Page 5 of Sachie's Hero

Teller Osgood jammedhis feet into his running shoes without untying or retying. His cell phone, on speaker, lay beside him on the bed. “Did anyone call 911?”

“I notified them before I called you,” Hawk said. “I sent you a pin location of the house where Sachie lives. She’s only been there a little over a week.” An incoming text pinged Teller’s cell phone.

Teller grabbed the phone and stood, stomping his foot to set it firmly in the shoe. “Where did she come from before landing in Hilo,” he asked, pulling a black T-shirt out of a drawer.

“Honolulu,” Hawk said. “She left there after a traumatic incident. I don’t know all the details, but Kaleasaid it was bad. Maybe you can get her to open up about it.”

Great. Now, he was supposed to be her therapist?

“Is she working on the Big Island?” Teller asked.

“Yes,” Hawk answered. “She’s a teen counselor, helping with abuse and addiction.”

Teller cringed. Was he supposed to dig into the counselor’s psyche to figure out what was wrong? Hell, maybe he was the right man for that job. He’d been on the other side of a counselor’s couch after being taken from his abusive father and placed in foster care at the awkward age of ten.

He pulled the T-shirt over his head, grabbed his phone and raced for his apartment door, glancing down at the watch on his wrist. He’d gone from a dead sleep to fully alert in less than a minute.

He looked down as he leaped past the last couple of steps from his apartment building, arriving at his vehicle in three long strides across the parking lot. Teller opened the door to the sleek black SUV and jumped in, still amazed at his find. He’d purchased the vehicle secondhand from an older man who’d lived on the Big Island but was moving to the mainland to be closer to his children as he grew older.

The SUV was in mint condition, lovingly cared for, with low miles and more than enough engine to satisfy Teller’s need for speed.

Having backed into his parking space, he slammed the shift into drive and hit the accelerator hard. The SUV leaped forward. The built-in Bluetooth capability picked up the pinpoint on the map Hawk had sent and displayed it on the screen. Teller slowed at the corner, glanced at the map to get his bearings and then made a sharp right, hitting the accelerator again. At two-thirty in the morning, traffic was almost nonexistent. Still, he remained alert, knowing those folks on the road had probably shut down a local bar and were either headed home or to the closest all-night diner, half drunk and more than half-asleep.

Teller zigzagged through the streets of Hilo, lined with houses that appeared to be straight out of an advertisement for houses designed and built in the nineteen-fifties, sixties or seventies. Each house sported a low roofline and stood close to the other like a crowd of spectators watching the parade of cars passing by on the streets.

Traveling faster than the posted speed limit, Teller wove in and out of turns and dodged cars parked next to curbs. A cat stepped off the curb onto the pavement, paused and stared at Teller’s oncoming headlights.

Before Teller could hit the break, the animal spun and darted back in the direction from which it had come as if the cat had changed its mind. The resultwas saving Teller from making a decision to go around the beast, possibly coming to the wrong conclusion as to which direction the cat would go. He wasn’t much of a cat person, but he didn’t like hurting animals if he could help it.

Four minutes had passed since he’d received the call from Hawk. He realized the phone call had come to him minutes, if not seconds, from the moment when Sachie had spotted the face in the window and subsequently discovered her car had been vandalized. The perpetrator could still be at her cottage. She was lucky she hadn’t been hurt at the point she’d made the call.

He still couldn’t believe she’d trotted her happy ass out of her cottage to confront the owner of the face in the window.

If he was to be her protector for the next few days, weeks or whatever timeframe he was needed, he’d have to set a few ground rules. First, if he wasn’t available, she should never leave the safety of her home, where she had the benefit of a lock on her door and her cell phone to call for help. Two, always assume the worst. In this case, she should have assumed what she saw was real, not a hallucination. She was lucky that the man who’d smashed the windshield on her car hadn’t taken whatever heavy, blunt instrument he’d used to deliver the damage to her carand turned on her, using that instrument to crush her skull.

Teller didn’t normally judge a person before he met her, but this lady appeared to fit into the category of too stupid to live. Which meant he would have his hands full if he was to protect her from a determined stalker who’d been following her around in Honolulu as well as on the Big Island.

The map guidance indicated he had reached her street, so Teller turned onto a long, quiet street, immediately accelerating. Her home was one of the last three houses at the end of the block. As he neared the pin’s location, Teller slowed quickly, coming to a halt just short of a little cottage.

No strobing lights greeted him, and no other vehicles had parked in front of Ms. Moore’s house. He’d arrived before the first responders.

Grabbing his Sig Sauer P365 handgun from the console, he shoved open his SUV door.

In the distance, sirens wailed, the sound growing steadily louder as the emergency vehicles got closer.

He could wait for them to arrive before he approached Sachie’s home. Having backup was always a good idea, but what if the perpetrator had breached a window or door and was inside with Ms. Moore now?

No. He couldn’t wait. He had to make sure she was okay. In certain situations, seconds counted.

He quickly eased up the steps onto the front porch and approached the door. When he reached for the door handle, he noticed the door wasn’t closed. It stood just barely ajar, the wooden doorframe split as if someone had hit it hard.

Immediately, Teller moved to the side of the door and listened. No sounds filtered through the gap. With the barrel of his gun, he nudged the door wider, testing the water.

Bullets didn’t fly in his direction. He considered it a good sign but wasn’t taking any chances. Inhaling a quick breath, he lunged through the door, threw himself into a somersault and came up into a crouched position in a shadow behind an armchair.

Footsteps rang out in the back of the house, moving quickly.

Teller’s entrance into the home hadn’t gone unnoticed.

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