Chapter 2
Red and blue light moved across the graffiti-covered wall, changing the colors without making the alley feel brighter. I sat on the curb near the diner’s back door while a patrol officer stood between me and the dumpster. Another officer walked the route the hooded person had taken, sweeping a flashlight over the wet pavement.
Malik stayed several feet away. He’d given me his jacket when he noticed I was shaking, then asked if I wanted him to remain nearby. He hadn’t touched me.
A woman in a charcoal coat approached and showed me her badge. “Detective Lena Ortiz. Is Emily okay, or do you prefer something else?”
“Emily’s fine.”
“Would you rather talk here or inside?”
I looked toward the mouth of the alley. Every passing set of headlights tightened something under my ribs.
“Inside.”
The diner office was barely large enough for three chairs and a metal desk. Receipts had been clipped into careful stacks beside an old computer monitor. Ortiz sat across from me, set a recorder between us, and told me I could pause whenever I needed.
I described the heavy hoodie, the dark pants, the hidden face. I told her about the hand reaching toward me and the glint under the hood.
“You’re certain it was a phone?” she asked.
“No.” My fingers closed around the paper cup of water Malik had brought me. “I thought it might be something else. Then I saw the edge of a screen when he moved. I think he was recording.”
Ortiz didn’t change my answer into certainty. She wrote for a moment, then asked me to repeat the words in order.
“I said, ‘Please, let me go.’”
Her pen moved.
“He said, ‘Calm down, enjoy it.’” My voice caught on the second sentence. I waited until I could breathe normally again. “Later, he said, ‘Please relax, huh?’”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No. It felt familiar, but I can’t tell you why.”
“That’s useful as long as we keep it exactly that way.”
When Ortiz brought Malik in, he took the chair beside the filing cabinet rather than the one next to mine. She asked where he had been when he first noticed trouble.
“At the diner’s back entrance,” he said. “I heard a voice, came outside, and saw someone leaning toward her.”
“Did you see a weapon?”
“No.”
“A phone?”
“I saw a reflection near the person’s chest or face. I couldn’t tell what made it.”
“Could you identify them?”
“No. The hood blocked the face.”
Ortiz asked whether he thought the person was a man. Malik glanced at me, then back at her.
“I heard a low voice, but I’m not going to guess beyond that.”
The steadiness of his answer eased a pressure I hadn’t realized I was carrying. He wasn’t improving the story to make himself more useful. He was leaving the empty spaces empty.
Malik logged into the diner’s security system. The first camera showed the rear sidewalk and most of the alley entrance. Ortiz dragged the timeline backward.
There I was, not yet in frame. Near the dumpster, a dark shape shifted.
Malik paused the video.
The hooded person had arrived several minutes before me. They stood where the dumpster blocked them from the street, stepping out only when I entered the alley. When Ortiz advanced the footage frame by frame, the figure’s head turned toward the camera, but the upper corner of the dumpster cut across the hood. No face appeared.
“They waited,” I said.
Ortiz nodded once. “The footage supports that.”
A patrol officer leaned into the office. “There’s a dark sedan parked half a block down. We’re checking the plate.”
For a few minutes, everyone treated the car as if it might answer the question. Then Malik remembered a second camera over the diner’s side entrance. Its view was narrow and washed gray by the streetlight, but it caught the hooded figure leaving the alley at a run. They passed the parked sedan without slowing, continued along the sidewalk, and disappeared beyond the camera’s range.
“So the car may be unrelated,” Ortiz said.
The officer checked his notes. “Registered to a resident on the block.”
The easy theory vanished. What remained was worse in a quieter way: someone had come on foot, waited for me, and known which way I would walk.
Ortiz opened a case file on her laptop and told me the report would be handled as a stalking investigation. The footage would be preserved, along with my statement and Malik’s. It confirmed planning, she said, but not identity.
My next shift started the following afternoon. I pictured the schedule posted in the back room at work, my closing times lined up in neat boxes.
“I need to call my manager,” I said.
“You can do that now,” Ortiz said. “Or wait until you’re ready.”
I took out my phone. My hand still shook, but I unlocked it myself.
“I’m not going in like nothing happened. I want to know who could see my schedule.”
May you like
Malik opened the office door without stepping into my path. Outside, dawn was still hours away, and the alley remained dark.
I called my workplace and said I was coming in before my next shift. This time, I intended to look at the routine someone else had been studying.
