“Eight, seven, three, nine,” I breathed then sucked back a harsh, desperate breath but only got half of it in.
He started choking me again.
And he did this making a call.
I didn’t care if he called Geneva, just as long as I got out of this alive.
So I kept fighting.
He was bigger than me, leaner than me, fitter than me, obviously stronger than me and really fucking good at choking people.
He was going to kill me.
At this realization, my stomach dropped, thoughts exploded in my brain, feelings grazing through me leaving wounds. Fear. Panic. Regret. Disbelief. Pain.
Fuck, Deke was going to find me.
Fuck, Deke had a key and if this guy left me where I lay after he was done throttling me, it would be Deke that found me.
I bucked ferociously with my hips and scored deep with my nails in his flesh, feeling myself tearing through fabric and breaking skin.
It was like he was a rodeo rider, he held on without a flinch.
It was happening. Oxygen depletion. The fight going out of me. My vision getting fuzzy. The black seeping in from the outsides of my eyes. He was fading and nothing was in my brain. Not a thing.
Except focusing all my efforts on dragging in air that just wasn’t coming.
I stopped flailing to concentrate everything I had on trying to breathe and the gruesome, useless noises I was making attempting to pull in oxygen filled the air.
“That’s your girl, Justice,” he said into the phone. “Listen,” he ordered and my phone was to my face.
I feebly lifted an arm to shove it up his jaw in one final effort to push him off me, but it just glanced off, dropping to the side as I kept suffocating.
He took the phone from me and said in it, “You get me what you owe me. You fuckin’ get it to me. You got a week. You don’t get it to me, she goes down and that other one does too.”
With that, he threw my phone on the bed and took his hand from my throat.
I twisted to the side under him, curling into myself, drawing in long, grating breaths, one after another, my hands to my throat.
“I will get to you. I don’t get paid, you pay,” he whispered in my ear. “You let her know that.”
Hand to my throat, he turned me, and I thrashed in terror at his grip there again, rasping out, “No!”
But he just hit me.
And again.
And again.
Which was when it all went black.
* * * * *
I woke up on my bed, no idea how long I’d been out. But my face was on fire, my throat was on fire and I had only one thought.
Get the fuck out of there.
I scrambled to my hands and knees, awkward and clumsy in my fear, and fell off the side of the bed, landing all my weight on a wrist.
I didn’t even feel the pain.
I grabbed the bed and nightstand, the lamp falling off as I hauled myself up.
I felt around on the nightstand for my keys, and in my agitated searching, they fell to the floor.
I dropped to my knees to find them, and in the dark actually hit them, sending them careening away from me.
I did this twice, frantically crawling after them, until I snatched them up in my hand and I held them so tight, the metal bit into my flesh.
I got to my feet and I ran.
Out the bedroom into the great room and to the front door.
I slammed into it.
It was locked.
With fumbling fingers, I unlocked it and tore out of my house, my bare feet going from the smooth flagstone walk to the biting gravel of my driveway, and I didn’t care.
I threw an arm out, half hugging my granddad’s truck, running my arm along its side, the hood as I rounded it to get to the driver’s side.
I got there, whispered my chant of, “Together, keep it together. Get in the truck and go. Together, keep it together,” in an effort to get the key in the hole to open my door without wasting another second dropping them from my violently shaking hands.
It worked.
The door made not a noise when I threw it open (WD-40 could not be beat).
I climbed in the seat, slammed the door, locked it and went to the ignition.
“Together, keep it together. Keep it together.” I kept at it to focus on getting the key in, the truck started up and getting the fuck out of there.
It worked again and I threw the truck in drive, did a tight turn in the wide (but not that wide) circle of gravel that was the end of the drive at the front of my house. And I floored it when I hit the lane.
Through this, I did not look anywhere or think anything but where I was going.
And I continued to do this as I drove like a fucking lunatic down my lane, Ponderosa Road and all the rest until I hit Main Street.
I must have taken that street in the early morning dark going seventy.
I did not care.
I drove direct to the police station, screeched to a halt at an angle to the front doors, taking up both handicap spaces. I threw the truck in park, pushed open my door, shoved myself out of the truck and ran to the front door.
It was locked.
I looked through the glass door at the officer at the desk and started banging with open palm at the door.
“Let me in.”
It came out as a scratch.
I cleared my throat, still banging, and shouted as loud as my damaged throat would let me. “Let me in!”
I heard a buzzer.
I yanked open the door, threw myself through it and raced to the desk where the officer was already standing and on the move, beginning to make his way around it, eyes locked to me.
I came to a rocking halt and declared, “Someone tried to strangle me.”
That was when the tears started to flow and there was nothing for it.
I sank down to my knees and totally lost my shit inside the Carnal Police Department.