The Sarah Roberts Series Vol. 7-9 Read online

  “No, please don’t,” the woman in the corner pleaded.

  Sarah looked over. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me? After what he’s done to you. He came here to kill you. He just shot Rita in front of your eyes and you want me to spare him?”

  Blood pumped from his leg wound. If they didn’t put a tourniquet on it, he would die whether she did any more damage or not.

  In her heart, she knew she wouldn’t murder him in cold blood, but the sound of her words consoled her and struck fear in a man who lived by doing that to others. He needed to feel what it was like to be utterly afraid.

  “You need to tie that leg off or you’ll die,” Sarah said. “But first, are there others outside? Or did you come alone?”

  “Alone. I came alone.” He gritted his teeth, his face pale, his eyes bugging out.

  She touched his cheek with the tip of her gun. “You wouldn’t lie to me now, would you?”

  “No. Please, no.”

  She pulled her jacket off. “Tie the sleeves of my jacket tight around your thigh above the wound. Do it now, or you’re going to die.”

  Noises and commotion came from outside the hall.

  “Your buddies?” Sarah asked as she brought the gun back to aim at his face.

  Before he could reply, a man shouted, “Police!”

  “Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up.”

  “Okay,” Sarah shouted down the hall from behind the door. “We’re coming out. The man who broke in here and shot the woman at the front isn’t a threat anymore. He’s been neutralized.”

  “Just come out with your hands where we can see them.”

  “Give us a second.”

  She ran over to the counter and grabbed a paper towel. With it, she picked the man’s weapon up off the floor and carried it to the door.

  “This is the weapon that shot the woman in the front.”

  She swung her arm and tossed the gun out into the hall.

  “Okay, we’re coming out. There’s two of us. Don’t shoot. We’re unarmed.”

  She flicked her safety back on her own weapon, shoved the gun in the back of her pants, and grabbed the sobbing woman off the floor. She helped her to her feet and guided her through the door, their hands raised as high as they could.

  “The perpetrator is in the kitchen with a leg wound. He’ll need medics ASAP.”

  “Come on, come on,” the cop gestured.

  Behind him, two more cops materialized. More sirens approached outside.

  At the end of the hall, cops grabbed her and pushed both of them to the side where they were frisked.

  “I’m still armed,” she said. “I have a permit for it.”

  The officer stopped on the gun in her pants. His eyes widened.

  “I’m not leaving my weapon behind,” she smiled. “Too expensive.”

  “Gun!” the cop shouted. “She’s got a gun.”

  He kicked her legs out from under her before she could react. Two other men jumped on her back, one of them placing a knee between her shoulder blades. She tried to tell them about her permit to carry and that the gun was expensive, but her windpipe was cut off momentarily. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move from the weight on her. White light filled her eyes.

  The gun was ripped from the back of her pants as her arms were wrenched behind her. Cuffs were snapped on roughly, causing enough pain in her wrists to make her think they had broken. Pain ignited her anger. She wanted to tear their faces off but she still couldn’t move. No matter how much Aaron had trained her in close quarters fighting, when the power of three men held her down, there wasn’t much she could do.

  The knee came off her back. She took a large gulp of air as her shoulders ached from being wrenched back so far. Her eyesight cleared in seconds, but pain flared from several places on her body.

  “Get the fuck off me,” she shouted. “Stupid motherfuckers.”

  “Shut up, slut.”

  They rolled her onto her right hip and, with one man on either side, lifted her up.

  “You approached officers of the law with a firearm. Are you a fucking stupid skank? Dressed the way you are, working in a joint like this, I guess it makes sense.” He looked at the two men on either side of her. “Take this stupid slut out to the cruiser. When we get to the station we’ll charge her with everything we can.” He headed down the hall. She heard him say stupid whore before he got too far.

  A siren outside came to a stop. Two paramedics rushed in, one going to Rita and checking for a pulse, the other knelt beside the woman with the black eyes.

  The cops half walked, half dragged Sarah outside into the brisk February wind without her jacket to the back door of the farthest cruiser.

  They shoved her into the back, banging the side of her head on the roof before she got in.

  “Serves you right, whore,” one cop said as he leered at her cleavage.

  She kept her mouth shut. Protesting would only get her more abuse or even pepper sprayed. Assholes like this was one of the reasons she didn’t trust cops.

  Her wrists ached, her shoulders throbbed and now she had a wicked headache.

  She had done what Vivian had asked of her. If she hadn’t been here, there would be two dead women, or more.

  Getting arrested had to be part of the plan too.

  Didn’t it?

  Throughout the entire incident, she didn’t once consider what Aaron would think. That really scared her.

  Chapter 11

  On Keele Street, just north of the 407 Highway, the man sat in his Range Rover and stared at the hole in the fence—the hole he made in the middle of the night last summer. It was still there. No one had come by in six months to repair it and no one would.

  The fence guarded an empty warehouse. A small metals company used to occupy the warehouse before they relocated to a larger facility in Mississauga. He had done his research. The site was available for lease. Anonymously, he had a real estate agent confirm that there would be no appointments to see the property for the month of February. Come March, he didn’t care. The building wouldn’t be here anymore.

  It was time to let his mannequins be discovered. That was one of the reasons he had chosen a spot so close to downtown Toronto. No more abandoned farms north of the city. No more holes in the ground far from home. Not at his age. He was done with the reset. This was to be his last. He would accept his just desserts as he had made his dolls accept theirs.

  Life had consequences and accountability. Today, people were not interested in accepting that. He had seen it all too much in his line of work and it disgusted him.

  That was why he chose the leap year, February 29th, every time it came around, to make at least two mannequins accept the ultimate consequence for their actions. After all, it was a leap year. Time to leap ahead, cleansed and ready for another four years.

  Two represented balance. Yin and yang. Removing their tongues stopped all human indignities like pleading, begging, bargaining, and ultimately acceptance. He didn’t care if the women accepted what he did to them or hated him for it. Had they lived better lives, they wouldn’t have found themselves in their particular predicament.

  It was all their fault. They deserved what happened to them. They brought it upon themselves.

  He learned a long time ago that every time he was with a woman, there was a price to pay. Whether it was a cash price, or a mental price, there was always a price to pay. In the end of every relationship, he had always suffered some kind of loss, so twenty years ago he had stopped having relationships. Knowing that going in is fair. But why was there a price? Why couldn’t men and woman be together without the fee? Men didn’t have a price. They just want companionship. What gave women the right?

  Women are foreign, enemy, hostile territory.

  Virtually, men were at war with them. He saw it all the time at his job. What women didn’t get was that men were physically stronger, so when pushed, women ended up paying the price.

  He mad
e women pay his price without ever getting pushed, riled up or unjustly paying their price. If he didn’t let them in, there was never a price to pay. At least not for him.

  Yet he was cursed with the natural urges to be with a woman. Month after month, year after year, his urges grew and intensified. Until that fateful day, February 28th, the leap year of 1996. He allowed himself to be drawn in on a date even though his sister had advised against it.

  But he didn’t listen to her.

  The woman seemed nice and dressed well. They went for dinner and then drinks after. He found they had a few things in common. At least enough to ask for another date.

  She had drank too much wine. Things got tense, the conversation stilted. The clock ticked past midnight. Leap day was upon them. His date explained that it was the anniversary of her sister’s murder.

  He’d thought if the woman’s sister was anything like her, maybe there was a valid reason for someone taking her life.

  The woman wailed at the injustice, screamed at him as if he were the murderer and made a scene in the near-empty bar they found themselves in that night. He’d backed away from her, suggesting that he would pay the bill and they could leave.

  She took his backing away as a sign that he wasn’t on her side. She irrationally accused him, in her drunken state, of being involved in the murder of her sister, which was preposterous.

  Then she physically attacked him.

  He repelled her as best as he could, but she had liquid courage and the strength of five women.

  The police were called and he was arrested. She had carpet burns from when he pushed her away. She had smashed her cheek on the corner of one of the tables. The woman claimed he had drugged her drinks with intent to rape and murder her on the anniversary of her sister’s unsolved murder.

  The leap year is also called the Bissextile Year and she claimed that was what he had wanted to do—have sex with her as he had with her dead sister.

  Within twenty-four hours, he was released and the arrest stricken from the records once the police had taken everyone’s statement, the bartender included.

  That one date almost cost him his job, a job he was retiring from this year. His life would’ve been ruined by this one date, by this woman whose price was far too steep to pay.

  He had gotten off lucky. He would never allow himself to get that close again.

  The woman ended up going back to the crisis center and was lost in the system. He never heard from her again.

  He never dated again.

  But he was scarred for life.

  And every bissextile year, he chose two women to become his dolls for the week leading up to February 29th. This one would mark his last leap day. His urges had decreased. He couldn’t fix the world two mannequins at a time every four years. It was all about him, sure, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t lessen the value of his cause. It was just. It was right. There just wasn’t a need for it anymore.

  He sighed in the front seat of the Range Rover.

  “Oh, to be young again.”

  Tomorrow he would deliver the cage through the hole in the back fence. His medical bag was ready with the proper tools to bring justice to his dolls.

  In the end, they thanked him. They always did. He made sure of it. If more people did what he did, there would be fewer assholes in the world. That was one of the reasons he wanted to be found out. Once everything went on record and the newspapers wrote his story, maybe women would consider their actions. Maybe they wouldn’t torment men to the point where they had to respond in anger. If he could just save a few men the pain of losing everything in a divorce, their home, their business, their kids, all because she cheated on him, then maybe what he did was righteous after all.

  He knew it was, but the public wouldn’t at first glance.

  He needed to die for his message to be heard. They would have no one to crucify if he was gone. Maybe then they would only hear the message, the true message.

  A plan had formed in his head. He already had two dolls in mind. He had talked to his sister. Jennifer always told him about the abusive women at the crisis center. He heard about it year after year while he waited for the leap year.

  This one was shaping up to be a grand year.

  He smiled, pulled the keys from the ignition and got out of the vehicle. The chill in the air hit him immediately. He hunched his shoulders, dropped his hands in his pockets and started for the hole in the fence.

  Once he had squeezed through, he walked the fifty meters across the snow-covered grass to the side door of the warehouse that he’d already snapped the lock off. It was mid-afternoon, but he didn’t worry about being seen. The hole in the fence was at the edge of the property, and behind that, a row of train tracks sat below a hill. The nearest building was hundreds of yards away on the other side of the street.

  The front of the warehouse looked out onto a large parking lot and the road that led to Keele Street. Even if someone saw him from the two-story office building on the other side of the road, they wouldn’t pay too much attention. He had a magnetic security sign on both front doors of the Range Rover. If anyone saw his vehicle in the area they would assume a security company was doing routine rounds.

  Once inside the side door of the warehouse, he made his way to the back of the building and down a few stairs where a large room once stored supplies. He had chosen this room for the cage.

  He walked around it, scanning every square foot, making sure it would work. The corner would hold the cage. The water was still connected. There was a sink that would help him clean up after his mannequins lost their tongues. He wasn’t in need of water for drinking. His dolls weren’t allowed such niceties.

  No, they came here to learn, not survive.

  A bird flitted in the rafters. He looked up and followed its path.

  “You’ll have quite a show in here soon enough,” he said to the bird. “Just a few more days.”

  The sound of his own voice echoing softly off the metallic walls scared him. He looked around as if he was being watched.

  Then someone shouted from somewhere above.

  “Hello?” The distant male voice echoed throughout the warehouse.

  Goose bumps rose on his arms.

  “That real estate agent said nobody was supposed to be inside this building until March,” he whispered to himself. He was unarmed. No knife, no scalpel, no weapon of any kind. He had never been any good with his hands. “What am I going to do?”

  “Hello?” the male voice called again. “I saw you come in.”

  He walked to the nearest wall and leaned against it.

  He saw me?

  Maybe if he stayed out of sight and let the intruder wander off, everything would work out. But he couldn’t now. Since he was seen, there were three options. Option one, kill the man and be done with it. But he didn’t want to. That was anti-progress. He dealt with dolls, mannequins, not men. Option two, talk to the man, convince him that everything was fine and then he could come back and still use the facility. Or option three, talk to the man, convince him that everything was fine, and find another facility to use. Time was running out, though. Leap day was coming up quick. He couldn’t find another facility in that time.

  So he decided on option two. He had to talk to the intruder. But he couldn’t do it in the room he proposed to assemble the cage so he slipped out and ran for the stairs.

  “Hello?” the voice called, sounding less certain someone was here.

  “Is anyone there?” the man called as he climbed the stairs two at a time.

  “Over here,” the intruder said.

  Across the main floor, about a hundred meters away, a man wearing a shirt and tie stood between two columns.

  “Are you okay?” the shirt and tie man asked. “Are you allowed to be in here? This place has been empty for over a year.”

  “Security,” he shouted as he walked toward the intruder.

  “Security? I’ve never seen security come through here before.�
��

  He continued walking toward the intruder. “New buyers or someone’s looking to lease the place.” They were forty yards apart now. “All I know is my company got the call to do routine patrols. We walk the premises to keep any animals out and to make sure there’s no squatters.”

  He sized the man up as he drew closer. Five foot, ten inches, about one hundred and sixty pounds, no stomach protruding but never been to a gym either. Losing his hair on top, scruff on the face, middle-aged and without a wedding ring. Unhappy, corporate blue-collar who eats pretty good and probably doesn’t have a girlfriend, lonely and with a lot of male friends. Focuses too much on what other people are doing. Shouldn’t have come in here because he had no idea who or what he was going to meet.