by Kimberly Rae
But healed wounds left scars, like the ones he could see now, that each morning were stiff and sore. Life was a battle, the PTSD counselor told him once. Those who developed skills and exercised them fought better than those who didn’t. That’s why each morning he stretched physically with fifty pushups and a two-mile run, and spiritually with time in his Bible before the run and a talk with his God during it.
Some days Cole wondered if every day was meant to be this much of a battle, in a war with no end in sight. He thought of Meagan Winston, of the joy in her voice when she talked about rescuing children from some of the darkest places in the world. She battled, but did not seem defeated.
He turned off the water, wrung out the washcloth again, and hung it to dry. With sudden resolve, he dried off his chest and arms, changed into dry pants, put his shirt and shoes back on, and walked across his one-bedroom apartment to pull his jacket and keys off the hooks hanging near the front door. He had too many questions about Meagan Winston, too many conflicting feelings, and little patience for either.
Cole jogged down the outside stairs to his car, glad the sunny day earlier made for a mild winter night. He hated wearing a coat. The moon was over three-quarters full and the sky cloudless and serene. He cranked up his Sedan and put the car in drive, heading toward the road to Meagan’s house. He wasn’t sure how he would explain his appearance at her house at night, but he felt a need to talk with her. Ask questions. See if he could find out if she was on his side of the fight or Sadie’s. Did she need his help as a victim of misinterpreted evidence, or was she a victim of her own wrong choices?
He couldn’t ignore that he felt drawn to her. If nothing else, tonight he wanted to find out why.
Cole turned on the radio but after a few minutes switched to a CD. Even that could not penetrate through the fog of his thoughts, so he turned the music off and drove in silence. At some point, he told himself he should be paying more attention, keeping alert to the possibility of being followed, but that seemed unnecessary. The few cars on the back road had dwindled to just him and one other car, and no one had reason to follow him. If Meagan were in the car with him, that would be a different matter
Three miles from her house, he noticed the headlights behind him made a sudden wild shift to the left. “Not smart,” Cole muttered at the passing car. “Can’t you see we’re nearing a bridge?”
The car pulled up alongside. A good ways ahead, Cole saw another set of headlights in the oncoming lane. He slowed, but the car beside him slowed as well, then jerked to the right, slamming into the side of his vehicle.
“What are you—” Cole tried to center the wheels and stabilize the vehicle. The car beside him swerved right again. Cole took a split second to look to the left at the driver. A horn honked. The oncoming vehicle was close now, on the bridge. Cole’s Sedan was half off the road, speeding toward the guardrail. Cole had no choice. He swerved to the right, just missing the guardrail, and skidded off the road. The car flipped and dived down a steep embankment. He saw the river rush up to meet him, but had no time to react, only to think that now none of his questions would get answered.
16
Friday, January 2
8:30 p.m.
Lucias grabbed an empty pillowcase off his bed and wiped the makeup from his face. He smiled at Meagan’s picture on the wall. What a rush. He yanked off the wig he’d found two years ago in a dumpster behind a costume store and threw it onto a pile of dirty clothes. When he wore it, he became Agatha. He’d never known his grandmother, but it felt nice using her name, like a connection. When he was Agatha, people were nice to him. They didn’t judge Agatha like they judged Lucias. They didn’t accuse her of crimes. Of murder.
But tonight, Agatha had shown a surprising violent side. It energized him. Agatha had banged up the side of his car, but she was a little eccentric. He understood that, and forgave her. The car already had a few dents it in anyway.
It was Agatha who had taken the drugs to the trade-off point in India this last trip, and Agatha was the one who’d seen Meagan in trouble that same day. Lucias liked to walk by the building where she worked, liked to see the light in her eyes when she hugged the children or taught them a new song. Meagan would be a wonderful mother someday. Not like his mother.
That day Meagan had left the building and was summoning a rickshaw when the attack came. A man held out a knife and yelled something. Meagan reached into her bag and gave him a handful of money, but Agatha saw that he was not satisfied. He was about to cut the bag from her shoulder. Or cut her.
Agatha had run toward them, screaming, swinging the briefcase that had just been emptied of drugs and filled with Indian rupees. The man had been surprised, and ran. Meagan had been surprised, too. She said thank you and started to walk toward him. He could not let her discover Lucias underneath Agatha, so he also had run away.
Later, three rows behind her on the plane, empowered enough by his act of heroism to ride as himself for the first time, Lucias realized the robbery had brought out his true feelings for Meagan. He didn’t just admire her. He loved her. Needed her to love him.
He was still waiting for the perfect time to meet her face-to-face, to show her how he felt. She might not believe him at first, but he would tell her all the times he had watched over her. Protected her. Like the day after they’d returned, when she’d been run off the road. Then on New Year’s Day when those men had bothered her in the square near her store. He knew the 9-1-1 operator had told her he’d called. Meagan had turned all the way around, looking for the hero who helped her. He had felt his chest swell with pride, with hope.
And he had protected her tonight. Getting rid of that man in the black suit had been the right thing to do. Meagan belonged with him. No one else.
He finished the double cheeseburger he’d picked up at a fast-food restaurant on the way home and threw the wrapper across the room. It landed in the corner near the trash can. He wasn’t a messy person really; it was the trailer. If he lived in a nicer home, he would make the effort to keep it up better. This old dump was his mother’s, or had been before she ran off for good with some drifter who offered her a ride and a new life, but didn’t have room for a kid. Lucias had taught himself to drive the old grey Oldsmobile she’d left parked in the yard. The car was his now. So was the trailer, and everything else she had left behind. The heat in the trailer didn’t work. The sink was full of plates and cups from back before he decided to switch to disposable dishes. Under the counter, behind the trash can where no one would want to look, he kept his cut of the tiny bags of powder that made the headaches go away for a while.
He hated the trailer. Hated the drugs. Hated his whole miserable life.
But things would soon change for good. Meagan wasn’t like his mother or like Claudia. She didn’t leave the people she loved. She wouldn’t reject him.
She was the one and only woman for him. He would tell her with actions, then with words in person. He’d launched the actions with the note. It was time for the next step.
17
Friday, January 2
9:15 p.m.
Cole woke to find himself still alive and in pain. Glass from the windshield littered the front seat and his body. He brushed it off, grimacing as shards sliced across his skin. He unbuckled his seat belt and pulled the door handle. Mangled metal screeched but the door would not budge.
The trickling sound he had at first assumed was the ringing in his ears increased to the unmistakable rush of water. He fought through the pain to stretch upward and across the seat to reach his glove compartment, discovering as he tried to move that his right leg was pinned beneath the dashboard just below his knee. With a lunge and a moan, he opened the compartment and rummaged frantically for his flashlight.
Grasping it, he clicked it on and fought panic. The car had landed right side up, but was perched at a diagonal angle on the bank of a river. The front of the car was already submerged, and water pooled over the floorboards. That trickle he’d heard, no
w more like a faucet turned on, was water washing into the car through the open space where his driver’s side window had been. The passenger side, tilted a foot or so up onto the embankment, was dry, but Cole could feel the car sinking.
Adrenaline surged. He had to get out. Now. Where was his phone? Pulling off his jacket, every movement bringing pain, he reached into his back pocket. With one hand wrapped in his jacket and beating at the dashboard that pinned his leg, he used his other hand to speed-dial Steve.
“Hey,” Steve answered. “What are you—?”
“Get help out here now!” Cole shouted. His attempts to free his leg were futile. “I’m trapped in a car that’s sinking into the river.” He named the lonely back road, the river, and his position.
“How much time do we have?” Steve’s voice took on the edge Cole knew his own had, that acute awareness that kicked in during every battle. This was a different kind of fight, against the enemy of death, and time was not on Cole’s side.
“Five minutes, maybe less, before the water fills the car enough to pull it under.”
The silence on the other end told Cole more than words could. He was too far out of town. Steve couldn’t get anyone there in time. Cole hung up. He was on his own.
“God,” he prayed, attacking the dashboard again, forcing his leg to pull against the pain. “I don’t want to die tonight. I’m not finished. I think You still have work for me to do, but if You do, You’ll have to show me—”
It came to him. The hammer! Lunging again for the glove compartment, he thanked God for the beat-up starter that had taught him to carry a hammer ever since. Once it was in hand, he banged on the dashboard area that held down his leg. Bit by bit he knocked off portions of plastic, feeling a slight release in the pressure on his leg each time a piece fell into the cold water rising up his calf.
The car groaned and tilted farther to his left, knocking him off balance. He fell against the door and dropped the hammer onto his knee. He let out a yell, then found the hammer and pounded again. Water rushed in his window and soaked his left arm and side.
With one final bang, the main section of the dashboard column broke apart and Cole pulled his leg free. He wrapped his right hand in his jacket again, now heavy with water, and climbed upward toward the passenger side, using the steering wheel, the seat, and the middle partition as leverage. The car fell to stand on its left side. Cole lost his footing. He grabbed at the window casing with his left hand and glass pierced into his palm. The car began to slide downward, into the river. Skipping the door handle, Cole used his jacket-covered hand to knock out the remaining pieces of broken glass lining the passenger window. As the river began to pour like a waterfall into the car, he pulled himself up and out of the vehicle.
The car sank to the point that only the right side of the back end was now above the water. Cole used his legs against the door to push away into the water and half-swam, half-trudged back to the embankment.
Red and blue lights neared as Cole waited for the dizziness to pass and then dragged himself up the incline to the bridge. He stood and saw Steve throw open his car door and race to the guardrail alongside the bridge.
“Cole!” Steve yelled, then shouted back at arriving emergency personnel, “The car is submerged. We’ve got to get a rescue team down there now!”
“I’m here,” Cole tried to shout, but coughed up water instead. The sound alerted a fireman on the scene, who gestured and issued orders to his crew. Soon Cole found himself in the back of an ambulance, its heat on full blast. A stranger took his vitals, and Steve paced the pavement in front of the open back doors as Cole gave a report on what happened.
“It was the old lady,” he said, rubbing his aching knee with his bandaged left hand. “I think.”
“What were you doing heading for the girl’s house in the first place?” Steve moved in closer and said through gritted teeth, “Do you have any idea how this makes me look to my team head? He questioned me on the way here and I didn’t know anything about what was going on! This was supposed to be an easy case to crack. We had the evidence. I was assigned to get Meagan to testify and we could close the international part of the case and hand the rest to the DEA team. You’ve turned it into an attempted homicide investigation.”
Cole’s head felt like a watermelon split open. “Sorry my almost getting killed caused you embarrassment.” He rose and stepped down onto the road. With a swipe, he removed the blood pressure cuff from his upper arm and tossed it back onto the gurney in the ambulance.
The woman who had checked him came to stand between the vehicle’s open doors, bent at the waist to keep her head clear of the ambulance roof. “Where are you going?” she asked over the roar of the heater, pen poised in mid-air above her clipboard. “Your blood pressure is high and you have multiple abrasions. You could have bruised ribs!” He waved her off.
“You need to get checked out,” Steve said, his tone a little less antagonistic.
“You want this in the newspapers?” Cole smirked at the war of emotions on Steve’s face, but even the smirk hurt. He grabbed his jacket off the ambulance bumper and looked it over. Unless he was willing to go after it with a needle and thread, which he wasn’t, it was time for a replacement. He hadn’t gone into a clothing store in years and didn’t want to now. He could get something online, but he’d have to remember he had twenty pounds more muscle than back when he’d bought the jacket in his hand. He tossed the wet material to Steve. “I’m going home,” he said.
Steve balled up the jacket and set it on the hood of the nearest police car. “In what? Your car is underwater.”
Cole groaned aloud. “I need a car for a week or so, until insurance gets me a new one.”
“And I’m supposed to what? Buy you one?”
“Loan me something. You have to have resources for someone whose car got destroyed as part of your investigation.”
“I didn’t ask you to continue in this investigation.”
“I didn’t ask for the guy to send me into the river,” Cole ground out.
“He wouldn’t have wanted to if you hadn’t been following that girl around.” Steve pointed down the road. “She called me and told me you’d followed her to her house. She already called the police about us stalking her before. So this time she gets somebody to knock you off the road.”
“Do you seriously think she’s behind all this?”
“It’s possible.”
Cole looked over the rail to the river. “I liked that car.”
Steve let out a heavy breath and handed Cole a set of keys. “You can use my car for now. I’ll catch a ride home with one of the guys and borrow Stephanie’s car until you can get a new one.”
“Thanks.” Cole accepted the keys and rounded Steve’s car toward the driver’s side.
“Why don’t you let somebody drive you home, at least?”
He shook his head. “I’ve got a stop to make first.”
Steve slammed his hand against the hood. “Cole, I told you—”
“I don’t think she did this,” Cole said, opening the car door. “But if she did, I want her to see that I’m still here and I’m seeing this through until we find the truth.”
He was in the car, ignition turned on, when Steve knocked on the window. Cole lowered it and Steve said, “You aren’t part of this investigation anymore, Cole. You’re out.”
“A guy just tried to kill me, Steve.” Cole’s jaw set. “I’m in this investigation till the end, whether you—or I—want me to be or not.”
18
Friday, January 2
10:15 p.m.
“My momma done told me,” Pops sang as he strummed the chords on his old guitar, making up his own version of the song as he always did. “That women...make you sing the bluuuues in the night.”
Kelsey, curled up near the window on an old green couch that looked like a return to the seventies, laughed and asked him to sing it again. “Thank you so much for coming over,” Meagan told her. “I feel bad
ly taking you away from your house and your husband, but after what’s happened these past few days, I’m just plain scared.”
“Nathan’s fine,” Kelsey said of her husband. Meagan wasn’t surprised Kelsey wore one of her many outfits from India, all of which had drawstring waists and flowing tops. Kelsey hated tight waistbands, or tight anything other than socks. Even her watch was clasped loosely on her wrist. “He recorded a couple of bowl games he missed while we were with Alexia the other day and has been itching to watch them. I’m happy to stay here as long as I’m needed, just as I’d stay with any girl being accosted.”
Meagan carried her grandfather’s blood sugar checking machine over to his recliner and got everything ready for his evening shot of insulin. She thought of the sadness in Cole’s eyes when she’d said that word. “He hasn’t really done anything bad. In fact, this last time he said he wanted to help me get clean and stay clean. He thinks I’m guilty.”
“Do you think that’s why he followed you, to try to find evidence or something?”
“Maybe. But then he said some grey car has been trailing me for days. I don’t know what to make of that. Did you ever find out who was at the counter when that note for me came?”
Kelsey glanced out the window into the darkness. Meagan had wanted to pull the shades closed, or sit in a room without windows facing the road, but if she changed the routine, she’d have to explain why to Pops. At least the driveway was gravel. No one could come down it without making enough noise to alert them. “We had two volunteers manning the register that day,” Kelsey said, “but neither of them remember anyone leaving a note. The second girl, Valerie, did mention she was over in the opposite corner for several minutes answering a customer’s questions about the fair trade spices. She said there were several other people in the store, so someone might have left it then.” Kelsey took the insulin syringe from Meagan’s hands. “You’re so distracted you hardly got the sugar reading. Let me do the shot.”