Chapter 1
Sharon couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that tonight she would die.
While driving back to Rosebud Foster Care at 5:34 p.m., her whole body trembled. Her nerves were sharpened around the family visit she would monitor. This mother had banged a hammer into her nine-year-old daughter’s head while the father reclined in a lounge chair and watched.
Worries tangled and knotted in Sharon’s mind. The abuse happened only five months ago. Is the girl psychologically prepared for the visit? How bad will it have to get before I must end it, even though the court ordered a full hour? Will the parents be appropriate? Did I explain the rules with enough depth and reasoning?
She sighed. She wanted everything to go smoothly.
Sharon hated children being traumatized. If she could prevent that, she would. That was the reason she had become a foster care social worker. It was measly power over the evil done to children, but at least it was something.
Turning on the Honda Civic’s stereo, she surfed the oldies rock stations, but none of her favorite musicians were playing.
She longed for Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, or Jerry Lee Lewis to buoy her spirits. Ever since turning twenty-seven and finishing college, she sought a less complicated life outside of work, like it seemed to have been around the 1950’s.
Back then, a cola was only five cents and a hotdog just ten cents. Family members didn’t seem so violent towards one another. That simplicity and ease would be wonderful in the present. But of course those qualities couldn’t be transported through time, so as a substitute she collected CDs and memorabilia from that lost era.
Sharon braked hard and clicked off the radio.
Up ahead, an old Toyota pickup truck lay overturned beside a bent light post. In front of the accident, a man stood beside the open door of a midnight blue Mercedes. He wore a fluttering white scarf, a gray flannel shirt, and blue jeans.
He faced the accident, body frozen still.
Slowing to twenty miles-per-hour, she continued approaching.
No one else had stopped to help the crash victims. In fact, the street was deserted. It was six at night and this street only had two lanes, connecting two busier streets of Covina. Dark office buildings loomed on either side.
Although a little frightened, she slowed further. She had heard stories in the news of carjackers in Los Angeles feigning crashes to take advantage of do-gooders, but this accident appeared real.
She was torn. It wasn’t exactly safe to offer assistance, yet she was a helper by nature. She had been trained early on by her alcoholic mother who was in need of someone more responsible, forcing young Sharon to be the adult in the family. In fact, she had just about single-handedly raised her younger sister, Marlene; that is, until Marlene died from a car accident at age ten. Since her death, guilt haunted in the shadows of Sharon’s life.
She screeched the car to a stop.
She couldn’t believe she was stepping out. But she had to. She was compelled. Already having punched the numbers 9-1-1 into her cell phone, she waited for a response.
“Do you need help?” she yelled to the man in blue jeans standing beside the Mercedes.
He didn’t answer. He seemed absorbed in something.
White light sprayed from him onto the cab of the truck. She assumed he was holding one of those high-powered, halogen flashlights. The illuminated man inside the cab was upside down, franticly scratching his face and banging his head against the window, evidently unable to roll it down. He appeared to be a large, muscular man, capable of smashing the window to pieces with one punch.
“Hello?” she called out.
The man in blue jeans continued to stand motionless with his back to her.
“Do something!”
He didn’t answer, and her phone reached a tape recording urging her to hold on and someone would be with her shortly.
“Can you hear me?” She stepped closer. Maybe the man had damaged his hearing from the accident or developed a concussion that affected his reasoning. But his Mercedes didn’t appear to have been dented or even scratched.
The trapped muscle-man bled from the forehead. He managed to get out of the seatbelt and turn right-side-up in the cab, and oddly, he began tearing his clothes off. A small fire rose from the truck’s undercarriage. She guessed it was heating up the inside the cab.
Her heartbeat raced, and the feeling that this would be her last night alive deepened in the pit of her stomach. But she had to do something.
The emergency operator answered. Sharon desperately searched for the nearest cross-street signs—Badillo Street and Angeles Drive—and relayed them to the operator. He said he would send a patrol car and ambulance to the scene.
She stepped closer, just five feet from the man in blue jeans now, able to see his brown, leather Clark shoes. His long gray flannel shirt slapped his thighs in the light breeze that flowed down the street. His white scarf trailed behind him.
“Hello?” Her voice echoed with deathly hollowness between the two-story office buildings.
A few distant honks of cars, a lapping from the growing fire, now chewing and crackling one of the tires, and muffled curses from the muscle-man inside were the only sounds. The thought that these could be the last sounds she would hear made her feel so alone. But she pressed ahead.
Coming to the side of the lean man, she could see he held his hands together, almost in prayer, except that the edges closest to the pinkies were opened facing the car. A light was emanating from inside his hands. She assumed he was holding a very small flashlight, although she had never seen one that could be that bright, and the light was different somehow. Clean.
The muscle-man now only had on his boxer shorts and was scratching his body, leaving bleeding trails. His brain must have been damaged in the crash. He required immediate assistance.
The flames on top of the overturned truck drank air, rising higher like giant demons rising from hell.
Is this man with his hands in prayer crazy? Is he a religious nut? Maybe he’s just enraged because the old truck almost crashed into his expensive Mercedes.
Annoyed, she brushed against his shoulder as she ran past him, noticing his light shutting off. When she reached the pickup, she kicked her foot into the window. Her foot bounced back, and her black pump fell off. She quickly replaced the shoe and stepped back to try again, but the man grabbed her from behind, dragging her away while she shouted, “Let me go.”
After a brief struggle, they fell to the ground, him on top.
The truck exploded, and she reflexively closed her eyes and screamed the loudest she had ever done since the day Marlene died. She heard bits of glass showering down around her and pangs from chunks of metal hitting the ground.
Opening her eyes, she saw excited flames dancing and chasing one another around the vehicle.
Turning her head to him, his weight pressing her back on the hard pavement, the firelight on their faces, she could see his face. It was irritatingly handsome for someone who did nothing to help the crash victim. His dark brown eyes were calm, as though he had anticipated this outcome, as though it were right.
A strange mewl escaped her lips as she struggled underneath him, and he began lifting himself up. She shook his arms off her shoulders and pushed him back. She straightened her blue, now dirty and torn, blouse and sat up. She wanted to sock him in his handsome face, but he had saved her from the explosion.
“Why?” was all she could say.
Sirens whined in the distance.
Instead of answering, he stood—no flashlight in hand or bulking up a pocket—ran to the open door of the Mercedes, got in, and raced away.
She realized her cell phone was missing.
She searched the ground, failing to find anything. Not even a flashlight.