Which was why she’d decided to take the shortcut instead of remaining on the main thoroughfare.
Most nights she was happy to take the longer path. The price of aching feet was worth paying to delay the moment she had to walk through the door of her apartment.
She grimaced, hitching her purse strap higher on her shoulder.
It hadn’t always been that way, she thought with a nostalgic pang of regret. She’d come to California forty-five years ago. She’d been young, barely seventeen, with big blue eyes and a girl-next-door beauty. But she hadn’t just been another pretty face.
She could sing, and dance. She’d worked every summer to take tap lessons. And she could act. But after a few small roles, and one local stage production of Annie Get Your Gun, she’d made the classic mistake. The one thing certain to bring an end to her dreams. She’d fallen in love.
She’d played at being a sophisticated woman of the world, but the truth was, she’d remained that na?ve girl from Nebraska. So when she’d gotten pregnant, she’d never considered the idea of getting rid of the baby. Instead, she’d demanded the handsome young actor who’d knocked her up put a ring on her finger.
No big surprise that the marriage had barely lasted long enough for her to give birth. By the time she’d returned to their cramped apartment with the baby her husband had already flown the coop.
Anita had been a single woman raising a baby without any training to earn a decent living. She should have returned home. Her parents wouldn’t have been happy, but they would have taken her in. Instead, she’d panicked and seduced the young man who worked at the local deli counter. He’d been blinded by her beauty and it’d been easy to lure him into a quickie marriage before he could consider whether he was ready to take on a wife and child.
She grimaced. Unlike her first husband, Earl had done the honorable thing and stayed married to her even after the passion had faded, but Anita knew that somewhere deep inside him, he’d nurtured a small resentment. And that resentment had destroyed any hope that they could build a decent marriage.
Instead of marital bliss, they’d spent forty years bickering and sniping at each other. They fought about the kids. The finances. The shattered dreams.
Her blue eyes had dimmed, her long red hair had faded to a weary peach fuzz. And instead of gracing the silver screen, she was delivering hash to the late-shift workers.
And then the stroke had left Earl in a wheelchair.
And she was stuck.
Again.
Her gloomy thoughts matched the gloom that surrounded her as she walked past the brick buildings with their front windows boarded over and covered with graffiti. At one time the area was ravaged by gangs, but now even they had abandoned the place.
What remained was an eerie husk of a shell that used to be bustling with life.
Like her, she thought with a humorless smile.
Lost in her dark thoughts, Anita was caught off guard when a vehicle rounded the corner and a pair of headlights momentarily blinded her. Coming to a halt she blinked. There were white dots that were floating in her eyes. Until her vision cleared she wasn’t going to risk continuing down the sidewalk that was cracked and pitted with holes. The last thing she needed was a twisted ankle.
When she opened her eyes again, it was to discover a white van had pulled along the curb right next to her.
Instinctively she took a step back as the window rolled down, her hand dipping into the pocket of her jacket. She never left her house without her Taser. Diamonds might be a girl’s best friend, but fifty thousand volts of electricity was a woman’s best defense.
The dome light came on in the van, revealing a nice-looking man with a charming smile.
“Excuse me,” he called out.
Anita eyed him with hard-earned suspicion. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that a man could be trusted just because he was good-looking and was wearing expensive clothes.
They were usually the worst.
“What?”
“I’m looking for Java Central.”
She frowned. It sounded like a place that would be in L.A., not Oxnard.
“I’ve never heard of it,” she told him.
He pointed to the empty building behind her, his expression sheepish in the dim light.
“My GPS shows that it should be right here.”
“Don’t know what to tell you.” She turned to continue walking down the sidewalk.
“Wait,” the man commanded, allowing the van to roll along the curb next to her. “This is really important. I’m supposed to meet my future in-laws there. My fiancée will kill me if I’m late.”
Her lips twisted in a sour smile. Young love. What a bunch of hooey.
Her steps never faltered. “Look, I never heard of it. Ask someone else.”
“Maybe if you’d look at the directions that she texted me, you would recognize where I went wrong.”
“Yeah, right,” she muttered. Even when she first arrived in California she wouldn’t have been na?ve enough to let a stranger on a dark street lure her toward his car.
“Please.”
She halted long enough to send him an exasperated glare. She wasn’t naturally rude. But after a day of hustling to serve people who assumed she was at fault with everything from the speck of dirt on the plate to their soggy fries, she was tired. Bone-deep tired.
“No,” she said in sharp tones. “Just call your fiancée and ask her.”
On the point of walking the short distance to the end of the street, Anita caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. She gave an awkward jump to the side, assuming that it must be one of the nasty homeless people. They were forever squatting in doorways and leaping out to demand money when she least expected it.
But even as her fingers tightened on her purse, the shadowy stranger lifted his arm. Was he holding something?
It looked like a hammer.
With a small gasp she raised her hands, holding them in front of her face as the man swung the object directly toward her head. Like that was going to help.
At the same time, she was aware that the man in the van was just sitting there. Watching.
Which could only mean one thing.
The two men had been working together. The man in the van had kept her distracted as she walked right toward her hidden attacker.
What she didn’t know was why.
One glance at her waitress uniform and ragged coat that she wore over it would tell a robber that she didn’t have much money. Especially for men who clearly weren’t in need of pocket change. And it wasn’t like she had a dozen enemies who could pay for a hit on her. She went from her crappy apartment to her crappy job and back to her crappy apartment. That was her life.
Sad? Sure. But not the sort of existence that made someone want her dead.
She was still mulling over the baffling attack when the hammer connected with the top of her head. Pain exploded through her brain and she shrieked.
She couldn’t think. At least not clearly. Instead, her most primal instincts took control and she fell heavily to the ground, bending forward to burrow her head in her arms. Blood dripped down her cheek, the stench of old cement and piss wafting from the sidewalk. She braced herself for another blow, but astonishingly it never landed.
For a long minute there was nothing but the loud rasp of the man breathing. He sounded as if he was excited by her crouched body. Or maybe it was the tiny whimpers that were escaping from her lips. Then she felt hands gripping her upper arms and she was yanked to her feet. Before she could brace herself, she was roughly shoved into the back of the van.
Anita groaned, the shocking pain in her head making her fear that her skull had been cracked. Not that it mattered, she supposed dully, listening to the van door slam shut. She might not know why the men had taken her, but she did know she wasn’t going to live to see the morning.
She was wrong.
The sun was just cresting the horizon when she died.
December 27, California