Naked Risk (Shatterproof #3) (6 page)

Chapter Eleven –
Catherine

I woke up early
Sunday morning after a night of very little sleep and a lot of tossing and turning. I also kept having those half-dreams, where you’re barely asleep and the dream is as vivid as real life.

I kept having them about Watts.

Watts getting caught.

Watts getting injured.

Watts getting killed.

And me never hearing from him again, never knowing what happened to him.

I finally gave up around 6:30 a.m. There was no way I was going to torture myself anymore. If I had to, I’d stay awake until I heard from him. In the meantime, I would find a way to take my mind off of my worries.

I took a long shower, letting the hot water massage my back
, which was stiff from a restless night. I decided to run a bubble bath, so I closed the drain and filled the tub. I soaked in it for an hour until my fingertips were pruned.

It was 9 a.m. by the time
I was dressed and ready to go anywhere. I figured I would take a Sunday drive somewhere. No specific destination. Just get on the road and go.

It had been a while since I’d been to the beach, so I headed in that direction. I hadn’t felt the warm sand on my feet in a long time, hadn’t smelled the salt breeze off the ocean, hadn’t sat in a waterfront restaurant and eaten fried seafood and all kind
s of other things that weren’t good for me.

I thought about going to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but that was two and a half hours away. The more I drove, the more I thought I should stay close to home in case Watts called or showed up. I hadn’t made it very far out of D.C., so I turned around and went back to the city to a familiar comfort spot for me.
My bench on the National Mall.

The food trucks were lined up,
open, but not yet busy. One had a British flag on it. I’d never seen it there before and it made me think of Watts, so I checked out their menu and ordered fish and chips in a basket and went to my bench.

I decided to text
him. It read:
I know you’re busy, but guess what I’m eating?

Ten minutes passed as I ate and waited in vain for a response from Watts. Nothing.

I decided to leave it be and when I’d spent enough time on the bench, I went to check in on Winnie.

“Two days in a row?” Meg said as I walked in to the shelter. “We’re going to have to put you on the payroll.”

I laughed. “I’d never let you pay me.”

“Good,” she said, “
because we’re strapped as it is.”

“You’re not going to have to close, are you?”

She waved it off. “Oh, no. We always have enough to stay open. Always will, I reckon. But anyway, I have some good news and bad news.”

“What?”

“It’s actually the same news. Good and bad.  A retired couple came in yesterday looking for an older, calm dog. They applied to adopt Winnie.”

Now I knew what she meant—it was good for Winnie, bad for me. If things had been different, if I could have given her a good home with a big fenced-in yard, I would have adopted her long ago. But it wasn’t to be.

I nodded. “Okay, well, that’s great. She deserves a good home.”

Meg frowned at me. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not sad. I always tell volunteers not to get attached to the dogs, but they always do. I do it myself.
It’s just part of what we do.”

I felt my eyes welling up. “I’m going to…” I pointed at the door, choking up.

“Go ahead,” Meg said.

. . . . .

I didn’t spend very much time with Winnie. It was making me too sad, especially considering all the stress I was feeling as I waited for Watts to text back.

Two hours and not a word from him.

I pulled up in front of my apartment just before 3 p.m., dreading going inside and trying to find something to pass the time.

When I got to the top of the steps, I found a surprise. One red rose. Just like
the one that had been here the night Watts had left me in the hotel room. At the time, I had considered the slight possibility that it was a gesture of apology from him, but instead decided that someone had left it here by accident because people were always leaving things at the wrong door in this building.

Now, though, as I picked up the rose and smelled it, I was sure they both had come from Watts. I knew he was working close by. Where, exactly, I didn’t know, but it was close enough for him to have done that drive-by check on me at the park the day before, close enough for him to have driven to my house in less than fifteen minutes on Friday.

He was apologizing again, this time for being out of contact.

I unlocked my door and went straight to the
kitchen, where I got a vase, filled it with water, and stood my rose in it. I placed it on the coffee table, admiring it for a moment. It was a big rose, in full bloom and richly red. Watts had picked a gorgeous one for me.

I’d been outside at the park only a short time, but the heat was enough to make me sweat a little and I had some of Winnie’s hair
clinging to my legs and arms. She was shedding for the summer. I decided to take a quick shower.

As I walked down my hallway, I wondered…
if he’d had time to drop off a rose, why hadn’t he sent me a text back?

The moment I stepped in my bedroom
and opened my dresser drawer, I got my answer.

Watts hadn’t left
either of the roses.

Chapter Twelve –
Watts

Spencer
and I had turned our phones off and had been out of contact with everyone for the better part of seven hours as we waited in the back of the van.

When the FBI started doing a sweep of the neighborhood, they brought the bomb-sniffing dogs out. We weren’t concerned abou
t the dogs alerting on the van, but there was a good chance the FBI agents could have gotten a visual on us, so we had retreated to the back of the van and covered ourselves with the movers’ blankets that came with the van.

They brought the dogs twice. I figured it was two different dogs. Each time,
we kept very still. I held my breath and I was sure Spencer had too.

I felt hunger and fatigue creeping up on me, but was able to fend both off. That’s where the training really came in handy. It served its purpose well, provi
ding both Spencer and I the ability to hide out, stay safe, and stay alive.

There were so many ways we could have been caught. The one I worried about the most was an FBI agent checking the name and phone number of the fake company on the magnet
Spencer had placed on the side of the van.

When we were relatively sure it was safe, we emerged from beneath the blankets and c
rawled to the front of the van. By then, the media had showed up. The street was filled with TV trucks, people walking around with big cameras, reporters crowded around various officials.

I started the van
, pulled away from the curb, and we were out of there unnoticed.

. . . . .

Back at the hotel in Alexandria, we watched all of the local major cable news channels covering the story of the terrorist cell that had been taken down in the early morning hours.

One report said:
“The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were tipped off by a neighbor who first called local police about an alleged noise ordinance violation. When police arrived, there was no noise coming from inside the house, so no ticket was issued. The neighbor kept a close eye on the house in the following days and became suspicious when he was taking the garbage out one night, heard a few of the suspects speaking in what he called ‘a foreign language’ and then observed them dry-firing weapons in the back yard.”

“I still can’t fucking believe it,”
Spencer said. “How did we not know they knew?”

I’d been wondering the same. We had experienced holes in the intelligence reporting before, but nothing like this.

“Maybe our time is up,” I said.

Another report
er stated:
“There are unconfirmed reports—I want to stress uncomfirmed—that federal investigators have linked two previous murder scenes to terrorists from the same region. Both of these scenes are in Maryland and are under active investigation. Back to you.”

I stared at the TV as they played loops of video from the scene overnight and showed a map pinpointing the two previous scenes. Fuck.

“Are those yours, Watts?” Spencer said.

I nodded.
“Like I said, I think our time is up.”

He
mumbled, “Yeah. Screw it. This was my last mission. I’m out anyway, so what better timing?”

I was beginning to feel the same way.

. .
. . .

Spencer went to his room just before noon. We agreed to sleep until we didn’t need to anymore and we would meet later that night and wrap things up.

I turned on my personal phone for the first time since the night before and found a text from Catherine asking me to guess what she was eating. It had been sent a few hours earlier, and there were no follow-up texts or voicemails from her. I considered answering her, but I really needed to sleep. She was apparently fine, otherwise I would have heard from her.

I looked at the clock. 12:03. I decided I would call her later.

I collapsed on the bed, still fully clothed, shoes still on, exhausted. I don’t think more than two minutes passed before I was asleep.

My phone rang, jolting me out of a deep sleep. I looked at the screen and saw Catherine’s name. The time read 3:13 p.m. Shit, only three hours of sleep.

I touched the screen to answer and before I could say anything she was saying, “Watts, Watts, oh my God.”

I sat up. “What is it?”

She was
full-on crying now, stuttering out the words: “Th-they were in my apartment.”

“Who was?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?” I said, becoming fully awake now as adrenaline spiked in my blood.

“Outside my building. My car. I’m in my car. I can’t go in there.”

I grabbed the keys to my rental car and was heading out the door. “Drive to that gas station around the corner and wait for me. Park next to the front door where it’s busy. Go now.”

I hung up.

Spencer
had apparently heard me talking loudly in the hallway. He opened his door. “I can’t get to sleep and your yelling isn’t going to help. Jesus, man, what’s wrong?”

I blew past him, walking quickly. “I’ll be back here in thirty minutes.”

“Need me to come along?”

I swung open the door to the stairwell
, said “No” to Spencer, and ran down the stairs.

I replayed Catherine’s words in my mind as I sped toward her apartment building.

They were in my apartment.

Who? And what had happened? My mind raced with possibilities. Maybe she’d been robbed. Or maybe someone had trashed her place, making it look like a robbery to scare her, maybe one of
McDowell’s strong-arms. But that didn’t make sense.

Fucking wake up, Watts, and get your mind straight, I kept thinking.

They were in my apartment.

She was terrified. I couldn’t get to her fast enough, and while I was speeding,
I realized the last thing I needed was to be held up by some cop.

I made it to the gas station
in under ten minutes. She had parked next to the doorway to the store just as I’d told her. I parked on the other side of the lot and walked toward her. I made sure to walk near the front of her car so I wouldn’t have to knock on her window and startle her.

The second Catherine
saw me she reached for the handle, pulled the door open and ran to me. She buried her face in my chest as I wrapped my arms around her, just letting her sob. There was no point in asking questions when she wouldn’t be able to form coherent words.

When she did calm down a little, I said, “Let’s get back in the car.”

I opened the door for her and she sat in the driver’s seat. I went around and got into the passenger’s seat, closing the door and asking her what happened.

She told me everything that had happened after gett
ing back home from her day out.

I asked her some questions, going through it again,
making her tell me step-by-step, right up until the part where she opened her dresser drawer and discovered that several pairs of her panties and some of her bras were missing.

“I had just done laundry,” she said. “The drawer was full earlier and when I opened it…it was just so obvious. I freaked and ran out.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “You’re safe now.” I waited for a short time before asking, “This is the second rose? Was anything missing the first time?”

“Yes, the first one was a few weeks ago, and nothing was missing. Well, not that I noticed. I don’t know.”
She wiped her nose and mouth with a napkin. “I really thought the rose was from you. The second time, I mean.”

My heart sank in response to her words, but I had to keep my emotions in check.

“You didn’t call the police,” I said.

She shook her head. “I called you. I was going to call them, but then I realized that once I called you…
.if they showed up….well, you know.”

I nodded.
“I need the key to your place.”

She turned her head sharply toward me. “What? Why?”

“I’m going there, and you’re staying here.”

She shook her head, reaching for the ignition and grabbing her keys. “Don’t leave.”

“I won’t be long. Stay here. You’ll be safe. Trust me, Catherine.”

She reluctantly handed me her keys. I removed her apartment key from the ring and gave the rest back to her.

. .
. . .

The front door of her apartment showed no signs of forced entry. I checked the lock for fresh scratches. Nothing. Checked the screws to see if they looked like they’d been removed. They didn’t.

Once inside, I checked her windows, all of which
were closed and securely locked in place.

Nothing was disturbed in her apartment. Her TV was still there, as was her laptop.
Even a jewelry box that had some rings and necklaces in it, gold and silver, though I didn’t know if they were valuable.

The dresser drawer was open. She hadn’t even slammed it shut when she discovered what had happened.

I walked around her apartment for a few minutes, looking for other signs of disturbance. The place felt totally different to me now, and I could only imagine how alienated Catherine must have felt from her own home.

A few things crossed my mind as I inspected the place—when Catherine first called and said “
They were in my apartment
” I had a very brief flash of suspicion and worry that Howard McDowell, in yet another of his merciless moves, had sent people here to rattle her. I wouldn’t have put it past the sly bastard. I’m not sure what I thought his motive would have been behind this specific kind of tactic, but I knew what his end-game was: to get Catherine out of my life.

But that was just more paranoia seeping into my thinking.
I was off my game, big time, in so many ways.

This clearly didn’t have anything to do with me. It had everything to do with Catherine not being safe.

Safe from who? I didn’t know yet, but I would find out.

There wasn’t much
left to do there at that point. I found a small suitcase in her closet and went into the bathroom first, then dialed her number.

S
he answered on the second ring and I asked, “Is there anything here you need immediately?”

“Some things from my bathroom. Toothbrush, toothpaste—”

“Already did that. I mean any kind of clothes you’ll want over the next couple of days.”

She told me what to grab and I put the items in the bag.

“Anything else you need or want out of here right now? Valuables, things you can’t do without?”

“No. No, that’s it.”

I left and drove back to the gas station.

“Are you okay to drive or do you want to ride with me?” I asked.

She opened the door and started to get out. “I want to ride with you but can we just leave my car here?”

“I’ll move it.”

I handed her the bag and my car keys and told her to wait for me in my car. I moved hers off to the side of the parking lot, out of the way where people were less likely to report it as abandoned. I had no idea how long we would leave it there. A day? Two? Longer?

It didn’t matter.