rosie said, yanking me from my mental hole.
The forms. The forms. “Oh shit! The forms! I hit send right when the generator cut out. I thought I still had fifteen…” My voice trailed off. Randall. He had been waiting outside last night. The generator hadn’t run out of juice, had it?
“Well,” she said, “I told the home office we had technical issues with the internet equipment. They told us to try to submit the files again. They’ll see if they can work something out with FEMA, but you need to get here ASAP—I can’t get into your computer. Also, you left a bunch of your filing cabinets open. You gotta lock that stuff up…”
While she went on about securing computers and all the weird stuff going on around the port, my heart pounded in my ears like a warning from deep inside my bones. Don’t go back to the jobsite, it said. What if that man returned? He’d saved my life, but there was no getting around how frightening he was. Like a ghost. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“I’m, uh, not feeling well.” I coughed for effect. “Think I’m coming down with something.”
“Jeni, you have to come in. If you don’t, those men outside won’t get paid. I won’t get paid. A lot of us have families, remember? I also need your help expediting parts today.”
Fuck. I exhaled slowly. My nose hurt. My scalp hurt. My everything hurt. I’d fought for my life last night, and the last thing I needed was to go back to that port and relive it.
“Please?” she begged, a hint of irritation in her voice.
I knew she was going to yell at me, and avoiding confrontation was a strong motivator for me. “I-I guess I could come in.”
“Great. How fast can you get here? Claire is waiting for an update.” Claire was the VP of operations in Tallahassee.
“I’ll leave now. Probably an hour. Hour and a half?”
“Well, get a move on it, girl.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and good news. The police came by this morning and picked up that body.”
Somehow, that body in the metal box didn’t seem as important or as scary as it had yesterday.