The Unborn

Chapter 35

Ben studied the directions Tadpole had given him. He figured Danni’s place shouldn’t be too difficult to find. He crawled into his Chevy and turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared and then idled into a purr. With his right indicator on, he accelerated gently and joined the flow of traffic heading north. Mike hadn’t phoned him to say that Danni was fine and all was okay and Ben was worried. It wasn’t like Mike to leave him hanging like that. He knew he was at Bluey’s waiting for some kind of word from him. Something didn’t feel right and Ben couldn’t stop thinking about Augie’s theory.

He grabbed for his phone and hit the speed dial button for Mike. The call connected but much to his surprise, it diverted directly to the message bank. His mind raced, now he was certain something was wrong. There’s no way Mike would divert his phone when he told him that he’d let him know what was happening. Ben felt his heart rate picking up, that old familiar uneasy feeling he always got when things weren’t right settled into the pit of his stomach and began to churn. He flung his phone onto the passenger seat and concentrated on the road, his foot growing heavier on the accelerator.

He made a left turn and sped further along the street until making a final right onto Cloverdale. Easing his foot off the accelerator, Ben idled slowly down the street, scanning for any sign of Mike’s car. Further down he spotted it parked on the left hand side of the road, he drove past and noticed the driver’s side door was open, but the cab was empty. Mike must have left his cruiser in a hurry. The panic he had been trying to fight was now rising within him. He made his way to the end of the street and did a U-turn before cruising back up on the opposite side of the street. Danni’s house and the cruiser came into view again. He looked up at the small weatherboard home and saw that the front door appeared to be hanging unevenly in the frame. It looked like it had been pulled off and propped back up against the frame in order to cover the entryway. There were no bright lights shining, that he could see, although there was a dim glow coming from the window right at the front of the house.

Ben drove further back down the road and pulled his car up to the footpath. He leaned over to the passenger seat and felt around underneath it. He retrieved a small lock box from beneath the seat and, using a key from his key ring, unlocked it. His hands flipped the lid back and dived into the box.

‚Shit!‛ he cussed. The box was empty. He tried hard to recall where he had placed his gun. It suddenly hit him that his weapon was still down at the station house. One of the officers had taken control of it after the scuffle with Rose yesterday. Ben had forgotten to retrieve it after his meeting with Anna this afternoon. With both hands, he slammed the lock box shut and threw it to the floor in front of the seat, his panic was now turning to dread. Here he was with a possible situation at hand, and no weapon to arm himself with.

A loud crashing noise sounded from somewhere behind him. He looked in his rear view mirror but could see nothing through the blackness of the night. Ben grabbed his phone and scrolled through the menu. After setting it to vibrate instead of ring, he stuffed it into his jeans and slid out from behind the steering wheel. His feet hit the footpath feeling like two sticks of jelly, his nerves were shot to hell and he was visibly shaking. After yesterday’s ordeal, Ben had had his fill of showdowns, sieges and scuffles and to add extra pressure, his head was now pounding hard. The last thing he needed right now was another one of his brain-bleeders, the timing just couldn’t be worse.

Ben crossed the street and walked silently towards Danni’s house. He entered her yard and crept up to the side of the house, taking cover among the branches of the large camphor laurel tree beneath one of the windows. He grabbed for the window ledge and boosted himself up using the trunk of the tree for leverage. Through a small part in the curtains, he could see he was at the window of the main bedroom. A double bed lay below the window and a duchess sat against the wall further into the room, on the left. The bedroom door was directly in front of the bed on the opposite wall; it was slightly ajar, enough so that he could make out a light shining in from the adjoining room.