Page 20 of Smooth Sailing

There was security in the form of actual security guards patrolling the premises.

Also, you had to have a key fob to get into any complex elevator vestibules, not to mention to get the elevator to take you to your floor (and your fob only worked for your floor) or into a stairwell.

So there was that.

Moreover, the place was lousy with cameras, and I had a security system in my unit.

And after Suzette moved in, I’d had one of those steel bars installed on my door, the kind with two thick plates, and when you hit a button on the center knob, they slid into anchors on either side of the door. It wasn’t pretty, but considering my door was heavy-duty anyway, it would make it hard work to get through.

This was no lock-picking situation. You could only open that thing from the inside or with a remote.

This did not make us impenetrable.

What it did was demand a good deal of effort from someone who was trying to break in, and that effort would need to be noisy and violent. This would give Suzette or me a definitive heads-up and the chance to call the cops before they were able to get through.

As such, Suzette hadn’t left my condo since she moved in. Not even to sit on one of my two balconies (one off the living room, one off my bedroom), each having views to the massive courtyard.

This was because the lower level of the complex was all businesses open to the public. There was a sandwich shop, a nice restaurant, a brunch café, a coffee bar, a neighborhood pub, a cocktail lounge, a hot-yoga studio, a Pilates place, a cute boutique, a hair salon and a day spa, among other things.

Some of this had outdoor seating.

And yes, I’d noticed from my balcony there were men enjoying lattes lounged in that seating, and they had eyes to my unit. Not all the time, but it wasn’t infrequent.

They weren’t making a show of it, but they weren’t hiding it.

They were watching.

What got into me to get involved in this tense situation, I wasn’t quite sure.

It had been a rocky road at first when I’d quit school and gone out on my own.

Gram and Gramps had helped, Mom had provided moral support from afar, but mostly, I was determined to make it under my own steam. It was multiple-jobs, burn-the-midnight-oil, get-so-exhausted-you-felt-you’d-never-be-refreshed-again, have-zero-days-off-from-work-school-or-study-for-an-entire-eighteen-months-at-one-point kind of determination.

I could not deny some of this was about Dad. About showing him, even if I was intent never to see him again. About proving not only myself, but something about Mom that I didn’t quite get, but I knew it was there.

He was a terrible father, but a great motivator.

This sitch with Suzette was something else entirely.

It was scary, stupid and dangerous.

But Suzette agreed with me. I was the wall she could hide behind that Babic wouldn’t tear down. She’d been clear about what happened, and her many injuries corroborated those facts. There was DNA collected from under her fingernails along with seminal fluid (that had not yet been tested, but it would be incontrovertible when it was).

Because of this, Babic really, really needed a very good attorney.

Last, Babic really, really, really did not need any more problems with the law, or bad PR, and the death of his accuser, and anything happening to the woman who was offering her protection, would be pretty damned bad PR, and would lead to more pretty danged serious problems with the law.

In other words, Suzette was understandably being a little nuts because she’d been through hell and maybe wasn’t thinking straight.

As for me, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

What I did know, and what troubled me greatly, was that I, too, was not thinking straight.

I parked my little, baby-blue Fiat 500 (satirically, but adorably, I’d named her “Baby Shark”) in my underground spot and grabbed my keys, primarily the hand-held Mace on my keychain. I flicked open the snap on the strap that kept the button covered, palmed the tube with my thumb on the button, took a look around through windows and mirrors, and only when I saw nothing, I got out.

I kept alert on the way to the parking level elevator lobby. I fobbed myself in. I called the elevator. I got on the elevator. I fobbed my floor.

And then I let out a sigh of relief as the doors started closing.

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