Page 15 of Kissing Kayley
We stopped an hour later for gas.
“Stay in the car, and stay off the phone,” he said as he climbed out, clicking the locks behind him. When he returned, he opened his door. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He drove away from the pumps and backed into a spot in front of the convenience store. Before getting out he clipped his badge to his belt, moved his sidearm to a visible holster on his belt, and pulled on a plain black windbreaker. With that done, he walked around and opened my door for me.
We were the only customers. The two clerks at the counter were glued to their phones. From the sounds, they were watching videos of the attacks.
Vic walked me into the ladies’ room after he first checked no one was inside. There was one stall, and he flipped the deadbolt on the outer door and stood outside the stall while I used it. Then he used it and before we emerged from the bathroom, he eased the outer door open to look around.
My gut tensed. While having a detail was inconvenient, and made certain aspects of my life complicated, it was nice that I usually never gave a second thought to my safety no matter where I went. I was unhappy to admit my normally top-notch situational awareness skills taught to me by Leo had atrophied from disuse.
Now alone with Vic, in a strange part of the country, I was more aware than ever how lucky I’d been over the past couple of years. None of the previous stress I’d ever felt about being a single woman out in public had impacted my life.
If I wanted to go for a 2 AM run? Sure, no problem. Two agents jogged with me and more followed in a car, usually with a marked law enforcement cruiser tagging along, too. If I wanted to go shopping somewhere? I didn’t have to worry about pickpockets or purse snatchers.
I had door-to-door drivers, meaning I never had to make the keys-in-my-fingers Wolverine fist for the nervous walk across a dark parking lot or through a nearly empty parking garage. The only people who ever drove my car now were my detail, when I wanted to ride in it instead of one of their huge, black SUVs, and even then they insisted on driving me.
Break-ins at home?
Ha! I had a state-of-the-art security system, bulletproof glass in my windows, and 24/7 on-site Secret Service special agents standing guard, as well as several panic buttons in my home.
But now?
Now I was once again a “civvie” and even with Vic’s comforting and highly skilled—and-armed—presence, I felt…
Raw. Nervous.
Scared.
That was something I’d honestly not felt since that day I holed up in my office closet. Even then my fear had been more for my coworkers and clients than myself.
We bought a couple of bottles of water and snacks and after Vic made another quick call to Maxwell to find out about my current and past coworkers—everyone was safe and accounted for—we set out again, heading east. Vic sometimes avoided what passed for main highways in this neck of the woods, and other times we took the freeway, where it was disconcerting to note how little traffic there was. Compared to California freeways, it felt damned deserted. We crossed into Idaho, and when we hit the Montana state line long after dark, he called the man again to let him know our ETA.
We pulled into a truck stop for gas. It wasn’t crowded but, unlike our previous stop, we weren’t alone.
“Don’t get out yet,” he said, his head on a swivel as he climbed out to pump gas. When he returned, he once again drove around to the building and backed in.
When I climbed out, despite it being comfortably cool he handed me a plain black hoodie jacket. “Wear this. Zipped up, hood down.”
Then he grabbed a Pittsburgh Penguins baseball cap from one of his bags and handed it to me. “Put that on,” he said. “Hair up under it.”
I pulled it on. I wasn’t about to argue. The very air felt… wrong. Every person I spotted on our walk to the bathrooms looked wary.
Angry.
Scared.
We knew all civilian and passenger aircraft had been grounded, and the nation tensely awaited updates or more attacks.
Less than an hour later, we pulled onto a different road but this one had a gate just a few yards in. The only thing visible beyond the gate was the road which rose in a way that told me we were going over yet another rise. I couldn’t see anything past thegate, but a large, sturdy, hand-carved wooden sign next to the entrance read, “The Ridge.”
Vic called the man back and he gave Vic a gate code to punch in. Then the gate swung open and we pulled through.
We passed a large, Victorian-style house with a quaint sign out front declaring it as Robyn’s Nest. It was another few miles before we spotted more houses. This wasn’t a slapped-together subdivision of tech-bro escapees from Jackson Hole crammed together in cookie-cutter McMansions. The homes varied in size and design. Each one sat on an enormous parcel, some even multi-acres large and complete with barns and pastures.
We wound our way deeper into the development and eventually turned into a driveway in front of a one-story ranch-style home with two pick-up trucks and an SUV parked out front.
