Ronnie Masters | the MENTALIST (COMPLETE)

RED RUM pt. I

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-Liv

She was in my room.

She was in my room.

Ronnie Masters fled her own apartment at two o'clock in the morning. No gun, no shoes, no jacket. She grabbed her phone and her keys and left without even a second to check if her mother was still in her home. Childish, debilitating fear clutched at her heart, choking out her ability to reason, blinding, suffocating, screaming in her skull.

She was in my bedroom.

She could still be in my house.

She took her motorcycle, but not her helmet.

Roaring down the nearly empty street, completely forgetting about her police protection, bare feet grinding into the spiked foot pegs, hair and robe whipping in the wind. She didn't feel any of it. Her apartment building got smaller and smaller in her rearview, and with it, the massive knot of terror in her chest, as though her mother was permanently tethered to her home.

She was in my bedroom.

When she showed up at Cho's door, in a jersey tank top and shorts and a polyester robe, eyes glazed over with panic, he'd just gotten home from the team's flight back from Tijuana. Wearing blue pajama bottoms and in the middle of tugging on a t-shirt, freshly showered and hair dripping, the beleaguered agent stopped short at the sight of Ronnie in his doorway.

His ever-passive face scrunched up in confusion. "Masters?"

"She was in my bedroom." Ronnie still hadn't met his eyes, just stared straight ahead at his chest like a blind woman.

Carla Masters, set in her memory, gray as a ghost, kept laughing in the confines of Ronnie's mind. Rasping, wheezing, grating laughter, scuffing between her ears like nails on a chalkboard. In her bedroom, in her apartment, crazy eyes watching her sleep.

The words spurring him instantly into motion, his hands went to her shoulders as the blood drained from her face. "Your mom?" He peered past her, down either end of the hallway as though the woman had followed her to his building.

She might have.

It wouldn't be uncharacteristic.

Ronnie couldn't turn her head enough to look. She just felt his warm hands gripping her shoulders, keeping her grounded, keeping her upright. She couldn't feel her forehead. "She was in my bedroom, Cho."

He stared at her clothes, the thin jersey material and tiny shoulder straps, the shorts that barely came to mid-thigh. She smelled like gasoline and a carburetor. She'd driven her motorcycle wearing those clothes? Where were her leathers? Where was her helmet? She was practically naked, relative to appropriate motorcycle attire. "You rode here like that?" He soon stopped examining so closely—she wasn't wearing a bra, and she wasn't sound of mind enough at the moment to determine how comfortable she was under his scrutiny. Embarrassed, he dropped his hands from her shoulders and let them hang awkwardly at his sides.

All that, and she was still standing in his hallway like some kind of senseless beggar.

Cho pushed his door open wider and stepped back to allow her entrance. "Come in, Masters."

She didn't move, eyes coasting distantly around his kitchen behind him. "In my bedroom."

Five-foot-seven, packed with muscle, and she'd never looked so frail.

It didn't take some kind of psychiatrist to see that the woman was listing into a state of shock. The fact that she'd managed a ten minute drive in her condition without accident or injury or even missing a turn was a miracle. Cho could count on one hand the number of times she'd visited his apartment, and somehow she'd made the drive at 2 a.m. with about seven percent mental faculty.