by Tim Tigner
Flash
Also by Tim Tigner
The Kyle Achilles Series
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Standalone Thrillers
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Table of Contents
Flash?
Author's Note?
Free Book Link?
Preview of Pushing Brilliance?
This novel is dedicated to the Beta Readers from my early years: John Chaplin, Christophe Martin, Janet Nelch, Cheryl Rennecker, Elena Tigner, Gwen Tigner, Rob Tigner, Steve Tigner, and Mark Tower, with everlasting gratitude.
Chapter 1
Spoons
TROY AWOKE to the sound of screaming. That was not unusual for a combat surgeon, but hearing soprano was.
He opened his eyes to utter blackness and a monster headache. What the hell was going on? His memory was failing him and he felt oddly unsure of … anything.
He self-diagnosed a concussion, but sensed that it was the least of his woes.
This premonition proved correct a moment later when he tried to sit up—but could not. A cold steel ceiling pressed down on his left shoulder. He also felt walls abutting his back, head and feet. As Troy strained to wrap his mind around his baffling predicament, his nose upped the ante.
Hesitant fingers groped to confirm the stench.
He was lying in a pool of blood.
Troy knew that this was the moment most people would begin to scream and flail, their fight and flight reflexes tripping all over one another. He remained motionless. Analyzing. He had learned at a very young age the wisdom of lying low and keeping quiet. In orphanages things had usually worked out better that way. In the army they still did.
He reached a steady hand into the darkness before him. Cool flesh met his bloody fingers just inches from his face. He had found the bleeder—or at least one of them. He checked the flabby neck for a pulse just to be sure. Definitely dead. “Better and better,” Troy whispered to himself.
Another soprano salvo erupted from the darkness, making his heartstrings resonate. Those were not wails of pain he realized, but cries of fear.
“Hold on! I’m coming,” he shouted back. Troy did not know if he was coming, of course. Aside from being boxed up with a corpse he had no idea where he was or how to get out. But he knew that hope had a power all its own. Best to offer it for now and figure the rest out later.
The screaming stopped. Then the box shook with a familiar rhythm. The motion snapped the puzzle pieces into place. He was in the trunk of a car.
The sound of an opening car door confirmed his hypothesis.
Troy strained his ears.
“Who said that?” a woman asked, her voice soft but clear.
Troy stifled his habitual Captain Troy response, giving his alternative title instead. “Doctor Troy. I’m in the trunk. Are you in danger?”
“I’m not at a party. What are you doing in there?”
For a dumb question, that was a really good one. “I have absolutely no idea. Ask the Taliban. But please let me out first.”
The woman remained silent for what seemed an eternity. He appreciated her dilemma. Curtain A or curtain B; the proverbial lady or the tiger. Picturing her trying to decide, he realized that if he got lucky and she pulled the trunk release rather than running off, his appearance might send her over the edge. He would look more like a feasting vampire than a valiant knight as he leapt to her rescue. Granted, she did not seem to be expecting a fairytale moment, but he decided not to risk it and added, “Don’t be scared by what you see.”
More silence ended with a cautious, “What do you mean?”
“I’m not at my best. I’m really much more charming than my present appearance might suggest.”
The car jiggled some more and then the trunk sprang open with a thwang and a woosh. Brave woman, Troy thought, scrambling to climb out before she caught sight of the corpse.
“Freeze!”
Freeze was a command one quickly learned to respect when working in a country rife with landmines. Troy turned his muscles to stone, but shifted his eyes toward the source of the command. What he saw both pleased and disappointed him. A petite beauty stood by the passenger door, knees bent slightly in a classic shooter’s stance, revolver leering at him from between two steady hands. She wore a white blouse, pink shorts, and white tennis shoes—all spattered with blood. Definitely not Taliban, but hardly Cinderella either.
They were in the corner of a parking garage illuminated only by emergency lighting. As he raised his hands up slowly over his head, Troy scanned the shadows cast by concrete pillars and parked cars. They appeared to be alone.
“I’m frozen,” he said, trying to sound disarming.
She stared at him in silence.
He stared right back at her. It was not unpleasant. She was short, and slender everywhere a woman was supposed to be, while generously rounded on top. He was not sure how his mind could focus on attributes like that at a time like this, but it did and he was glad for it. Stop to smell the roses and all that.
She spoke at last. “You’re all covered in blood.”
“You noticed that too,” Troy said. “But then it appears that you use the same designer.”
She did not look down at herself. No doubt the sight of her blood-spattered blouse was what had initially sparked her screams.
Troy did look down in an attempt to appear less threatening only to find himself out of uniform. That was odd, but not his chief concern. Priority number one was pacifying the pixie with the gun pointed at his chest. Hardware aside, she did not look like a killer, but then mental illness could be a master of disguise. Looking back up he said, “It’s not my blood,” and motioned toward the trunk with his head. “Speaking of which, would you mind putting your finger outside the trigger guard?”
Tinkerbell craned her long neck to glance into the trunk but then looked quickly away. “What happened? Who is he?” she asked, her arms starting to tremble. Her finger still on the trigger.
“I’m a bit curious about that myself,” Troy said, deciding to focus on the latter question first. “His uniform looks a bit like Marine dress blues, less the jacket. But he’s much too … squishy to be a jarhead, and that’s not the Marine crest on his shoulder boards. Mind if I take a closer look? We’ve been sleeping together and I don’t even know his name.”
“Don’t move!” she said.
“Sounds like you’ve got my headache,” Troy replied. “I woke up with a real humdinger.”
His comment mollified her expression. “Me too,” she said. Then she beckoned with the gun. “Go ahead and have a look.”
Troy pivoted back toward the trunk and went to work. The shoulder joint creaked as he moved the corpse’s arm out of the way, indicating that rigor was setting. Troy knew that meant he’d been dead for three to four hours. Nice to have a timeline. For the moment he had little else.
He spotted two bloody holes and a name tag on the corpse’s chest. “His name tag reads Evan Johnson, Detective Sergeant. That’s an imperial police rank.”
“Imperial?”
“As in British empire. A number of those former colonies are part of the coalition.”
Her look did not telegraph comprehension, but Troy returned to the search anyway.
Evan was not wearing his utility belt, so he had no handcuffs, nightstick, or phone. Troy could guess where his handgun was—as well as two of its bullets. Still concerned about the possibility of experiencing the third, he kept his movements slow and steady before the woman.
He slid his hand gingerly into Evan’s front right pocket and pulled out a set of car keys—Fords, lik
e the car. Next he reached around and pulled Evan’s wallet from his back pocket. He flipped it open and read from the identification card. “Detective Sergeant Evan Johnson, Royal Cayman Islands Police (RCIP). Boy is this guy a long way from home.” Troy realized the obvious as he spoke. “But then, so are we I suppose.”
“What do you mean, we’re a long way from home?” Tinkerbell asked.
Troy turned back toward her. “Judging by your alabaster skin, green eyes, and state of dress, I’m guessing you weren’t born in Afghanistan.”
“What does Afghanistan have to do with anything?”
The look of sincere confusion on her face gave Troy pause. “Where do you think we are?”
“South L.A., I’m guessing.”
“As in Los Angeles?”
“Of course.”
Troy felt his stomach begin to constrict. He reached for his own billfold but found his pockets empty. He reopened Evan’s wallet and pulled eight bills and a receipt from the main compartment. The bills were ten-Cayman-dollar notes.
He took a step back to study the other cars in the garage. All had RCIP logos and right-side steering wheels. Strike two.
His stomach shrank to the size of a walnut.
“What is it?” the woman asked.
Troy ignored her and turned his attention to Evan’s gas receipt. Between juvenile detention and foreign tours, medical school and war, Troy had encountered some of the worst humanity had to offer. Nothing he’d seen had shaken him like the flimsy piece of paper he now held in his hand.
The woman spoke again, but all Troy heard was fuzzy background noise.
Not wanting to believe his eyes, he retrieved Evan’s identity card in hopes of finding contrary information. Confirmation greeted him instead. Strike three.
Feeling dizzy, he turned his attention back to the gas receipt. He mouthed the words as if testing to see if they were real. Thirty liters, forty-eight Cayman dollars, September third, two thousand … eight.
He had not just forgotten the last few hours.
He was missing seven years.
Chapter 2
Loss
EMMY WATCHED the man’s face pale as he studied a document from the dead cop’s wallet. “Will you kindly tell me what it is?” she repeated.
He continued to ignore her, even though she was the one holding the gun. She was holding the gun, Emmy repeated to herself. What was going on? Ten minutes ago she had awoken in the front seat of a cop car with the worst headache of her life, a huge silver pistol in her lap, blood spatter all over her blouse, and no idea what had happened. Then some guy locked in the trunk and claiming to be a doctor told her to “ask the Taliban.” Was he insane … or was she?
Now she watched wide-eyed as he pulled his shirttails out of his shorts and began inspecting his own stomach. Drug addict was her first assumption, but his washboard abs belied the user life. When he wiped the blood from his flesh, she saw his jagged scar. It looked like the doctor had once removed his own appendix with a pocketknife. He spread the skin taut around the scar and poked at it as though trying to confirm its authenticity. Then he looked away and sank to his knees.
“What is it? What did you find?” she asked.
After a long tense silence he regained his feet and locked her gaze with disbelieving eyes.
She tried to read his thoughts but found only confusion.
“Will you answer one simple question for me?” he asked.
She wanted to say, “Hey buddy, how about answering my question first?” But his grave expression caused her to nod in silence.
“What year is it?”
She knew then and there that she should run. She had hoped that the doctor would have some answers, be her defender, ally, and guide out of this mess. But he was talking gibberish. Still, something in those cobalt blues gave her pause.
She took a moment to analyze him as she would a client—from the outside in. He wore an olive safari shirt, khaki cargo shorts hanging from a silver-buckled belt, and running shoes. Practicality was clearly his chief wardrobe concern, but he knew what style fit him. Definitely ex-military. An officer.
At about six feet, he was taller than eighty-eight percent of his peers and would be accordingly overconfident. He was fit and broad of shoulder. A man’s man, used to command. A ladies’ man, used to getting his way. His face was handsome, but marred. Two angry v-shaped scars peeked down from above the thick dark hairline over his right eye. Probably a war wound. Possibly an accident. Definitely traumatic.
His most distinctive feature was a big dimple in the center of his chin. It reminded her of the actor who played Spartacus. But unlike Spartacus, she noted, violence was not Troy’s default reaction. He used humor to defuse tension.
He was college educated, highly intelligent—although quite possibly demented, and a wisecrack. She put the odds that he was a doctor at fifty percent.
“What year is it?” he repeated.
She decided to chance a few seconds more to see where this was going. Keeping the gun pointed straight at his chest, she said, “It’s 2002. June fifteenth or sixteenth.”
“You’re sure it’s not November 2001?”
“I’m sure,” she said, backing up a step.
“Or September 2008?”
“What’s this about?”
“Check out your reflection,” he said. “You can still keep the gun on me if you want, but crouch down behind the car door and take a good look at your face in the side mirror.”
“Why?” she asked. “What would I be looking for?”
He stepped forward until the barrel of her pistol pressed into his chest. Then he held the receipt up before her eyes while placing his free hand softly on her shoulder. “Six lost years.”
Chapter 3
Flat
THE WOMAN seemed to spend forever staring into the patrol car’s side mirror. When she finally straightened back up to look at him, her posture drooped. The Colt dangled from her arm like a burdensome weight. Tinkerbell had run out of pixie dust.
She looked blankly in his general direction, tears flowing freely down her troubled face. Despite his own problems, despite their impending peril, Troy’s predominant emotion was the urge to wrap her in his comforting arms. He was glad to find his hormones still working at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, but resisted the chivalrous impulse nonetheless. When a patient was in shock, it was best to tread lightly. Then there was the gun.
She opened and closed her jaw a few times before producing any sound. When at last she managed, her voice was but a whisper. “Two thousand eight. Are you sure? This can’t be.”
“My last memory is taking shrapnel from an Afghan IED. Now I have a scar that’s long healed. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I don’t know. Nothing as crazy as a terrorist bomb. Business as usual, I guess. I’m having trouble remembering. Everything feels hazy … forced.”
“I feel the same,” He said.
“Six years … Is that possible, doctor?”
“Medically speaking, yes. But it’s highly improbable.”
His bedside manner seemed to calm her a bit. She wiped her tears and none replaced them. “You think we’re in Afghanistan?” she asked, like Alice to the Cheshire Cat.
“I did when I first woke up. Now I think we’re in the Cayman Islands.”
Her expression conveyed the same anything can happen in six years acceptance that he felt. “Where are the Cayman Islands?”
“In the Caribbean. Between Cuba and Jamaica—I think.”
“I’ve never been to the Caribbean. I’ve never even left the United States.”
Troy did not know what to say. He shrugged.
“How did this happen?”
“I don’t have a clue.” He stepped forward and put a reassuring hand on each of her shoulders. “But whatever happened, happened to both of us. You are not alone.”
He watched his last words pour life into her like a magic elixir. Her face blossomed and her eyes
regained some twinkle.
She dropped cross-legged to the concrete floor, set the gun down in her lap, and began to massage her aching temples. “So what’s our next move?”
Normally, Troy would have sat down with her, but this was neither a pickup bar nor a yoga class. “We run.”
“Run? Where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. We need to put distance between this corpse and ourselves. Nothing good can come from being discovered with a dead cop.”
“You didn’t …?”
“Of course not.” He paused, catching himself. “At least I don’t think I did. I can’t be sure—and neither can you.” She started to speak but he pressed on. “For that matter, we can’t answer any questions, provide any alibi, or put up any kind of a legal defense. The I-have-no-recollection line only works if you’re the president or someone in his favor. Now, maybe the last seven years have been really good to me … but I’m guessing not.”
She did not get up.
He stepped toward her and held out his hand.
She looked up at him. Now that her tears had stopped he could almost see the processor spinning behind her clear emerald eyes.
“We need to run,” he pressed, reverting to operational mode.
“That will only make us look guilty,” she said, still ignoring his hand.
“I think we’ve already got looking-guilty covered. It’s a question of getting caught. The way I figure it, either one or both of us did kill him, or—much more likely—someone wants it to look like we did. I’d say they’ve done a pretty good job.”
He braced for blowback.
She just nodded in silence for a moment and then, much to his surprise and delight, completed his own thought. “And in either case, we’re better off disappearing until we can figure things out. Okay, let’s get moving.” She took his hand and added, “With my luck it’s time for a shift change and a division of cops is about to come barreling through those doors.”