She kept her eye on the doorway to her father’s office, wondering if there was some way she could intervene. Maybe if she just pretended to be a ditzy female, stepped in with a silly question for her father, she might catch a glimpse of what was going on inside. Perhaps she could stop anything that could be going wrong? She’d never done something like that before, nor had her father ever allowed her in his office. If he wanted to speak with her, he came to the main house. It was a well-known fact that his office space was forbidden territory. So if she were to do that, his wrath would come down hard on her head.
As she contemplated the situation, she knew that she didn’t care what happened to herself. The man that had been lured into her father’s office was innocent. She had absolutely no way to know this, but she instinctively knew it was the case. Would her conscience allow her to ignore what might be happening simply because she was afraid of the repercussions?
No. She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t do something to stop the brutality despite her shaking hands and rapidly beating, terrified heart.
She stood beside the pool, the heat of the sunshine beating down on her head, as she struggled to come up with a reasonable, or even an unreasonable excuse, for interrupting her father’s conference. While she debated the issue, two more of her father’s men must have received some sort of signal because both of them started hurrying towards her father’s office and Sierra didn’t like the looks of things. The two men appeared worried, anxious even and that raised her anxiety level even higher. When these men were anxious, bullets started flying. Their idea of diplomacy was to shoot all moving objects first and sort out the problem later. Dead bodies were merely a hindrance, not a hazard.
She tried to step in front of her father’s lieutenants, but her father’s second in command, Jimmy, simply stopped her with a hand held out in front of her. She looked up at him, glaring out her anger. “Jimmy, what’s going on?” she demanded, trying to hide her terror at the possibilities of what might be happening.
Jimmy was only about two inches taller than she was, but he had an evilness about his eyes that had always made her nervous. He had big, bulky shoulders and a belly that wasn’t as bad as some of the others mooching off of her father at the bar, but it definitely would benefit from some abdominal crunches.
Jimmy shook his head. “Nothing you need to worry yourself about, Sierra. Just leave it be,” he replied firmly, standing directly in her path and looking as if he were going to stop her if she proceeded to interfere.
Sierra peered around his shoulder, shivering when one of her father’s men came out of the house, dunking his now-bloody hand into one of the ice buckets in which the party’s beer was cooling. That was the clincher, she thought. There had obviously been violence and it was pretty harsh if the man’s hand was any indication. These men prided themselves on dealing with inflicted pain by others but Tony, the man with his hand in the ice, was not amused by whatever had gone down in the office.
When her father’s big, black Lincoln pulled out of the garage, Sierra ignored Jimmy and spun around in the opposite direction. As she rushed through the house, she grabbed her own purse and keys, hurrying out of the house, she raced as quickly as possible through to the garage. She dove into her tiny car, praying she wasn’t too late to catch up with the big, black Lincoln. She also fervently prayed that she hadn’t been wrong about the handsome stranger being in that car. What if he were still back at the house? What if he needed help and she was off chasing some car with just her father’s goons in it heading out for a beer run?
As she zipped out of the garage, she spotted the big car turning the corner at the end of the street. She didn’t have time to be indecisive. She had to hurry if she was going to catch up with them. She zipped by several of her neighbors, earning a glare for her rude driving and pushed on ahead. She finally caught up with them at the light over by the local grocery store but held back, afraid her father’s men might spot her if she got too close.
Her eyes focused only on keeping up with the huge, black car. She suspected that, somehow, the stranger was inside of that car. Her heart and several pieces of evidence were telling her that something was very, very wrong.
Fifteen minutes later, she stopped a block away from the black car in a relatively dingy, older section of Chicago where the warehouses and now-unused factory buildings were basically abandoned except for the rats and drug dealers. It was a section that several community groups had tried to revitalize, but without much success. When neither of her father’s men got out of the obtrusive vehicle, but a large, dark form was pushed from the back seat, she gasped in horror.
The black car pulled away with a harsh screeching of tires and Sierra accelerated cautiously forward, her heart pounding frantically with the fear of what she might find.
When she pulled up even with the alleyway, she struggled for breath, shocked by what she was seeing. Sierra jumped out of her car, barely remembering to put it in park in her rush to get to the wounded man lying on the gravel as if he were a piece of trash.
She rushed over to the man, cradling his head in her lap and trying to shield his face from the harsh glare of the sun. She heard him moan and rested her hand against his cheek. “Please don’t die on me,” she begged to the extremely large, inert form. “You just have to be okay. I’ll make this all okay, if you’ll just survive this horrible incident,” she whispered, unaware that she was actually sobbing out the words.
With her cell phone in one hand, she cradled the man’s head, her fingers laying on his cheek as she sobbed almost uncontrollably. She could barely dial nine-one-one because her hand was shaking so badly but finally she managed to get the numbers pressed. As soon as the operator came online she said, “Please, I need an ambulance here as soon as possible.”
She squinted into the hot, summer sunshine, trying to read the street signs halfway down the block. It was one of those horrible, hazy days that Chicago was famous for so the street signs were a bit blurry.
Squinting through the smog, sun and haze, she finally read the words and almost yelled them through the phone. She told the operator her location, then kept answering the questions about this stranger’s condition. She couldn’t believe all the bruises that were quickly forming on the man’s face and body. His previously pristine, white shirt was now torn and bloodied and she didn’t realize that tears were streaming down her cheeks, inadvertently landing on the man’s face.