Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(7)

“Relax,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’re going to talk.”

“You want to talk? After what you did to me?”

“Yes, I do. Sit down. Please.”

His face showed fright and anger. “You’re in my house, telling me to sit down?”

“I’m asking you to sit. I’ve never yet told you to do anything.”

“You’re not going to hurt me? You promise?”

I got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with a mug. I handed it to him. “I made coffee. I hope that’s okay.”

“You made coffee,” he repeated. Now he just looked confused.

“Figured we could both use a cup.”

He took the cup skeptically, as though I’d dropped in a cyanide pill. We sat in the living room. Except for the broken coffee table, everything looked the same as when we had first arrived. “What do you want?” he asked.

I opened my purse, took out a narrow sheaf of pages, and handed them to him.

He saw the first page and looked up, startled. “What is this?”

“Your girlfriend’s name is Angela Matterson. Your name is Robert Harris. She works as a special education teacher in San Leandro and you’re a mechanic at Sharkey’s Motors. You’ve been with Angela for two years and seven months.”

“How do you know that?”

I ignored the question. “Six weeks ago, you two got in a bad argument. Tempers flared. And then you hit her. You hurt her pretty badly.”

He stared at me. “Who are you?”

“I don’t pretend to know who was in the right. I don’t give a damn who said what. But as shown in those hospital intake records you’re holding, you put your girlfriend in the ER with a broken nose. The broken rib she got when she fell down the front steps trying to run. She told the police that she had tripped, and stuck to it. She wouldn’t admit you had touched her.”

“I lost my temper,” Robert said in a more subdued voice. “I felt bad about it. I’d never laid a hand on her before.”

Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. “After the hospital, she checked into a women’s shelter,” I continued. “She received counseling and then she came back here to get her things. She had decided to move out, and start a new life. She made those decisions for herself.”

He looked at me but said nothing.

“When she came back here, though, you were waiting.”

“To apologize! To ask for another chance.”

“You did apologize. That’s undisputed. But she didn’t change her mind. She packed a suitcase.” I set aside my coffee. “That was when you showed her the gun. Said you’d find her and make what you’d done look like nothing.”

I was quiet. Challenging him to contradict me.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I never would have done that. I wasn’t serious, I was upset. I just really wanted her back.”

Again, maybe true, maybe not. Didn’t matter. “Sure. Maybe you were bluffing. Maybe you did really love her. Maybe you still do. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. But what you said was enough to terrify her. And that’s where I come in.”

He bit his lip. “I was angry, but I’d never hurt her. I have that gun for self-defense. I work in a bad part of town, been carjacked twice.”

“How many Percocet did they give you at the hospital?”

“What?”

“How many pills? And what milligrams were they? Did you happen to notice?”

“Only one. They wouldn’t give me more until the booze was out of my system.”

“So you’re feeling clear-headed? Cognizant?”

He looked at me in confusion. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Good.” I reached into my purse a second time. This time I took out a small black pistol.

People reacted differently to guns being pointed at them. Some screamed, some froze, some ran. All kinds of reactions. Robert started jerking his head this way and that. Back and forth like some grotesque jack-in-the-box.

“This is a Beretta subcompact chambered in forty-caliber hollow points,” I told him. “The subcompacts aren’t worth jack for target practice because the barrel’s too short. But from five feet away that doesn’t matter so much.”

“You said you weren’t going to hurt me!”

I pulled the slide back and the gun cocked loudly.

The only safety I ever used was an empty chamber.

He started jerking around even more frantically. “Please!”

I left the gun on him for a long moment. Then in one smooth motion I pulled the slide back, popped the live cartridge out of the chamber, and put the gun down. “I need you to understand your situation. How it’s escalated.”

“Please,” he said again.

I walked over to him. Put a hand lightly on his shoulder. Put something in his hand. The cartridge. A small brass cylinder, pointed at one end, still warm from my hand. “I want you to keep that, Robert,” I said, sitting down again. “Think of it as your restraining order. If you ever get mad or lonely and start thinking about maybe finding Angela, I want you to hold this bullet and look at it and remember this conversation. Because if you ever try to talk to her or see her again, I’ll use a bullet identical to this one and shoot you in the head.”