High Noon

conference room for the next ninety minutes.”
    “Oh, okay. Lieutenant?” Annie Utz, the squad’s public administrative assistant, sent Phoebe a quick, nervous smile. “I, ah, may have to take a day off later in the week for some, um, personal business.”
    “All right. If you can let me know ahead of time, that’d be good. We’ll see the desk is covered.”
    “Um…um…Lieutenant?” The smile wavered around the edges. “I know I’m still new and all. But I like working here. I hope I’m doing a good job.”
    “You’re doing fine.” Wouldn’t hurt to tone down the makeup and buy the next size up in your shirt, Phoebe thought, but the work itself wasn’t a problem.
    “Um…I brought in pralines today. Homemade.” She held up a covered paper plate. “Maybe you’d like one.”
    “After the session.”
    “You’re taking the stairs, right? The way you run up and down those stairs instead of taking the elevator, sugar sure won’t hurt you.”
    “My fondness for sugar is why I run up and down the stairs.”
    She hurried out before Annie could make her any later. With the opening of her lecture winding through her mind, she pushed through the door, started the jog down the stairway.
    Her car had to be ready today, she remembered. Had to. She’d call the mechanic during the break and—
    She barely saw the flash of movement, had no time to react much less reach her weapon as the attack slammed her against the stairwell wall. Pain burst along with an explosion of fear when her head rammed hard against the concrete. And her vision hazed with red.
    Seconds, it took only the few seconds when her instincts were screaming fight and the stun from the blow buckled her knees for tape to slap over her mouth, for her arms to be wrenched back.
    Struggling, dizzy from the blow, she tried to bring her heel down, missed the mark. Then she was blind from the hood yanked over her head. Her scream muffled to nothing against the tape as she pitched forward from a violent shove. Shock and pain radiated as her body hit the landing, rolled. She tasted blood, and through the thunder of her own gasps, heard her attacker laugh. Praying for a miracle, she kicked out. And when hands closed around her throat, she thrashed.
    Not this way, she couldn’t die this way. Unable to look into the eyes of who killed her. Who took her away from her baby.
    Her body bucked, her legs pushed and kicked while her lungs wept for air. When the pressure released, she gasped and gulped it in only to fight to scream it out again when she felt a knife, the point of a knife, cutting through her clothes, and the quick, horrible sting of that point slicking carelessly into her flesh. Hands—gloved hands, part of her mind registered—squeezed her breasts.
    It couldn’t be happening. Attack and rape a cop in her own precinct? It was madness. But her kicks and struggles didn’t stop his hands from tearing, from touching, from pushing roughly between her legs.
    And she hated herself from the sobs and pleas that babbled behind the tape. Hated that they made him laugh, that they gave him power.
    “Don’t worry.” He whispered it, the first words he’d spoken. “I don’t fuck your kind.”
    Fresh pain erupted from the blow to her face. She teetered toward unconsciousness, almost welcomed it. Dimly she heard, thought she heard, footsteps.
    Someone coming. Please, God. But no, no, leaving. He was leaving. Leaving her alive. She moaned. Everything wept, everything wept with pain. But survival, that primal need to survive, was stronger. She was afraid to roll, to try to get to her knees, to her feet. How close was she to the stairs, how close to a nasty, perhaps fatal, fall?
    The cuffs he’d snapped on her bit brutally into her flesh, weighed down by her own body. The need to see—escape, survive—was greater than the need for relief. She hunched her shoulders, turned her head right and left, inching tortuously forward as she tested the ground with her feet. Slowly, keeping a vicious grip on panic, she worked the hood up her face until her chin was clear, her mouth, her nose. Then blessedly her eyes.
    And those eyes wheeled around. She could see spots and smears of her own blood on the wall of the stairwell where her head had hit, just as she could taste it in her throat.
    But she could see the door below. She had to reach that door, get down the short flight of steps to that door. To survival.
    Now she rolled, and her gasp went to a keening as