Wrong Place, Wrong Man

Chapter 2

The marina wasn’t dangerous. At least, it had never felt dangerous to me. I knew the waterfront better than most people did. I had spent half my childhood around that water, swimming, running along the shore and climbing onto docks I definitely wasn’t supposed to be on. Even now, I occasionally came down here to run when I wanted something quieter than a treadmill.
Besides, I wasn’t helpless. Years of running and swimming had given me decent stamina, and enough kickboxing classes had taught me that I didn’t need to be bigger than someone to make them regret grabbing me.
I slipped my phone into my handbag and started walking.
For the first several blocks, the city remained comfortably alive around me. Cars passed regularly, people waited beneath restaurant awnings, and a couple hurried past sharing an umbrella, laughing when a taxi sent water spraying toward their shoes. Every time the door of a nearby bar opened, music and conversation spilled onto the pavement before being swallowed again.
My irritation gradually faded. All I wanted now was a hot shower, food and approximately nine hours in which nobody said the words guest list to me.
Thai food sounded good.
Maybe pasta.
Definitely wine.
As I moved closer to the waterfront, the city slowly began to thin around me. Restaurants gave way to closed offices and smaller businesses. Glass-fronted towers became older brick buildings, and the traffic faded until I could hear the steady rhythm of my own heels against the pavement.
A breeze from the water lifted my long hair and swept several pale strands across my face. I tucked them behind my ear and continued walking.
The air smelled different this close to the marina, carrying salt from the water, rain-soaked wood and the faint trace of diesel from the boats moored beyond the railings. I breathed it in deeply. The scent was familiar enough to stir old memories of summer afternoons spent swimming until my arms ached and my mother threatened to drag me home herself if I didn’t get out of the water.
For a moment, I smiled.
I had known this waterfront for most of my life. There was no reason for it to make me uneasy.
And at first, it didn’t.
The marina appeared beyond the railings, dozens of boats shifting gently in the black water. Their white hulls looked grey beneath the night sky, their masts stretching beyond the reach of the streetlights. Farther out, lights from larger boats shimmered across the surface, breaking apart whenever the water moved.
Somewhere along the docks, a loose piece of metal tapped rhythmically against a mast. The sound travelled surprisingly far across the water, accompanied by the quiet creak of ropes tightening against their moorings.
I checked my phone.
Eleven percent battery.
“Of course.”
I slipped it back into my bag. The main road was perhaps another ten minutes away. Probably less.
I continued walking, but after another minute I became conscious of how clearly I could hear my heels.
The traffic behind me had faded almost completely. The music from the bars was gone, and I could no longer hear the scattered conversations that had followed me through the busier streets. The marina had always been quieter than the city centre, but tonight the silence seemed unusually complete.
My footsteps echoed faintly from the brick buildings beside me.
I glanced over my shoulder.
The path behind me was empty. Streetlights stretched into the distance, their reflections wavering across the wet pavement, but there was nobody following me.
I kept walking.
I knew this place. There was no reason to be nervous.
Still, without consciously deciding to, I shifted my handbag from my shoulder and tucked it more securely beneath my arm.
Several old warehouses occupied this part of the waterfront. Most had been renovated years ago and converted into expensive apartments, restaurants and offices, but a handful remained untouched, relics from the days when this entire district had belonged more to cargo ships than cocktail bars.
One stood ahead of me now, its dark brick exterior broken by tall windows that reflected almost nothing. A single light burned above a side entrance, casting a pale circle over the wet ground.
I had walked past the building dozens of times before.
Tonight, I found myself moving slightly toward the opposite side of the path.
I almost laughed at myself.
Then I heard voices.
Men.
At least two of them, perhaps three, somewhere ahead and out of sight between the warehouses. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and there was nothing inherently strange about people being near the marina at this hour.
I continued walking.
None of my business.
The voices sharpened as I approached. One man said something quickly, his tone hard enough to carry even though the words didn’t. Another answered, lower this time.
Then both voices stopped.
My steps slowed before I could stop myself.
Why the hell am I slowing down?
I forced myself to keep moving.
Something had changed inside me. I couldn’t explain it, but my body seemed to have noticed the shift before my mind was willing to acknowledge it. My shoulders tightened, the tiny hairs along my arms lifted and my fingers slipped automatically into my handbag until they found my phone.
The marina suddenly seemed full of sounds I hadn’t noticed a moment earlier. Water moved softly against the pilings. A chain scraped somewhere along the dock. Wind whispered around the corner of the warehouse, catching the loose fabric of my blouse. Somewhere behind me, something skittered across the pavement.
Every one of my senses had sharpened.
Then something metallic crashed between the buildings.
I flinched so violently that my handbag struck my hip.
The noise echoed from brick to brick before disappearing across the water. My heart gave one heavy beat, and I turned to look behind me again.
Nothing.
“Jesus, Bonnie,” I muttered beneath my breath.
It could have been a dumpster. Someone working late. Something knocked over by the wind. There were a hundred perfectly ordinary explanations, and I was beginning to behave like the blonde woman in a horror movie everyone screamed at for walking toward the basement.
I exhaled slowly and faced forward.
A door slammed.
This time I stopped.
Footsteps followed almost immediately, fast and uneven, coming from somewhere between the buildings ahead.
My pulse kicked hard.
Someone burst around the corner of the warehouse.
A man.
I froze.
He stopped too.
For one strange, suspended moment, we simply stared at each other from opposite ends of the path. He was perhaps thirty feet away, standing beneath the weak spill of light from the warehouse. His shirt hung partly untucked from his trousers, one side pulled loose as though someone had grabbed him.
One sleeve was dark.
At first I thought it was rain.
Then he stepped beneath the light.
Blood.
My stomach tightened.
His face was pale, but it wasn’t the pale exhaustion of someone who had run too far. There was something in his expression that made every instinct in my body begin screaming before my mind had even understood what I was seeing.
He was terrified.
His eyes found mine.
“Help me.”
The words barely carried across the distance between us.
My fingers tightened around the phone inside my bag. “What happened?”
He stumbled toward me.
I stepped backwards instinctively. “Are you hurt?”
“Please.”
He took another step.
The gunshot split the night.
The sound was so sudden and violent that my entire body jerked. For half a second, my brain refused to identify what I had heard. I stared at the man as his expression changed, his mouth opening slightly while his body rocked forward.
He looked down.
So did I.
A dark stain was spreading across the front of his shirt.
My mind struggled to connect the pieces in front of me. The noise. The blood. The expression on his face.
A gunshot.
Before the thought had fully formed, a second shot tore through the night.
The man collapsed.
There was nothing graceful about it. His knees simply stopped supporting him. His shoulder struck the pavement first, followed by his head, and the dull sound of bone against wet concrete turned my stomach.
For several seconds, I couldn’t move.
Blood spread beneath his body, mixing with rainwater and travelling through the shallow grooves in the pavement. My ears rang from the gunshots, drowning out the water, the wind and every other sound around me. All I could hear was the violent pounding of my own heart.
I needed to move.
My heel slid backwards across the wet pavement. Then another step followed, my eyes fixed on the dark space between the warehouses where the shots must have come from.
Something moved there.
That was enough.
I turned and ran.
I barely made it two steps before an arm locked around my waist and dragged me backwards. A scream tore up my throat, but a hand clamped over my mouth before it could escape. My back slammed against a solid chest, and panic detonated through me so violently that thought disappeared.
Training took over.
I drove the heel of my shoe down as hard as I could.
The man behind me cursed, his grip tightening around my waist. I twisted sharply and threw my elbow backwards, connecting with something solid. It wasn’t a clean strike, but it was enough to loosen the hand covering my mouth.
I turned my head and bit down.
“f**k!”
His grip slipped.
I tore myself sideways and stumbled forward. For one glorious second, I was free.
Then another man stepped directly into my path.
I stopped so abruptly that my ankle nearly folded beneath me.
He was huge, not simply tall but broad enough that the path suddenly seemed much narrower than it had moments earlier. I changed direction instinctively, but the first man caught my arm before I could get past him.
I spun and struck without thinking. My palm connected sharply with his jaw, snapping his head slightly to one side.
For a heartbeat, all three of us seemed equally surprised.
Then he slowly turned his face back toward me.
“You really don’t want to do that again.”
“Let go of me.”
My voice came out breathless and higher than usual. I hated it. I hated that he could hear exactly how frightened I was.
“Calm down.”
“Don’t f*****g tell me to calm down.”
The larger man’s eyebrows rose slightly.
Apparently, when faced with the possibility of being murdered, my survival instincts had selected anger.
Typical.
I pulled against the hand gripping my arm, but his fingers didn’t shift even slightly. My eyes moved automatically toward the other man, searching for anything useful, anything I could exploit.
That was when his jacket fell open.
A gun rested beneath it.
My body went still.
There was no mistaking it now. No room left for denial or some ridiculous hope that I had misunderstood what had happened.
I looked back toward the man lying on the pavement. His blood had spread far enough that a thin stream of diluted red had almost reached the toe of my shoe.
My stomach rolled.
“I didn’t see anything.”
The words escaped before I could stop them.
Both men looked at me.
Then at the body.
Then back at me.
Brilliant, Bonnie. Absolutely f*****g brilliant.
The larger man tilted his head slightly. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
His gaze moved pointedly toward the corpse less than six feet away.
I swallowed. “I have terrible eyesight.”
Silence followed.
The man holding my arm made a strange sound, and for one absurd moment I realised he was trying not to laugh.
His friend wasn’t.
I pulled against his grip again. “Let go of me.”
“Can’t do that.”
“You don’t know me.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“I don’t know you either.”
“Even better.”
My heart was beating so violently that I could feel every pulse in my throat, but I forced myself to breathe slowly through my nose and look beyond the panic.
The main road was behind me, much too far away to reach before either man could stop me. To my right, the marina disappeared into darkness. To my left stood the warehouse and whoever else might be waiting behind it. There were two men in front of me, at least one visible gun and no way of knowing how many others were close enough to hear me scream.
My phone was still inside my handbag, but there was no chance of reaching it without them noticing.
I looked at the larger man. “Then what exactly is the problem?”
His gaze settled on mine. “What you just saw.”
A slow, sickening cold spread through my stomach.
For once in my life, I had enough sense not to answer.
The larger man raised two fingers to something hidden inside his ear. “We’ve got a witness.”
He listened for a moment while his eyes travelled over me, not with interest but with the detached assessment of someone cataloguing information.
“Female. Alone.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
Something changed in his expression. It was barely perceptible, no more than a tightening around his mouth, but I saw it.
He lowered his hand.
“What?” I asked.
Neither man answered.
My fear sharpened.
“What did he say?”
The man holding my arm adjusted his grip. “Walk.”
“No.”
“Don’t make this difficult.”
I looked from him to the body on the pavement, then toward the gun beneath the other man’s jacket and finally toward the distant glow of the main road. My heart slammed painfully against my ribs.
“Where are you taking me?”
Neither answered immediately.
The larger man stepped aside, and for the first time I noticed the black car waiting in the shadows behind him. It was long and glossy, its engine running so quietly that I hadn’t heard it over the movement of the water. The rear windows were almost completely black, giving me no chance of seeing whether anyone was sitting inside.
My stomach tightened as I stared at it.
Had it just arrived?
Or had it been there the entire time?
The man holding my arm pulled me forward.
I planted my heels against the pavement. “No.”
His jaw tightened. “Walk.”
“No.”
“You’re making this harder than it needs to be.”
“A man was just shot in front of me, and now two strangers with guns are trying to put me into a car. Forgive me for being f*****g uncooperative.”
The larger man stared at me for several seconds. To my surprise, the corner of his mouth moved slightly.
“She’s going to be fun.”
“I’m delighted you’re enjoying yourself.”
Whatever amusement had appeared on his face vanished as he reached for the rear door and opened it.
The interior beyond him was dark.
Every warning I had ever heard collided inside my head. Never get into the car. Run. Fight. Scream. Do whatever you have to do, because whatever happens at the second location will be worse.
My muscles tightened.
The man holding me felt it.
“Don’t.”
The word was quiet, but I understood exactly what he meant.
I looked at him and then at the weapon beneath his friend’s jacket. I could fight. I could probably hurt one of them, perhaps even get myself free for a few seconds.
And then what?
There were thirty feet of open pavement before the nearest corner. Both men were armed, and there could be more of them somewhere I couldn’t see.
I could run fast.
I wasn’t faster than a bullet.
My fingers curled slowly into my palm.
Not yet.
If they wanted me dead, they could have killed me beside the man on the pavement. For whatever reason, they hadn’t.
That meant I still had time.
And time meant another opportunity.
There had to be one.
I allowed the man to guide me toward the open door, but stopped before getting inside.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To someone who’ll decide what happens to you.”
My mouth had gone dry. “And who exactly is that?”
The two men exchanged a glance.
It was brief, perhaps no more than a second, but I caught it. For the first time since they’d grabbed me, neither of them seemed remotely amused.
The larger man looked back at me.
“Mr. Valenti.”
The name meant nothing to me.
Not then.
Less than an hour later, I would understand why both men had gone quiet when they said it.
But standing beside that black car, with rainwater shining beneath my heels and a dead man’s blood still visible on the pavement behind me, I knew only that whoever Lorenzo Valenti was, two armed men were taking me to him.
And for the first time that night, I wondered whether the dead man might have been the lucky one.