Free Cast of Shadows - v4 by Kevin Guilfoile

walk toward her. He wore an open blue windbreaker, presumably to ward off a sudden shower, and his striped shirt was tucked into acid-washed jeans. Low on his forehead he had an Astros cap, but not one with the current logo. His auburn facial hair reflected a few days of neglect, but wasn’t organized into anything you could call beard or mustache.
    In his left hand he had a thick ring of keys. Among them, she glimpsed one of those frequent-shopper discount cards from a large chain grocery. Later, she’d wonder why she found that detail so benign.
    She grabbed the five.
    The fist with the keys struck Joan across the cheek and she yelped as she fell into the car door. He grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head back and forth while ripping the purse off her shoulder. He pulled a gun from the rear of his waistband and pressed it above her ear like he wanted it to stick there by itself.
    “Get in the fucking car and drive,” he growled, pushing her into the driver’s seat and throwing her own keys on the floor mat, where she had to grope for them. As he hurried to the passenger side, she never thought about running, never presumed she could outpace him.
    He directed her down, out of the unmanned garage, and east on Bellaire, then northeast on Main, away from the med center toward downtown.
    “Do you have a family?” His voice was cold and hard to understand, like a robot mumbling.
    She nodded, trying to keep the tremble in her hands away from her voice. “Parents. Brothers. Not around here.”
    “I mean kids,” he said testily, waving the gun at her in a hammer motion.
    She shook her head. He didn’t say why he wanted to know, exactly. “You have to take care of your own,” he said.
    “What?” She wondered right away why she was asking him questions that could encourage or antagonize him, or both.
    “No one else matters,” he said in a dreamy, drunken octave one register higher than he likely intended. “Your son. Your mom. Your goddamned fucking wife.” He ordered her east on Memorial. “Where do you live?” he asked.
    “Sugarland,” she said.
    He bisected her purse, opened her wallet, and lifted her license to read it in the passing streetlights. “Liar,” he said, and leaned his head indifferently against the window.
    They didn’t drive far, to an empty lot surrounded by office buildings. In six hours there would be five thousand people within screaming radius. Just now, there was no one.
    He grabbed her hair again. “Get in back.”
    Pinning her to the bench seat with his knees and the barrel of his gun, he searched casually through the rest of her purse, filling his pockets with cash, a cell phone, and gum. Then he doused her face with her own pepper spray — mercifully, in a way, she thought, as it allowed her to focus on the pain in her eyes, instead of the horror below.
    And it gave her an excuse to cry, which, in those dark, awful, vulnerable moments when she imagined that such a thing as this could happen, she had sworn she would never do.
     
     
    “Jesus. Joan. I didn’t know.”
    “Because I didn’t want you to know.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’d look at me like that.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Stop it.”
    “So why are you telling me now?”
    “Because I think you need someone to talk to. I thought it might help open you up if you knew I was a” — she started to say
survivor
— “that I had been through it. I don’t pretend to know what Anna Kat went through. But in the moments before it happened, behind the wheel of that car, I imagined the worst happening to me. Imagined my life ending with a bullet, or a knife. In just a few instants I became resigned to it. But I survived it. Like you. The way you survived an assassin’s gun. And you survived Anna Kat’s attack. Or you will. But you need to talk about it, Davis. It’s been a long time.”
    “I just don’t think it’s fair,” Davis said, reaching his hand inside his jacket to finger the old wound through his