My Hockey Alpha novel Chapter 53

Enzo

I had only just woken up after a mostly sleepless night of wishing I could just explain everything to Nina without either scaring her or pushing her away, when I heard banging on my front door. Groaning, I dragged myself out of bed and opened the door to a surprise: Luke.

“She’s up to something,” he said, without so much as a greeting, and pushed his way past me into my living room.

“What? Nina?” I asked, still rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I watched the anxious skeleton pace back and forth across my apartment. It was times like this that I was glad to not have roommates.

“I don’t know exactly what she’s doing, but she’s definitely up to something that is very much not good,” he said, a little too quickly for me to fully comprehend exactly what was going on in my tired mind.

“Wait… Luke, slow down. What’s happening?” I asked.

Luke stormed over to me and took me by both shoulders, shaking me back and forth.

“Nina is being lured into a trap!” he shouted.

There were a few moments of silence as we stared at each other, the reality of the situation slowly sinking in.

Finally, I understood what was going on; panic mode started to set in.

“Where is she? How do you know? Is she alone? Is she hurt? Tell me what’s happening, god dammit!” I shouted as I ran around my apartment like a madman, throwing on yesterday’s dirty clothes as images of Nina being brutally murdered or kidnapped by a crazy person flashed through my mind.

“If you would give me a chance, I would tell you!” Luke shouted, his usual monotone voice now bellowing so loudly it shook the glass of water on my nightstand.

I stopped and took a deep breath. Luke was right; running around like a chicken with its head cut off wouldn’t solve anything.

“I saw a strange guy in a beat up pickup truck pull up to the diner last night while she was at work,” Luke said. “He sat down in a window booth. When she went over to him, she looked terrified; he gave her a piece of paper, they talked, then he left. This morning, she drove to the gun shop outside of town -- that’s right, a gun shop -- and walked out with a shotgun. The last I saw of her, she was driving out of town with her roommates with a car full of camping supplies.”

My heart raced as I pictured Nina with a shotgun… Why on earth would she need a dangerous weapon like that? And who was that man that Luke mentioned?

None of that mattered, though, because right now my sole purpose was to find Nina and protect her in any way I could.

“Do you know where she went?” I asked, grabbing a duffel bag from my closet and starting to fill it with necessities.

“I’m not sure exactly,” Luke replied, pulling a folded up piece of newspaper out of his hoodie pocket, “but I broke into her dorm after she left and I found this. The newspaper that the guy in the diner gave her. My best guess is that she’s trying to investigate… Because she probably thinks that we did this somehow.”

I furrowed my brow and snatched the newspaper away from Luke. My eyes widened as I read the article.

“This is…”

“Yeah,” Luke said, nodding. “It’s him. The guy who drugged her at the club. Someone must’ve found where I had him and they did him in. I’m not sure why, exactly, but my only guess is that that guy who showed up to the diner last night had something to do with it.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “Why would he have given her this if he was the one who did the killing?”

“When he went into the diner last night and I saw how terrified Nina looked, I got suspicious,” Luke replied. “So I looked through the windows of his truck. There was a business card on the dashboard. It had blood on it.”

“Fuck,” I exclaimed, stuffing the newspaper article in my pocket and continuing to pack. “How long ago did she leave?”

“Only about ten minutes ago,” Luke said. “If we go soon, we might be able to catch up with her and stop her before it’s too late.”

I quickly finished packing up my camping supplies, formulating a plan as I did so. I couldn’t just randomly show up in the woods and drag Nina home; for starters, I didn’t want to get shot, and secondly, I couldn’t have her friends getting suspicious. I had to figure out a way to make it seem like it was all just a coincidence.

I called Matt from the hockey team once I finished packing -- he was the only one on the team who I knew would agree to a last-minute camping trip like this, plus he had a car -- and told him to pack quickly and meet me at the quad. Just as I suspected, he agreed enthusiastically.