Frequently. “Sometimes. It depends on what’s going on in the person’s life, on how I’m feeling, on a lot of different things. I’m kind of under the weather tonight, but I’d be glad to read for you all tomorrow.”
“Really? How great. Thanks. Jerry’s skeptical about this kind of stuff, but Tess and I are fascinated.”
They stepped into the barn, where bright overhead lights revealed a four-stall barn and two very happy teens, laughing and chatting like old friends as they brushed down a miniature horse no larger than a St Bernard. “Mom, isn’t this just the coolest and most gorgeous horse?” Annie called.
“That’s Beauty,” Ramona explained. “She’s our newest addition. We bought her to keep Coal company. She’s the black horse in the next stall. If you sit in the stall with Beauty, she lays on her side and puts her head in your lap. Like she’s a dog or something. Tess, honey, this is Annie’s mom, Mira.”
“Hi, Mira,” called the pretty young girl who was the spitting image of her mother. “Nice to meet you. Can Annie spend the night with us tonight?”
“Can I, Mom? Can I?” Annie asked.
Ramona laughed. “It’s fine with me.”
“I think Shep wants to take you all into Asheville,” Mira said.
“Cool,” Tess said. “Let’s hurry up and finish the stalls. We’ll meet you at the cabin.”
Thirty minutes later, Mira was huddled in front of the wood-burning stove, sipping hot tea and waiting for the aspirin she’d taken to kick in. She felt like shit, had a low-grade fever, could barely breathe through the congestion in her sinuses. She begged off on Asheville, and since Ramona and Jerry had to get up early, it would be just Sheppard and the teens and one of the dogs, a gorgeous golden retriever named Rich.
“If you see a health-food store, can you pick up some zinc and green tea?” Mira asked Sheppard. ‘That way I’ll be fine by morning.”
“I thought vitamin C did the trick,” Sheppard said.
“If Mom says that’s what she needs, then that’s what she needs,” Annie told him, and gave Mira a hug. “We’ll bring you back something special, too.”
“Bundle up,” Mira called after them.
Sheppard bussed her good-bye on the top of her head, Rich the dog licked her face, and then they were gone, leaving her to the heat from the stove and the blissful silence.
Mira moved into the huge recliner, turned on the TV, and curled up. With the blanket around her shoulders and a pair of Shep’s heavy socks on her feet, she finally understood the phrase, “snug as a bug.”
When she woke, it was to wood crackling in the stove and the wind whistling through the trees. It wasn’t something she heard very often on Tango Key and the sound spooked her. She threw off the blanket and padded into the kitchen for a bottle of water. It was now nine, but felt like four in the morning. Her fever had broken, but her body ached all over, and when she coughed, her chest hurt.
Flu? Bronchitis? Or hell, why not imagine the worst? SARS.
She tried Sheppard’s cell number, but her cell didn’t get a signal up here, and when she picked up the cabin phone, she got a busy signal. What’d that mean? Was the cabin on a party line? Did such things even exist anymore? Annie had left her cell phone on the kitchen table, so she tried Sheppard’s number on the small, much more powerful Motorola. But it didn’t pick up a signal, either.
A knock at the front door. Probably Ramona, she thought, bringing her homemade chicken noodle soup or something. Mira set Annie’s phone down on the newspaper Sheppard had left on the table, and went over to the door and turned on the outside light. As she opened the door, a chill wind blew inside, wrapping itself around her stocking feet. A pretty woman about Mira’s age, in her early forties, stood there. She was maybe five foot eight, with long, thick black hair, and was bundled up in a parka, jeans, boots. Snowflakes glistened in her hair.
“Hi, is Mr. Sheppard here?” she asked.
“No, he’s not. He went into town. You can try his cell phone, if you can get a signal up here.”
“You’re Mira, right? Mira Morales?”
“Uh, yes. And you are. . . ?”
“Allie,” she said, with a pleasant smile, and slid her right hand out of her parka pocket and pointed a gun at Mira’s chest. “Don’t make me use this, Mira. Just step back inside the cabin.”
Mira looked at the gun, at the woman, and all her usual worries about car transmissions and the bookstore failing suddenly shrank in importance. The sight of the gun terrified her, paralyzed her, and her sluggish mind pushed up against the wall of that terror and refused to move beyond it.
“I said, move, “the woman barked, and stepped forward, forcing Mira back into the cabin.
Without taking her eyes off Mira, the woman kicked the door shut. “My God, it’s like a furnace in here.” She unzipped her parka. “Toss me that cell phone in the chair, put on some shoes, jacket, and put some clothes in a bag. Where’s your suitcase?”
“What. . . what the hell do you want?”
Allie’s smile snapped like a brittle twig and settled into a thin, hard line. “I ask the questions. Now give me that phone and move down the goddamn hall.”
Mira picked up the phone, tossed it to her. She started down the hail, struggling desperately to pick up something on this woman. But her head throbbed from sinus congestion, her body ached, and the only thing she picked up was the obvious—she was in very deep shit.
In the bedroom she put on her shoes and the woman stood in the doorway, watching her.
“Where’s your suitcase?”
“Under the bed.”
“Get it.”
As Mira knelt down and slid the suitcase out, the woman opened the drawers to the dresser and scooped out clothes that she dropped on the bed. “No wonder you’re congested. These aren’t mountain clothes. And those shoes. . .” She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “They’re Florida shoes. Do you have a fever?”
Florida shoes. “How do you know where I’m from?”
“I know quite a bit about you. They say you’re psychic, but if that’s true, you should have known I was going to be at the door and therefore wouldn’t have opened it. So much for the psychic part. You’ve got a teenage daughter and a handsome FBI agent boyfriend. You were born on October twenty-seventh. That makes you hmmm... I’m not really up on my astrology, but I bought a couple of books on the subject at your store. You have a collection of weird books. Anyway, that makes you a Scorpio, right?
“I know that your ancient grandmother lives with you, your bookstore is flourishing, and you have quite a number of clients who come to you for predictions about their lives. Poor suckers. Six months ago, something happened to you or to your daughter, I’m still not real clear on that part. And, oh, I know that your husband, Tom, was gunned down in a convenience-store robbery when your daughter was three or so. Tragic. Really. It’s the sort of thing that taints your whole life.”
Jesus. Mira just stared at her, unable to understand how she never had picked up any indication that she was being watched, stalked, investigated, researched.
“I know that Sheppard was married years ago to an attorney, during his first stint with the bureau. No kids. He spends a lot of time with your daughter and they seem to be quite close. You help him out on cases from time to time, supposedly using your abilities, like with that case in Lauderdale, where you met him. I figure you just got lucky with that one. You do have some repeat clients, so they must be getting something out of the readings you do for them. Maybe you’re just a good listener, huh? More of a counselor, an inexpensive therapist, that’s how I see it.” She paused. “A few months back, I almost had a reading with you. I’d made the appointment—under a phony name, of course—then I canceled. I figured I didn’t really need to talk to you at all. I already knew so much about you. It’s amazing what you can learn about a person just by observing, talking to other people, and from the Internet.” Another pause. “So, do you have a fever?” she asked again.
“If you’ve got a fever, then you’ve got an infection. If you’ve got an infection, then you need an antibiotic. But if it’s viral, then the most that will work is something for the fever and some vitamin C.”
She talked like a doctor. And as soon as Mira thought this, she got the only psychic impression she’d had all day, of this woman shouting, Clear, and applying cardiac paddles to a patient’s chest. “You’re a doctor.”
The woman frowned, then gestured impatiently with the gun. “Just hurry up, c’mon, we don’t have all night.” Keep her talking, stall for time. “Where’re we going?”
“Move,” she snapped.
Mira zipped her bag shut. “My jacket’s in the closet.”
“Get it.”
She retrieved her jacket from the closet, zipped it up, grabbed her bag off the bed—and sneezed. “I need some Kleenex.”
“I’ve got plenty of Kleenex in the car.”
“I need to blow my nose now, not ten minutes from now.”
The woman slipped a travel pack of Kleenex out of her jacket pocket and tossed it to Mira.
She held it tightly for a moment, struggling to pick up something from the packet of Kleenex, but nothing surfaced, not a single image or impression, not even a tiny inner nudge.
“C’mon, let’s move.” She gestured impatiently with the gun.
Mira went through the bedroom doorway—and whirled suddenly, swung the bag, and it slammed into the side of Allie’s head, knocking her back and the gun from her hand. Mira raced down the hail, threw open the cabin door, and ran outside, shouting for Ramona, Jerry, screaming for them to call the police, to hide, there was a crazy out here with a gun. Her voice echoed in the eerie stillness. Where was everyone? Why weren’t the dogs barking?
She headed into the barn, her chest heaving for air, her head in an uproar. A horse. She would ride out of here on the big black horse. But midway into the barn, she tripped, fell, and found herself lying on top of something warm. A body, Christ, it was a body, a man, and he wasn’t moving. She leaped up, wild with panic, the horses whinnying, braying, and Allie crashed into the barn, her powerful flashlight stripping away the darkness, Mira’s protection.
“Hey, I don’t want to hurt you!”she shouted. “Don’t make me hurt you!”
Mira flew straight for the door on the opposite side of the barn, arms tucked in at her sides, her body moving as fast as a bullet, straight on target. Then those doors flew open, an explosion rocked through the barn, and pain burst in Mira’s right thigh. The bitch had shot her. She gasped and tried to keep moving, but the pain, dear God, the pain. Her leg gave out, her knee buckled, and she went down.
Chapter 2
Shit, shit, this isn’t in the pattern.
Allie Hart crouched next to Mira and nearly gagged on the stink in the barn. Manure, urine, dirt, blood. Even though she smelled worse things than this daily in ER, she had to cover her mouth and nose with her hand. She felt for a pulse in Mira’s neck. There. Quick and steady. Allie rolled her onto her back and shone her flashlight on Mira’s thigh, where she’d taken the bullet. A dark stain spread across the denim. The bullet probably hadn’t come out the other side. That was bad. No exit wound spelled infection. Infection meant complications. And complications meant more trouble, more possible glitches in her plan. She would have to remove the bullet and she sure as hell couldn’t do emergency surgery here.
And what about her head? Had her head struck the ground first when she’d fallen? Allie shone the flashlight on Mira’s face, saw a scrape on her cheek, but no other injuries. She moved her fingers expertly across her forehead and into her hair, looking for bumps, swellings. She ran her hand across the back of her neck and over the first couple of vertebrae, then raised her eyelids and checked her pupils. Everything looked okay. Except for the bullet. And the bleeding.
“Get her into the car,” she murmured. “Wrap the wound to stop the bleeding, pump her full of antibiotics. Drive. Get where you’re going.” That part of her plan wouldn’t change. Once she arrived at her destination, she would do the surgery. She’d been planning to lay low for a few days, anyway, and Mira would be able to recuperate enough so that she could travel.
Allie hooked the flashlight to her belt, slipped the gun in her jacket pocket, and slid her hands and arms under Mira and lifted her. A hundred and fifteen pounds, give or take a few. Not a problem. She had lifted patients in ER who weighed twice as much. The car wasn’t far.
The larger horse was going nuts, whinnying, kicking at the walls of the stall. Allie hurried out the closest door and moved quickly up the slope to her Land Rover. She had removed the rear seat before she’d left home, so there was plenty of room for Mira. Allie laid her on a blanket on the floor. She cuffed her left wrist to one of the metal rings that usually served to keep the rear seat in place, covered her with a blanket, and ran back to the cabin.
Grab the suitcase, she thought. Make sure she wiped off any surface she might have touched. Hurry, hurry.
The snow was coming down harder, big fat flakes that would make driving through the mountains perilous. But she didn’t have to drive quickly, she reminded herself. She had time.
But Mira doesn’t.
Okay, she would get out of town, pull off the road, tend to the bleeding, give her drugs. She had all sorts of drugs with her, antibiotics and painkillers, drugs to bring you up and take you down, drugs to kill you. Drugs weren’t the problem. The goddamn bullet was the problem.
This isn’t in the pattern. This wasn’t part of the plan she had spent months hammering together.
But Mira hadn’t left her a choice. She’d been running and a bullet was all that would stop her. It had seemed so obvious at the time. But now, nothing seemed obvious. Nothing seemed easy. Nothing seemed to be the way she’d envisioned it.
She hadn’t intended to shoot the others, either. But at the time, they had gotten in her way and the only obvious solution had been to shoot them.
She took long, deep breaths to calm herself.
Inside the cabin now. The silence wrapped around her. Allie’s gaze moved slowly through the front room. She hadn’t touched anything in here. The only objects she’d touched were the handles on the dresser drawers. She yanked a dish towel from the rack in the kitchen, hastened down the hall and into the bedroom. She wiped vigorously at the handles, at the edges of the drawers, then returned to the kitchen, grabbed the suitcase off the floor, and went over to the front door. She had rapped on the wood, but her gloves had been on then.
She briefly shut her eyes, envisioning those few moments when she’d stood outside the door, when she’d stepped inside the cabin, and afterward. She hadn’t touched anything else, she was sure of it.
I’m outta here.
The road down the hill from the farm was already slippery, treacherous. But the Land Rover could negotiate virtually any terrain and she reached the bottom of the hill quickly and made it to the two-lane road without mishap. Her plan had been to avoid the interstates and, considering the snow, that still seemed like a good idea.
She headed west toward the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where she could pick up any number of country roads. No one would pay any attention to a car that turned off a country road and into the trees. She wouldn’t need more than twenty minutes to bandage Mira’s leg and pump her so full of drugs that she would sleep through the night. Any infection that might be festering would be under control by morning.
But if the bullet had chipped a bone or hit a major vein and there was internal bleeding...
Then she would deal with it, just as she dealt with every trauma that came through her ER on a given night.
Heat poured out of the Rover’s vents. Allie unzipped her jacket, removed her gloves, and reached into the cooler on the passenger seat for a bottle of water. It was important to stay hydrated in times of stress. And B vitamins would help. She opened the glove compartment and removed one of the m
any plastic packets of vitamins inside. Each travel packet contained a potent B complex, eight hundred milligrams of vitamin C, a hundred milligrams of zinc, twenty-five thousand units of A, and Pycnogenol, another antioxidant. She swallowed the pills, then reached into the cooler again and brought out a bottle of green tea in liquid form. Another good antioxidant. She squirted an eyedropper full into her mouth, tightened the cap, and put it back into the cooler. As soon as she could, she would start Mira on a regimen of antioxidants.
Her vitamin habit was well known around the ER. Most of the other docs on staff thought she was a bit odd because of it and gossiped and made jokes about it behind her back. But the hospital’s chief of staff had become a convert when his daughter’s face had required forty-eight stitches after a biking accident and Allie had recommended topical vitamin E six times a day instead of plastic surgery. Today the daughter didn’t have a scar on her face.
Thanks to her diet, vitamins, and exercise, Allie, now forty-one, had a pulse rate of 52, a blood pressure of 110/62, and a cholesterol count of 152. She could run five miles in thirty-two minutes, which she did three times a week, and could bench-press four repetitions of 135 pounds.
She’d gotten her younger brother started on vitamins when he was in middle school. Don’t go there. Stay focused. Keep driving.
But now that she had admitted him into her consciousness, she couldn’t get him out. Tears welled up in her eyes, her foot pressed down against the gas pedal, and the speedometer leaped past sixty and climbed. The tires screeched as she took a turn.
Talk to me, she begged him.
Sometimes he did. Sometimes when she drove to work, he rode in the passenger seat with her and commented on the scenery, on their brother Keith’s wild and pointless life, and he always looked just as he had when she had last seen him, a twenty-nine-year-old Olympian god. Or like a Viking. But tonight he wasn’t talking. Tonight the cooler occupied the passenger seat and the blasted snow came down harder and faster and the woman in the back of the Rover began to groan. Tonight she was alone with the consequences of a plan that had developed some major glitches.
Total Silence Page 2