A Panicked Premonition

by Victoria Laurie

  I reached up and squeezed his arm in turn. “Want to arm-wrestle?”

  Dutch bounced his eyebrows. “I’d rather just wrestle.”

  I laughed. “I’m game.”

  He surprised me by leaning both arms out to scoop me up and plunk me down in his lap. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said, nuzzling my neck.

  I laughed some more and pushed my hands into his robe to lay my palms against his chest and touch his skin.

  God, I love the feel of my husband. His skin is smooth and soft, and his chest is as perfect a thing as you can imagine. Even as busy as he’d been, he always took forty-five minutes of his lunch hour to work out at the gym across the street from the bureau. Years of that dedicated regime had molded a body fit to be sculpted into marble.

  Dutch is lean at the waist, broad in the shoulders, solid in the pecs, and has the biceps of a god. And, for those of you wondering, he never skips leg day either. . . . I mean, his ass could make you cry—it’s so beautiful.

  I love to look at him and drink him in, but I also love the feel of him. Running my hands over his skin, tracing every taut muscle, is one of the greatest pleasures I’ve ever known. And when he sucks in a breath in reaction to the way I touch him, well . . . there are no words to fully describe how powerful and close to him that makes me feel. We’ve always had this amazing chemistry, but I’ve come to realize that it’s more than that, much more. It’d be better described as a tightly controlled volcanic eruption that happens in slow motion. It’s transformative.

  “Hey,” Dutch said, lifting his lips away from my neck.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, my mind already a little hazy.

  “Is that my phone?” he said, tilting his head again toward the back door.

  “Isn’t it out here?”

  “No. Remember? It’s no-pants Sunday. No pants means no phone to shove in a pocket. I left it on the counter next to yours.”

  “Well, it’s definitely ringing. Should I get it?”

  Dutch looked undecided, which meant that if he didn’t answer his phone, he’d be preoccupied with thoughts about who was trying to reach him at eight thirty on a Sunday morning.

  For the record, no one with good news ever tried to reach him at eight thirty on a Sunday morning.

  As I was putting all those thoughts together, my phone started ringing again. “Well, shit,” I said. “That’s gotta be trouble.”

  “Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Dutch said. “Candice calling you and some idiot calling me.”

  Sighing again, I got up to head to the back door. “It’s never a coincidence, babe.”

  I reached Dutch’s cell on the last ring. “Dutch’s phone, hold, please,” I said before answering my own cell—which was displaying a number I didn’t recognize across the top. “This is Abby.”

  “Abby?” said a woman’s voice. “This is Gwen. Have you seen or heard from my husband?”

  Now, I know my brain had been a little fuzzy just moments before, but nothing about what the woman said to me rang a bell. “Come again?” I said.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “Yes . . . I can. I’m sorry, but who is this?”

  “Gwen,” she repeated. “Gwen McKenzie.”

  Okay, so that still meant nothing to me. “Uh . . . ,” I said, furiously sorting through the list of acquaintances I had, and the name still wasn’t registering. Was it one of our neighbors? Was she a client? And if she was, was she one of my clients from my psychic practice or the PI business?

  “I’m Dave’s wife,” she tried again.

  I actually slapped my forehead. “Ohmigod! You’re Dave’s old lady!”

  Now, Dave had been referring to his common-law wife as his “old lady” for years. It was an ongoing joke between us that I’d actually never been able to tweeze her name out of him. He always just called her “my old lady.”

  But saying that to her on a Sunday morning probably wasn’t polite. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “He always refers to you as that. I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “No, you’re fine,” she said, her voice taut with tension. “I know he does. Have you seen or heard from him?”

  “Have I seen or heard from him?” I repeated, still relishing the boon of finally learning her name. “Um, no, Gwen. I haven’t. Should I have?” I almost never saw Dave anymore—he was so busy. Quite a change from a few years ago, when I couldn’t get the man out of my house. Especially if it was mealtime.

  A voice sounded from Dutch’s phone and I said to Gwen, “Sorry, can you hold on just a second?”

  Lifting Dutch’s phone, I said, “Hi, sorry, who’s this?”

  “It’s me, Abs,” Brice said. “Have you or Dutch heard from Dave? We were supposed to meet this morning at eight, and I can’t reach him on his cell.”

  A small shiver of cold crept along my backbone. Uh-oh. “Brice, lemme call you back.” Returning to Gwen, I said, “How long has it been since you last saw him, Gwen?”

  “Yesterday morning,” she said, and now I could hear the hoarseness in her voice. She sounded like she’d been crying. “He didn’t come home last night. I was out late with some girlfriends, and when I came home at midnight, he wasn’t here. There was a poker game last night, and I thought he was just out, still playing, so I went to bed. But when I woke up this morning, he hadn’t come home, and Brice Harrison called, looking for him. He’s never stayed out all night before without texting me to let me know where he is. I’ve called his cell a dozen times, and I’ve called all of his friends, and no one’s seen him since Friday. He never showed up to the game last night and he never answered any of their texts either. I’m worried sick!”

  My heart began to beat a little faster in my chest. Not being able to raise Dave on a cell was bad. He practically had that thing glued to his hand. And although he looked a bit irresponsible, with his long hair, thick mustache, full beard, and arms covered in tattoos, Dave McKenzie was a solid human being who could absolutely be counted on to show up when he said he would.

  That Dave hadn’t arrived at a poker game with his friends was worrisome enough, but the fact that he missed a business meeting with Brice was totally unlike him and a cause for real concern. In the pit of my stomach, a very bad feeling was beginning to settle in. Still, as calmly and gently as I could, I asked, “Gwen, have you tried any of the local hospitals?”

  There was a small sob on the other end of the call. “N-n-no,” she stammered. “I . . . I don’t know if I can do that. Oh, God, what if he’s been in an accident?”

  “Sit tight,” I said as the back door opened and Dutch peered in curiously. “I’ll reach out to local law enforcement to see if anybody’s got any information and get back to you, okay?”

  “Oh my God, Abby!” she cried. “What if something bad happened to him?”

  “Nothing bad happened to him,” I said. My inner lie detector went off quietly. Oh, shit! I thought. Oh, shit!

  Chapter Three

  “Talk to me,” Dutch said the moment I hung up with Gwen.

  Before I could answer him, his cell rang. He reached for it and answered it swiftly. “Brice, what’s going on?”

  While Dutch listened, I called Candice. Her cell went to voice mail, because, of course, she was out on some twenty-mile running excursion and she’d have her music on and her ringer off. “Dammit,” I muttered, clicking off to send her an urgent text. By the time I was done tapping it out, Dutch was telling Brice to hold on.

  “Dave’s missing?” he said to me. Even though I was sure Brice had filled him in, I knew what he was asking. He wanted my intuitive input to confirm whether we should be worried.

  “Yes,” I said, that dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach increasing with each passing second. Then I thought of something. “Do you have any pictures of Dave?”

  Dutch grimaced,
because he knew what I was asking. One of the truly quirky talents that I have is being able to tell from a photograph if someone is alive or dead. The best way to explain it is that when I see a photo of someone who’s alive, to my mind’s eye everything about it is normal and probably exactly matches how it appears to the average person. But show me a photo of someone who’s passed away, and something changes. It’s as if their image becomes flatter somehow, as if their visage goes from being three-dimensional to two. And it doesn’t matter if the person has been dead for a hundred years or five minutes; if I look at a photo of someone who’s deceased, I can tell very quickly that they’ve passed on.

  “I think so,” Dutch said. Lifting the phone to his ear, he said, “Brice, let me call you back.” After hanging up with Brice, Dutch sifted through the photos on his phone until he found one with Dave in it. “Here,” he said, making the image larger. “I took this last week at Murielle’s house. Dave’s in the background next to a section of wall that we were going to have to remove to meet the dimensions.”

  I squinted at the screen, bracing myself for what I might see. With a huge sigh of relief, I said, “He’s alive.”

  Dutch leaned against the counter, obviously relieved too. “So where is he?”

  I went to the kitchen table and sat down. Even though I was convinced that Dave was still alive, I wasn’t at all certain he was well. In fact, that dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach confirmed that something was very, very wrong with my longtime friend. “I think he’s been in an accident,” I said, trying to piece together the images and feelings I was getting intuitively.

  Dutch tapped at his phone before raising it to his ear. A moment later he said, “Hey, Abby thinks Dave could’ve been in an accident. Can you call your source at APD dispatch and see if there was anything reported in last night?”

  I felt something cool on my leg and looked down to see Eggy, my other beloved mini dachshund, nosing my shin. He’d obviously sensed my concern. Lifting him into my lap, I went back to focusing on Dutch, who was just getting off the phone. “Brice has a contact,” he said. “We’ll find out if something happened. In the meantime, we should reach out to all the local hospitals.”

  Dutch and I divided and conquered the list of four main hospitals within short driving distance of where Dave would have been on Saturday morning. None had a patient admitted within the last twenty-four hours by the name of Dave McKenzie or a John Doe that fit his description.

  Just as Dutch hung up with the last hospital, shaking his head to indicate he’d had no luck tracking Dave down, Brice called us back. Dutch put the call on speaker so that we both could hear. “I think I’ve got something,” Brice said, and I could tell by his voice that it was bad. “There was a report of an accident involving a truck fitting the description of Dave’s F-one-fifty, but when APD rolled up on scene, the only thing they found were some skid marks and some broken plastic they think came off one of the headlights. A report was written and a search for both the truck and the witness vetted nothing.”

  “How did they learn there was an accident in the first place?” Dutch asked.

  “Got an anonymous nine-one-one call,” Brice told him. “The caller didn’t stay on long enough to be identified.”

  “Doesn’t APD have caller ID?” I asked.

  “They do, and I asked about it. My source says the call was blocked.”

  “That’s fishy,” I said while Dutch nodded.

  “Yep,” Brice agreed. “But it may not have been Dave’s truck. I haven’t heard the call, so I don’t know what else the witness may have seen or said. There’s still a way for them to trace the call, though, but it’ll take some time because they have to go through all the carriers and triangulate the signal. If the phone was a burner, we’ll never know who made the call.”

  “What time did the call come in?” Dutch asked.

  “A little after ten in the morning,” Brice told him.

  “So, Dave’s been missing for almost twenty-four hours?” I said. “How does that track?”

  “He could’ve hit his head and become disoriented,” Dutch said.

  “So where is he?” I pressed. I had this terrible, foreboding feeling.

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Cooper,” Brice said. “My best guess is that if it was Dave who was in the accident, he suffered a concussion or head injury, and maybe he tried to make it to the hospital but couldn’t, and now he and his vehicle are off the road, somewhere no one’s seen him yet.”

  “We have to find him,” I said. “Soon, you guys. We have to find him very, very soon.”

  “Meet me at APD,” Brice said. “We’ll ask to hear the call and see the photos of the scene, if any were taken. And then we’ll go to the site of the accident and try to find Dave from there.”

  “We’ll be there in twenty,” Dutch promised, clicking off the call. He then looked at me and even though his expression was reserved, I could see the worry in his eyes. “How fast can you change?”

  “Fast,” I said, setting Eggy back on the floor to hurry to the bedroom. Just seven minutes later Dutch and I were out the door.

  We didn’t speak on the way to the APD station. I think we were both too worried to talk. On the drive, I did notice that Dutch glanced over at me a time or two, and I knew that he was hoping I’d say something like, “Don’t worry, honey, my radar says we’ll find Dave and he’ll be fine!” but nothing in the ether was giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling about Dave’s future, and that greatly troubled me.

  We walked into the station and Brice was already there at the front door. “This way, guys,” he said, waving us forward to follow him. He led us through a maze of corridors to what felt like the back of the station, and there he paused at a door and knocked. After hearing someone say, “Come in,” we did.

  Through the door we found a woman in uniform, sitting behind a desk with a laptop. She nodded to Brice. “Special Agent Harrison.”

  “Thanks for meeting with us, Officer Seabright. These are my colleagues Special Agent Rivers and our consultant Abigail Cooper.”

  Officer Seabright’s eyes showed interest when he said my name. “Abigail Cooper. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “If it’s good stuff, then it’s all true. If it’s bad stuff, then it’s still probably all true,” I told her.

  She chuckled, but then Brice cleared his throat and I immediately regretted making the joke. He was right; we weren’t here on a social call. Our friend was quite possibly in serious trouble. “Sorry,” I said. “I make jokes when I’m nervous.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told me. “I do the same thing. Now, you wanted me to queue up the call about the accident on Lost Creek Boulevard, correct?”

  At the mention of the street name, Dutch lifted his phone to tap at it. Over his shoulder I could see he’d pulled up a map of the street, which was over on the wealthy side of town, where I’d set up most of Dave’s appointments for the day before. Lots of money ran through the surrounding bluffs over that way.

  Meanwhile, Brice had answered Seabright in the affirmative, and with a click we began to hear the call.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  “There’s an accident,” a man’s voice replied. “On Lost Creek. I think a truck went off the road. Y’all should send somebody over there.”

  “Sir, what is the exact location of the accident?”

  “Uh . . . I’m not for sure on this, but I think it’s right off Lost Creek, just past Quaker Ridge Drive. Maybe a little further.”

  “East or west of Quaker Ridge, sir?” she asked.

  “Um . . . hold on. . . . I guess it’d be east.”

  “Can you describe the vehicle?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It was a truck. A big one. Maybe . . . an F-one-fifty?”

  “What color?”

&n
bsp; “Silver.”

  “Was there anyone in the vehicle?”

  “I think there was a guy in it.”

  “Just one person?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He’s all I saw at least.”

  “Did he appear to be moving?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “And what is your location?” the dispatcher asked.

  There was a pause, then, “Wh-wh-why do you need to know that?”

  “We’d like to send an officer out to get your statement, sir,” she said.

  “Uh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Sir, may I have your name, please?”

  “Yeah, I gotta go. Just send somebody out there. I think the guy might be hurt.”

  “Was anyone else involved in the accident, sir?”

  There was an audible click as the caller disconnected.

  “Sir? Are you there, sir?”

  Shortly after that the call stopped and Officer Seabright looked up at us. “That’s all there is.”

  Brice, Dutch, and I traded a series of concerned looks; then Brice said, “The number was blocked?”

  “Yes. If you need me to send in a trace on it, I can, but it’ll be at least a few days before we’d get anything back.”

  “Do it,” I said, feeling that sense of urgency in my gut.

  Seabright looked to Brice for confirmation and he nodded.

  “Is it just me or did the caller sound like he was under the influence?” Dutch asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I noticed it too. Some of his words were slurred and his cadence was slow.”

  “Ten a.m. is pretty early to be driving around under the influence,” Brice said.

  “He sounded young too,” I said. “He could’ve been at a party and passed out, then woke up still buzzed but thinking he could make it home.”

  “He could’ve also been the reason Dave’s truck went off the road,” Brice said.

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Shit,” I muttered.

  Brice then directed his next question to Seabright. “Did the responding unit take photos?”