The Squad

I saw the SUV slowly making its way down the street towards me and stepped out of the shadows. The backdoor popped open, but I closed it again, and Creed rolled down his window with a questioning look on his face. “What’s up, kid?” How do I explain this shit?

“I’m following on foot. I don’t think it’s going to be too far. Unless she took public transportation.” I’m hoping she didn’t because that would be an added headache, but I doubt it. “Right now her scent is very strong along here, which means she didn’t have a car waiting so most likely she walked in and out. I’ll know when we get to the end of the block if she got into something or not, then we’ll go from there.”

From the report, Mancini got ahold of the killer hadn’t cleaned up on the scene, which is something they checked for, so she wouldn’t have taken public transport with her clothes full of blood which they would have to be after castrating someone and removing their insides.

Even if she were dressed in black from head to toe, that shit would still reek, and there was no way to stop it from getting on anything she touched. I don’t think she drove either because her scent still lingered, had she been in a car her scent would be long gone by now instead of following me along the back road leading away from the victim’s house.

“Seriously? You can tell whether or not she got into a car?”

“Yeah!” It had to do with the variants of scent and other things that I wasn’t about to get into on the side of the damn street in the middle of the night, and he wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Okay, I guess we’ll just follow along behind you.”

I started to tell him they didn’t need to, that I could go after her on my own but knew that would only be a losing battle, so I just nodded and turned to continue walking down the street where her scent beckoned. I could almost see in my mind the path she took, knew that she too stayed in the shadows as her scent was strongest there.

I was almost running by the time we reached the end of the street as a sudden need to get to her grew strong. I don’t think she was physically hurt, but I knew she was hurting, somehow I sensed it. I grew more and more excited as I left the area and found myself heading towards the outskirts where traffic was much lighter.

I didn’t look back at the SUV as I broke into a sprint. She wasn’t as close as I’d expected, but it wasn’t too far. I knew when I was close because of the erratic pace of my heart. I couldn’t go by my dick because the shit had been hard a pike ever since I picked up her scent, but I knew she wasn’t too far from me.

My skin prickled the way it does when I get too close to an open fire, and everything in me was on high alert, and my feet just stopped as though they were being controlled by someone or something else. I looked around as the SUV came to a stop behind me, where I stood on the sidewalk.

There were no houses here, just a few scattered buildings that looked like they’d been abandoned for a while. The place might’ve been some kind of industrial area at some point in time. ‘Where are you?’ I whispered the question in my mind as I looked from one building to the next. I had the strange urge to scale the walls of one particular building to find her.

Just what the fuck is this girl doing to me? Scale the wall? Who the fuck am I Spiderman? But I saw myself doing it seconds before my body crouched as if getting ready to spring through the air. Just then, I heard the doors of the SUV open and close behind me and damn near bared my teeth at the two men who walked towards me. Mine! Fuck!

ROXY

My eyes popped open, and I came instantly awake. Something had awakened me, some sound, what was it? I held still and listened, my heart racing with fear until I remembered that I was no longer the defenseless little girl who’d been awakened many times during the night to face torment and horror.

I sat up slowly in the dark and pulled on my shoes with my back to the wall as I listened and peered around in the darkness. Whatever it was had come from outside, there was no one in my direct vicinity, I was sure. Crawling on my hands and knees, I made it to the nearest window, or the place where a window once was I should say since they’d all been long gone.