The sun was beginning to rise in the sky just ahead of Adam's vision just off the horizon. A sign on the side of the road told him that Texas was finally within their reach, his chest loosening a little at the thought. His eyes burned with a tired ache, the kind he'd only felt one time before in his life when the team had a boys sleepover at Charlie's apartment and had ended up staying up all night only to find out they had practice in the morning. He would never agree to that again, he thought with a groan. His stomach ached from the shots he'd taken to his abdomen and he knew for sure he had a broken tooth or two. To top that all off, his eye lids felt heavy, he was losing the battle to keep them open and quickly fall asleep. Using every muscle in his face, he concentrated to keep them open long enough to glance at the girl sitting next to him and wonder if they could switch positions to keep moving. She hadn't uttered a word to him all night, she hadn't slept either or moved from the position she was in now, which was knees tucked against her chest and her arms wrapped around them, her back stiff against the passenger's seat. For a moment he worried that she was even alive enough to respond to him if he tried to talk to her but he had to do something.
"Julie… I got to stop. I can't keep driving like this.." He whispered, her face finally turning to him with a look of disbelief. His entire body ached with exhaustion and he needed a couple hours of sleep before he could continue the way they had been. Julie looked to him frantically, dropping her legs to the floor in front of her and turning in her seat.
"We can't stop! Adam, he'll find us…" She nearly cried as he pulled over to the side of the road. Adam turned to her as she began to reach for the gears to get the car going again and blocked her hands before they could get them into an accident.
"Julie, calm down… I won't let anything happen to you.. I just can't keep my eyes open anymore…" He whispered, holding her at arm's length to keep her from reaching the wheel and the shifting stick. Her eyes finally softened when she realized just how desperate he was. After searching his eyes for a long moment, she finally nodded in agreement to stop but felt herself bubbling with anger.
"I don't think you can protect me.." Her words weren't filled with distain but understanding that this wasn't a normal situation they had found themselves in. There was something about Greg that no one knew, ever herself. The man they were running from had some sort of political power or undercover connections that allowed him to track them down everywhere they went. Or maybe it was just blind luck he kept finding them, either way, they were doing something wrong that required them to change their plan. Adam wasn't strong enough for another fight like the one the night before. Adam stared into her eyes for another long moment, analyzing what she meant by her statement before letting go of her arms and backing up. He was too tired to fight with her and somewhere deep down he knew she was right. He didn't want to in the first place, his body was protesting the idea of another fight now. Yes, Greg was bigger and it looked like he had more upper body strength then Adam had ever bothered to build, still Adam would die if it meant protecting Julie. His eyes stared out in front of them, the silence hitting Julie like a ton of bricks to the chest as she realized what she had said to him.
'Adam.." She tried to start to explain when he cut her off.
"No, you're right. I can't protect you all the time. That's why we're not going to make it unless you start trying to protect yourself!" Adam sternly replied, never moving his gaze from the front windshield. Julie was silent for a few minutes, trying to contain the tears she felt forming behind her eyes. She had tried for months to protect herself from that man and had failed each time. The fight that she might have had left in her, was dwindling to nothing before her very eyes. He finally looked over at her and felt his heart melt at the sight. She was trying to contain the few stray tears that had begun to fall but was doing a poor job of it, rubbing at her eyes to not let one hit the ground. He reached his hand out to brush the lines of sadness from her pale face but stopped just short of touching her. She hadn't wanted his touch before, she'd been gripped with fear each time he tried to comfort her but maybe this time, he thought, a sense of hope entering his mind. His arm extended the remainder of the distance and brushed along her tightened cheek bone, feeling the bone underneath and it's jagged edges. She didn't cry out, she was used to this pain now, her face wouldn't be the same again but at least she had Adam. She turned slightly to him and closed her eyes to the touch. The soft wetness of her cheek and the tense feeling of fear that was pulsing through her was all Adam could feel from their connection.
"I'm sorry.." He whispered softly, leaning into her ear to whisper into her hair. Her fear lightened just a bit as his thumb grazed her cheek, removing the last of her tears as they fell and soothing the burning flesh that ached below his finger tips.
"Julie, you're the strongest woman I've ever know. You can do anything you set your mind to, even beat this jerk. Jules, I know you, I know that Julie "The Cat" Gaffney is still in there somewhere. I saw her last night. You have to help me for us to get through this." He continued to whisper, trying to keep his voice soft and encouraging rather than anger and demanding. "Now if you don't think you can do that… I think we should find the nearest police station and turn this bastard in while we still can." He said before Julie's eyes darted in his direction, a look of worry etched into her features.
"I've file cases with the police before. Nothing ever happened. They'd just take the information and the next thing I know he'd be out of jail and madder than ever." She shook her head in defense. Lifting her sleeve to show him a set of burn marks on her forearm. "These are what he gave me the last time I tried to turn him in." She softly whispered, touching the scared flesh with her thumb. Adam ran a finger over them as well before tightening his lips to his teeth,
"We have to try, Julie. We can't just let him win, I will never let you go back to him. Ever." He promised with stern eyes blazing before her head moved only slightly in acknowledgement of his promise.
"Okay, let's go to the police first." She agreed, resting her head back on her knees that she had brought back up to her chest. What more could he possibly do to them that he hadn't already done?
"Okay." He nodded briefly before shifting the car back in motion, hopefully it wasn't too far to the nearly police state, he could barely keep his eyes open as it was.
The smell of coffee and doughnuts wafted through the tiny space of the waiting area, the hard chairs and coffee table filling the largely unused space. Adam rested uncomfortably back against the hard metal chair, his abdomen aching with each movement that he took. Her eyes scanned the floor the way they did that first day he'd seen her again. She was nervous to no end, glancing around the room as if looking for someone to go back and tell Greg what she was doing.
"Julie.." His feather-light voice caught her attention. "He's not here. We're still okay.." He tried to reassure her. She nodded to him, trying to at least ease his mind that she would be okay, no matter what the outcome might be here. Her mind raced in her head with memories of what she endured the last time she stepped into one of these places. It wasn't like she was helpless, she'd tried her best to get away from him on her own. No one cared though, she was just another battered woman to them, in a long line of women to pass through those ugly metal doors. Before Adam had come to get her she was doomed to become a statistic.
"Julie?" A female officer asked, coming to stand in front of them. Her eyes looked down at the defeated woman with worry and concern before she reached her hand out to help Julie up. Julie's eyes remained on the floor, she acknowledged the woman with a small nod of her head, never taking the outstretched hand.
"I'm Officer Smith, head of domestic abuse here. You want to come and talk with me, you can tell me what's going on.." Her voice was soft and caring as Julie nodded before standing from her seat next to Adam. He began to stand too to go with them when the Officer held up her hand to stop him.
"Please, we ask that she give her statement alone. No pressure from outside parties." The woman gently responded. Adam nodded only once, meeting Julie's eyes as if to say he would be here when she was done. She nodded back, following the office through another set of double doors leading to the back. He lowered his body back to the hard metal chair was a groan as Julie and the officer disappeared around the corner.
The room Julie was brought to was pure white with a hard looking metal table and chair set in the center. It looked almost like an interrogation room to her, not that she'd even been in one before but evening television had given her a picture in her mind to base her knowledge from. The room was cold and drafty, though no windows were present in the entire space.
"Please, have a seat Mrs. Williams." The woman said, Julie sitting slowly in the chair furthest away from the door. Looking at the mirror glass on her right, Julie realized just how bad she looked after the encounter with Greg the night before. Her cheek was bruised from the bone to the jaw and her lip on that same side was cut open, dried blood caked into the cut. It was no longer bleeding but it still looked horrible to look at. Officer Smith placing another chair directly across from her, brought her attention back to the woman in front of her and what she was here to do.
"Okay, Mrs. Williams, tell me what's going on?" Her voice was calm and reassuring but Julie's stare never left the floor to her right side, her lips quivering with fear.
"It's okay to talk to me. You're safe here." Julie's eyes began to wander up to the cold hard metal of the table, slowly making their way to the officer.
"I'm not safe anywhere from him, not even here." Her voice remained low, always kept at an even pace. The office almost felt a little uneasy about her calmness given the situation.
"Julie, I know you're scared but trust me, you are completely safe here." She tried to reach across the table to grip Julie's hand in reassurance but Julie moved her tightly gripped palms off the table to her lap, much like she had done to Adam a few days before. The officer looked Julie up and down slowly before retreating her outstretched palm back across the cool surface of the table and re-gripping her pen that she had been planning to take notes with.
"Okay, why don't you just give us your husband's name or whoever did this to you and we will bring him in. Let's start there, shall we?" The woman tried to open the conversation. Julie almost felt her lip curl up into a smile at the irony of the statement.
"You're just going to bring him in, to talk to him and then just let him go again. I've done this enough times to know how you operate." Julie nearly laughed. The officer's eyes turned down towards the paper and pen that sat in front of her on the desk. "I'd like to see you try to bring him in..." Julie followed up, thinking of how many cops it would take to bring her psychotic husband in.
"No…No, not necessarily. If you press charges we can hold him until he can post bail, even then he wouldn't be allowed to leave the area. I'm sure you'll be impressed with our police force." The officer tried to assure. Julie shook her head in response.
"No, I've tried that before too. He just posts bail and tries to injure me again until I agree to drop the charges. What guarantees do I have that he won't kill me before we can even see a judge?" Julie's eyes finally met the woman's and she pleaded with her silently to give her something to go on.
"We can give you a restraining order." The Officer offered, pulling the paperwork from the file.
"I've had one of those before." Julie's voice cutting off the police officer in mid sentence. "You know what he did with that restraining order? He did this.." Julie said holding up her arm to reveal a scar long since healed but never forgotten, "He lit that paper up with a match and then burned me with it so I'd remember for next time." Julie's eyes were cold and unfeeling, she wasn't going to cry, she needed this woman to understand the horrors she'd went though. The officer sat straighter up in her hard metal chair and cleared her throat.
"Okay, well…" She was at a lack of words. "Well, we can assign an undercover police officer to guard you at all times until we can get a hearing set or we can take you into protective custody..." The officer tried to lay out some different options. Julie shook her head to all of them.
"He managed to find me 10 states away, where could you possibility put me where he wouldn't look?" She shook her head again, looking down at the table with distain. "And I'm not bring anyone else into this, I've already successfully ruined Adam's life…" She could feel the tears brimming on her over tired eye lids at the mere thought that Adam's life would never be the same again after the mess she was putting him through.
"Look we can send you out of the country... There's a million places for you to go, it'd take him up until the trial to find you and we'd have him on leaving the country during his bailed release." The officer countered. Julie shook her head again,
"No, I can't leave Adam. Greg already knows he's involved." Her face was stern and unmoving. The officer nodded her head in agreement, finally picking up the pen she had placed on the table between them.
"Okay, you just tell me what you want from us and you got it. I'm fresh out of ideas." The officer said sitting back in her chair with a squeak of the legs on the marble floor and stared at Julie with wondering eyes.
"You know him better than anyone else, he's your husband…" She tried to coax. Julie's eyes darted around the room at that moment, feeling a set of eyes on her and a cold fear creep up her back. Her eyes fell on the mirror to their right again and her reflection stared back at her, her own fear reflecting in her eyes.
"Is there anyone in that room?" Julie asked quickly standing from her seat and knocking over the chair she had been sitting in.
"No, we're completely alone…" The officer shook her head, sitting up in her seat again to shake her head at the thought someone was watching them. The other guys knew better than to do that when she was handling a case.
"Can you check please.." Julie asked, her eyes remaining on the mirror. The officer sighed a little with the lack of cooperation she was getting from Mrs. Williams before she stood from her chair.
"Okay, if it would make you feel better…" She sighed, moving towards the door of the room to open it and enter the hallway. Julie gripped the metal table against her outstretched palm just waiting for something to happen.
Adam Banks tried to stretch out on the hard metal chairs of the waiting room, his eyes opening from a peaceful ten minute slumber. Gripping his jacket over his chest, his head fell back against the chair next to him and his eyes rested on the ceiling fluorescent lights and the old chipped ceiling tiles. The place sure was quiet for a police station, even for a Sunday, he mused. There were no ringing phones, the guy that had been seated at the front desk when they walked in was now gone. His coffee still steaming with heat, sat on the counter, completely forgotten. A strange feeling ran over his body and he involuntarily shook with a chill pulling the jacket more on himself. He shook his head, it must just be the air conditioning in this place, he thought silently. His mind wandered over the events that lead him here, to this place. He couldn't protect her, the idea stuck to his mind like glue. He just wasn't strong enough. A slight vibration against his thigh caused Adam to mumble a few choice words before he grimly sat up and pulled the object making the fuss from his pants pocket. The small flip phone did it's familiar dance in the palm of his hand. The caller ID read a number he didn't want to read but if he didn't pick up she'd just call again until he did. Sighing heavily he looked around again now that he was awake and sitting up. The entire station from what he could see was deserted. Looking around cautiously, he flipped the phone open and stood to look around some more.
"Mom, this really isn't a good time." He mumbled into the receiver, moving to look around the corner where they had taken Julie and seeing a vacant hallway.
"It's a good time, Adam! What is going on with you? Your Father and I sat down to watch your game tonight, you know, the one to decide if you guys get to the playoffs or not and you're not there!" She yelled into the receiver. Adam held the phone away from his ear, moving slowly around the corner, his sneakers squeaked involuntarily on the floor.
"Where are you! You're coach has no idea!" His Mother's voice was still shouting in the background, Adam moved towards the first door to his right. It was a vending machine room and no one was inside.
"Adam, do you want to ruin your future!" His Mother still shouted as he returned the phone to his ear.
"Mom, I got to go…" He mumbled before his Father's voice came on the line to continue with their assault.
"Adam, you get your butt back to New York and fix this mess! I will not see you ruin your future like your brother has!"
"Dad, I have to go, I think Julie's in trouble…" He mumbled, taking the phone away from his ear.
"Julie…" His Dad shot back, "Are mixed up with her again?" He shouted into the phone. "She was nothing but trouble for you!" His Father's voice was cut prematurely as Adam closed the phone and pocketed it back into his jeans again. Moving slowly down the hall, he came to another hall leading down in a different direction of the first. Still no one in sight, he thought moving ever so slowly as to not make a sound. The door to his right in this second hall sat slightly ajar and Adam peaked in around the corner to look for anyone. The room was dark but the light coming in from the open wooden blinds set a stream of light across the floor and unto a lump in the center of the room. Adam's mind gripped with terror when he realized what he was looking at. The officer that had check them in, now lay, face down on the floor of what he could only describe as a storage room, a line of blood trailing from his open mouth, his eyes open in the darkness.
"Sir…" Adam tried weakly, moving into the room and kneeling next to the officer. He didn't move, his eyes cast widely open, a look of fear forever imprinted in their depths. The sight was one Adam would never forget. Glancing back at the door Adam heard footsteps coming down the hall as a fast pace. His eyes darted around the room for something to use, anything to aid him against the attacker. They finally lay on the night stick the officer had apparently tried to use in defense, it was gripped in his right hand with every muscle in his body. Prying the object from the man's cold fingers, Adam stepped towards the open door and listened with intensity. The steps were coming from the way he had come, moving at a fast pace. Gripping the heavy metal object, Adam prepared himself to fight. The footsteps came closer with every passing minute, Adam could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, this was it. Adam swung the door open at high speed and threw everything he had into his swing, knocking the intruder to the ground. Adam's breathe was ragged as he gripped the stick for another swing but found he didn't need to. The man lay on the floor, his limbs stretched out to each side of him, his head resting against the floor. It was the man from the night before at the bar. Adam quickly bent down to search him clothes for anything that might be of some use. Pulling a few items from his pockets, Adam looked over the items, every so often, glancing to each end of the hall for anyone else. The man had no forms of identification on him but a barcode like scanning bar, placed in a neatly enclosed plastic card holder. He had no keys on him but a lighter and some matches from a place called the pussycat club. Adam quickly searched for anything else he might carry, reaching for his jacket pockets. The man was dressed in a neatly iron suit, hair slicked back from his face, the pockets of the jacket gave Adam two more clues he shoved into his pocket quickly without looking at them before his thoughts were sent elsewhere. A scream came violently down the hallway, Adam stood up quickly, it was Julie. Without so much as a thought to the consequences, Adam grabbed the gun the man had been holding and quickly ran down the hall towards where the scream came from. A woman officer lay just beyond the corner as he rounded it, almost tripping over her lifeless body.
"Julie!" He yelled, swinging open the last door to the right of the new hall. She came at him with the pen that had been left on the table, her only option for a weapon.
"Julie. It's me!" He yelled gripped her hands as she tried to attack him. He gripped her arms pulling them down at her sides and crashed his lips down to hers. The kiss was nothing like he had imagined the first time he'd kiss her again would be. it was sloppy and uncoordinated. Her body was tense at first before she melted to him, dropping the pen to the floor and gripping his arms in her hands. He finally let go of her and she stared at him with confusion marking her face.
"We have to get out of here…" He said awkwardly, pulling her with him as he picked up the gun, he'd dropped, off the floor. She nodded in agreement, finally calm and thinking clearly instead of in a panic.
"He's here…I know it.." She mumbled, gripping the back of his shirt in her tightly clasped hands. He looked around frantically but there was no window to escape through in this room.
"Perfect, he's got us just where he wants us!" Adam hissed, moving about the room to look for options. "Who the hell puts two cops on to run an entire station!" He yelled in frustration. Julie moved to open the door and checked out in the hall for anyone.
"Adam, come on!" She said, moving out the door and to the end of the hall they found themselves in. There was a window just at the end, letting the sunlight pour in. Julie quickly tried to open it but it was nailed shut, probably to prevent anyone from escaping.
"Damn it!" She yelled in frustration, looking back the way they came. Another man in a business suit rounded the corner and began to come after them. Adam quickly broke the window, pushing Julie to go through it quickly. He pointed the gun in the direction of the man and fired two shots without looking. The man was caught in the arm, sending him spinning with the force of the bullet into the wall. Adam followed Julie just as the man let off one shot, nailing Adam in the shoulder and stumbling to the ground where he remained.
"Adam!" Julie called out, quickly knelling next to him to survey the damage.
"Go!" He shouted, trying to stand again but tripping over his feet. Julie nodded, making it to the car, Adam just behind her, gripping his shoulder with his other hand, the gun still gripped in the his wounded arm's hand. She started the car quickly and they pulled out of the parking lot, heading towards the wooded area of the highway as fast as they could.