Page 2 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name
She would feel a brief stab of pain when the needle pierced her skin, but then she wouldn’t feel anything. There would be no more anxiety. No more fear. No more guilt about the myriad ways she’d failed Noah, or regret about all the terrible things she’d done that had led her to this point.
The door behind her opened. She sensed the gap at her back, heard footsteps fill it. She twisted around, saw an enormous man towering over her. He had a tattoo of a spider web covering his scalp and running down both sides of his neck.
He looked down at her and grinned. Dangling from one hand was an aluminum baseball bat. He raised it, double-handed, like a slugger about to hit one home.
Addison felt a sharp stab of pain.
And then she felt nothing at all.
ONE
PRESENT
Jessica Meeks hadten minutes to pack everything she would need to start a new life into a suitcase, watched silently by the armed man in the doorway.
She yanked clothing from hangers, grabbed armfuls of makeup and toiletries from the bathroom and upended drawers onto her crumpled bed.
“Shit.” She scraped her hair back from her face. “I can’t find my phone. I must have left it at work.”
The man in the doorway stepped forward. “Leave the phone, ma’am. And all your other devices. We’ll get you new ones.”
She rolled up a pair of jeans and stuffed them in her suitcase. Then she stopped to survey the room. The place looked like a hurricane had ripped through it, and not just because of her hurried packing. Clothes spewed out of her wardrobe. Someone had rifled through her underwear drawer; its contents were draped obscenely over her dresser. The mirror on her chest of drawers was shattered.
The rest of her house was in a similar state. Nearly every possession she owned had been pulled from drawers and knocked off shelves. Someone had torn the pictures from the walls. Her TV had been kicked over, and the contents of her refrigerator spread across the kitchen floor. In the bathroom, her vanity had been raided, the mirror smashed.
Her bedroom had suffered the greatest devastation. In the fractured image reflected by her dresser mirror, she could see the wall above her bed. Red spray paint scrawled across the wallpaper. It depicted a crudely drawn all-seeing eye topped with a crown. The still-wet paint dripped down the wall from the corners of the eye like tears.
The man in the doorway cleared his throat. “Five minutes, ma’am.”
She tore her gaze from the awful artwork and swung the lid of her suitcase shut. “Just one more thing.”
Before he could object, she dashed down the hall to the kitchen. She pushed open a screen door and stepped out into the backyard.
The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the lawn. Her washing hung stiffly from the clothesline strung between two pine trees.
She glanced over her shoulder to check she wasn’t being followed, then jogged down the crushed shell path that led to the laundry room by the side of the house. She pulled the door shut behind her, flicked on the light, then reached up into the cupboard above the dryer and took down an old box of laundry powder. Lifting the lid, she found what she’d stashed in there years ago. A little pink and silver revolver and a box of cartridges. She wrapped them in an old dish towel, then ran back to the kitchen.
She stuffed them in her shoulder bag, then returned to the bedroom. Pausing in the doorway, she took a moment to survey the debris of her life scattered about. Her fragmented reflection stared back at her from the shattered mirror.
“Ready to go, ma’am?”
She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and faced the man. “You don’t have to call me, ma’am, you know. My name’s Jessica.”
The man said nothing, just left his post by the door to lift her suitcase from the bed and carry it out into the hall.
As she watched him go, it occurred to her that her name wouldn’t be Jessica for much longer. Soon, she’d be someone else entirely. Someone no one had ever met before.
Not even her.
* * *
Forty minutes earlier, she’d been onstage at the Femme Fatale Strip Club, wearing nothing but a pink thong and a couple of strategically placed silver stars. She was upside down, hanging onto a pole with just her knees when she spotted the man standing near the lighted exit.
He was leaning against the wall, both hands clasped in front of him. Broad shouldered, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, the veins jumping out of the tanned skin of his forearms. Handsome, in a square-jawed, clean-cut kind of way.
He’d stuck out like a sore thumb among the sweaty frat boys and assorted lowlifes that frequented the club. Partly because he looked deeply uncomfortable being there. But mostly because he had a silver star of his own. His was made of chromium and attached to his belt, beside a slim black handgun. When he shifted his hips, it glinted in the light.
U.S. Marshals.
