STALKING SAPPHIRE (Sapphire Dubois: Book 1)

Chapter 8

Sapphire parked in her usual spot behind the questionable port-a-potty a yard from the gas station and jumped out. She approached the beaten-up Volkswagen held together by duct tape and sheer will, and smiled.

“There’s my baby,” she mumbled, giving the rusty old door three kicks and a knee to open it. She never bothered locking it. Never needed to. Sapphire had been looking for the perfect car to let her blend into places that were a far cry from the streets of Beverly Hills. And there, while following a lead into the Chula Vista junkyard, it sat in line about to be crushed into a cube by the big gaping mouth. Keys still in the ignition.

The lead fell flat, but Sapphire stuck around until after hours and managed to get to the Volkswagen. She spent twenty minutes trying to open the doors, beginning to understand why someone would have left it there in the first place. Finally she took a broken-off rearview mirror from a totaled car next to her and smashed the window, climbed in, and drove off in her very own first car. Well, her very own first car not paid for by mommy dearest.

Was it stealing? Probably. Was it at the bottom of the list of all the illegal things Sapphire had done in the past few years? Definitely.

She left the gas station and merged back onto the freeway as unwelcome thoughts of suffering women missing their fingers entered her mind. She turned up the radio and focused on one thing only. Her destination.

*****

Aston had a choice to make. He could stay where he was and keep waiting for the Range Rover to appear, or he could drive up to the gas station with the risk of exposing himself to see what the fuck was going on. It had been an hour since she turned into the gas station. For one hour, Aston had stared at the gaping exit, waiting. Two cars had left the gas station, but not the Range Rover. His greatest weakness as an officer had always been patience—or lack there of—and that wasn’t about to change today.

Aston pulled into the gas station’s empty parking lot. Where had she gone? Aston lit a cigarette and circled the area, avoiding looking in the rearview mirror. The last thing he wanted to see at that moment was his own confused face. After his cigarette, Aston stepped into the Quickie Mart to question the clerk and refill his emergency vodka stash in the glove compartment.

“The young woman who came in here about an hour ago...where’d she go?” Aston flashed his badge at the clerk, a thirty-something blond California kid with spiked hair and hazy eyes.

“I dunno, dude,” the clerk responded.

“Did you see her come in?”

The clerk’s eyes looked straight up at the ceiling without moving his head. After ten seconds of long silence Aston thought the guy might have had a brain aneurism but finally realized he was just thinking.

Aston snapped his fingers an inch from the guy’s face and brought him back to life.

“Yeah?”

Aston took a deep breath refraining himself from punching the guy. “Was there a young woman here an hour ago?”

“Uuuuh...yeah; definitely, man.”

They went back and forth for another five minutes until Aston decided to jump over the counter and review the security tape.

He rewound until the Range Rover popped up on the screen and circled around, disappearing behind a port-a-potty. Sapphire came out from behind the bathroom and walked up to something that had once been a car. She abused it a little, then opened the door, climbed in, and drove off.