Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,1

night when she flinched hard, almost dropping it on the floor. The knock on the door was forceful, numbers instantly flashing through Zoe’s head: the weight of the fist doing the knocking, the velocity, the force. And she knew, without a doubt, who was attached to that fist.

“Zoe?” The voice floated under the door and through the quiet apartment, too loud. Dr. Francesca Applewhite had come by almost every one of the twenty-seven days since John’s last text, and every day before that, too. Thirty-six knocks on the door. Given that Dr. Applewhite almost always knocked in a pattern of four raps—one, one-two, one—that was one hundred forty-four individual knocks, impacts on the frame, on Dr. Applewhite’s knuckles.

And Zoe had never opened the door once.

“Zoe, I just want to hear your voice,” Dr. Applewhite said. “Just let me know that you’re okay.”

Zoe’s eyes slid closed. Dr. Applewhite’s voice came through the door at sixty-five decibels, only slightly raised from normal speaking level. Just loud enough to be heard through the door. Through the apartment. There was nowhere Zoe could go where she couldn’t hear the voice calling through the door. It was too small of a space. She had tried.

“Zoe!”

Sixty-nine decibels. Zoe clamped her hands over her ears, trying not to hear the numbers anymore. “Go away!” she shouted, unable to stop herself. “Just leave me alone!”

There was a soft noise in the corridor outside. “All right, Zoe.” Sixty decibels. Low and calm. “I’m going now. Just call me if you need anything.”

There was a hesitant pause, a wait for a response. Zoe said nothing. Finally Dr. Applewhite’s footsteps walked away, Zoe tracing their path to the stairs, knowing from the sound that Dr. Applewhite still weighed one hundred twenty-nine pounds.

Zoe rubbed a hand over her eyes and took the beer out of the refrigerator. She cracked it open and took a long swig, draining as much of it as she could manage in one go. Almost exactly one-half, she noted as she measured the volume with her eyes. She turned to look at the sofa but did not move, the apartment seeming stiflingly close now, too small, too circular a space for her thoughts to rush around in.

She couldn’t stay here, not with the numbers, not for the whole of the rest of the night. She couldn’t listen to them echoing in her head with no response. They were everywhere, and even though she knew they were also out there, at least the numbers outside of the apartment would be new.

She waited seventeen minutes after the last of Dr. Applewhite’s audible footsteps to allow her time to be out of the neighborhood entirely, downed the rest of the second bottle of beer and threw it in the trash, and went to put on her shoes.

***

Zoe stumbled, almost tripping over a loose stone on the edge of the sidewalk. On closer inspection, it transpired that the stone was actually part of the sidewalk itself, an edging slab put in during construction. Well. They shouldn’t have put it there. Zoe straightened carefully, making sure not to wobble over again.

She looked up at the street and realized where she was with a sinking feeling: the same place she often ended up when she attempted to wander through the night after a few drinks. Or during a few drinks, since she had carried the rest of the six-pack with her, and now her hands were empty. It wasn’t exactly a short walk, which meant that she had deliberately come this way, even if she couldn’t remember actually making the decision. Still, here she was, right in front of that same house.

The house that Zoe normally never would have dared to stand in front of. It was no coincidence that she only came here at night, under the cover of darkness, and when the alcohol had stripped away some of her nerves. It meant they weren’t likely to see her, and she could stand there and wallow in her guilt like a coward, and never actually do anything.

It wasn’t as though she didn’t want to. Zoe wanted more than anything to go up to that house and knock on the door. She wanted it to open and for Agent Shelley Rose to be standing there, her blonde chignon perfectly in place, her pink lipstick without a smudge. She wanted Shelley to smile and say something like, “Read to go, Z?”, and they would get on a plane together and go solve a murder, and