by Linda Howard
The car looked gigantic, coming right at me. The headlights were glaring right in my eyes, blinding me; I had only a vague impression of the dark form behind the wheel, and that was due solely to the lights in the parking lot. There was plenty of room for the car to swerve around me, but it didn’t.
I took a running step to get out of the way, and in the split second that followed I swear it seemed the driver adjusted direction, too, and aimed for me.
Panic exploded in my brain. All I could think—and this wasn’t a fully-formed, coherent thought, just an “Ohmigod!” kind of realization—was that if the car hit me I would be crushed between it and the van.
Good-bye, wedding. Hell, good-bye me.
I jumped. Actually, I dived. And it was a world-class effort, let me tell you. There’s nothing like thinking you’re about to be turned into mush to put some spring in the legs. Even when I was cheerleading in college I couldn’t get that kind of distance.
The car roared by so closely I felt the heat of its exhaust; I was still airborne at the time, that’s how close I came to being hit. I heard squealing tires, then I crashed to the asphalt behind the van and the lights sort of went out.
Chapter
Three
I didn’t lose consciousness, or at least not completely. The world was nothing but a dark, tumbling blur. I remember the sharp, burning sensation as I sort of skidded and rolled across the asphalt. I remember thinking “My shoes!” as I tried desperately to hold on to my packages. I remember my ears ringing, and the sudden hot taste of blood in my mouth. And I remember what felt like a shock wave of pain slamming through me.
Then the movement stopped and I lay on the asphalt, which was still warm even though night had closed in, not quite certain where I was or what had happened. I could hear sounds, but I couldn’t tell what they were or where they were coming from. All I wanted to do was lie there and try to contain my body’s outrage at being injured. I was hurt. My head was pounding in a sickening throb, throb, throb, in time with my heartbeat. I felt hot, then cold, and wanted to throw up. I could feel the sharp aches, the burns, the throbs and jabs; I just couldn’t isolate all the sensations and make sense of them, couldn’t determine location or severity, or do anything about them.
At least I wasn’t dead. That was a plus.
Then a very clear thought burned through my brain: “That bitch tried to run me down!”
My second thought was, “Oh, shit, not again!”
I even said the words aloud, and the sound of my own voice startled me, sort of jarred me back into my body, which, by the way, wasn’t a happy place to be. I almost wanted to go back into that disconnected state, except I was afraid the driver would turn around and come back for another pass at me, and if I were just lying there zoned out I’d be roadkill. Literally.
Spurred by a panicked shot of adrenaline, I sat up and hastily looked around. That wasn’t my smartest move ever. Well, maybe it was, because I had to make certain I wasn’t about to become a greasy mess on the pavement, but my body immediately rebelled: my head gave a huge throb, my stomach heaved, my eyes rolled up in my head, and I collapsed back to the asphalt.
This time I just let myself lie there, because the eyeballs-rolling-up thing was weird. Surely someone would come rushing to my aid any minute now.
Frankly, I was getting very tired of people trying to kill me. Read my previous book if you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve been shot (by my ex-husband’s current wife); my brake line cut (by my ex-husband), resulting in a multi-car accident; and now this. I was tired of pain. I was tired of the hell this played with my schedule. I was damn tired of not looking my best.
The pavement was rough under my cheek. From the various shrieks of pain coming from nerve endings all over my body, I thought I must have left large amounts of skin on the asphalt. Thank goodness I was wearing long pants, but really, only leather will protect your skin, so I suspected the pants hadn’t been a lot of help. Road rash is an ugly thing. I began to worry; how would I look for the wedding? Was four weeks enough time to heal, or would I have to invest in some heavy body makeup, which is icky and would smear on my dress? Maybe the sleeveless, sexy column of silk I’d envisioned would have to go, and instead I’d wear something with more coverage, like a burka, or a tent—not that there’s much difference between the two.
Well, for pete’s sake, where was someone? Were all those people going to stay in the frickin’ mall until midnight? How long would I have to lie there before someone saw me and came to help? I’d almost been smashed to a pulp! I needed a little concern here, a little something.
I was getting very indignant. Hello…a body lying in the parking lot, and no one notices? Yes, it was night, but the parking lot was lit by those huge vapor lights, and I wasn’t lying between two cars or anything. I was…I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings.
My vision was blurred; all I could see were black shadows and patches of light, and those swam and ran together. Automatically I tried to rub my eyes, only to find that my arms, neither of them, wanted to obey. They would move, but reluctantly, and not very well—certainly not well enough to have fingers flailing away at my eyes; I might blind myself, and wouldn’t that be adding insult to injury?
Okay, so I couldn’t see exactly where I was. Still, I had to be lying in the end of the row closest to the mall, where someone should notice me. Eventually.
Dimly I heard a car start, somewhere. So long as it wasn’t a car that would back over me, that was okay, but I figured in that case the driver would have had to step over my body to get to said car, so that scenario wasn’t likely. On the other hand, there have been times when I was so rushed that if I had stepped over a body I might have thought, I’ll get to that later.
Something else to worry about: being backed over by someone like me.
Was there any sort of record on how long someone could lie in the middle of a parking lot and no one notice? And—yuck—what if ants and things crawled on me? I was bleeding. Probably all sorts of little critters were crawling at top speed toward me, eager to feast.
This thought was so disgusting that if my head hadn’t been aching so badly I probably would have bolted upright. No, I don’t like bugs. I’m not afraid of them, but I think they’re nasty and icky, and I don’t want them anywhere near me.
Come to think of it, the parking lot itself was nasty and icky. Tacky, classless people spit on the pavement, and sometimes they spit more than just spit. All sorts of crap landed on pavements, including, well, crap.
Oh, God, I had to get up before I died from an overdose of the nasties. No one was coming to my aid, at least not on my timetable, which pretty much meant NOW. I’d have to do this myself. I’d have to find my purse, dig out my cell phone—I hoped the damn thing still worked, that the battery hadn’t been knocked out or something, because finding a battery and replacing it was beyond me at the moment—and call 911. I also had to sit up, to get most of my body off the nasty pavement, or my mental state would soon match my physical one.
On the count of three, I thought, I would sit up. One. Two. Three. Nothing happened. My mind knew what I wanted to do, but my body said uh-uh. It had already tried that sitting-up stuff.
That pissed me off, almost as much as did the lying-there-unnoticed. Okay, I’m lying about that. Lying-there-unnoticed came close to the top of the list. If I had to rate the things that pissed me off right then, someone trying to kill me—again!—would have to rate a ten. No one paying any attention to me was a nine. A disobedient body was a distant third, coming in at maybe a five.
Still, I’d been a cheerleader for years, all the way from junior high through college. I’d told my body to do painful things lots of times, and for the most part it had obeyed. It just didn’t make sense that it wouldn’t obey me now when the stakes were a lot higher than turning a cartwheel or something. My life could hang in the balance here! Not only that, it felt as if something was crawling on my face. No doubt about it, I had to
get up. I had to get help.
Maybe I was trying to do too much. Sitting up all in one motion, without the spur of panic to push me, was more than I could manage. Maybe I should try moving my arm again.
That worked out pretty well. My right arm hurt, but it did just what my brain told it to do, which was laboriously (I didn’t tell it that part, that was just the way it worked) bring my hand up so I could swipe at whatever was crawling across my face.
I expected to feel a bug. I was braced to feel a giant bug. What I felt, instead, was wet and sticky.
Okay, I was bleeding. I was vaguely surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t that I was surprised I was bleeding, but that I was bleeding from my head or face, or both. I knew I’d hit my head, hence the headache and nausea that likely meant a concussion, but the situation was getting worser and worser, as someone once said. If I’d cut my face, would that mean stitches? The way this was going, I would look like the Bride of Frankenstein by the time Wyatt and I got married.
That realization shot up to a seven on my Piss-O-Meter. Maybe an eight. My plans for Wyatt were totally screwed if my face was scarred and I was covered in peeling road rash, because how could he possibly go blind with lust looking at that?
At least he wasn’t with me this time. He’d been right there both of the other times when someone tried to kill me, and it had played hell with him on all sorts of levels. As a cop, he’d been infuriated. As a man, he’d been outraged. As the man who loved me, he’d been terrified. Naturally, he had shown all this by becoming even more arrogant and overbearing, and considering what his base level was for both those characteristics, you can imagine how unbearable he became. It’s a good thing I already loved him, or I’d have had to kill him.
Thinking about Wyatt wasn’t going to get help to me any faster. I was really good at putting off unpleasant stuff, but I couldn’t put this off any longer. It was going to hurt, but I had to force myself to move.
I was lying on my left side, with my left arm pinned beneath me. I planted my right hand about even with my shoulder and awkwardly levered myself up until I managed to get propped on my left elbow. Then I paused, fighting nausea, fighting the horrible pounding in my head, waiting until the worst of it passed before I struggled into an upright position.
Okay. Nothing was broken. Having had experience with broken bones, I could tell that much. Scraped, bruised, jarred, and concussed, but not broken. Probably if I’d been in fear of my life I could have jumped up and run like hell, but the bitch who had almost run me down had evidently taken her road rage to, well, the road. Not having that pressing need, I sat there and used the hem of my blouse to wipe the blood from my eyes so I could see. I also used that time to reassure myself that my head wasn’t going to explode or fall off, though it felt as if it might do both.
With my vision less blurry, I found my purse. It was hanging from the bend of my right arm, and it was tangled with some of the plastic bags that I likewise hadn’t dropped. The tangled straps had been hampering my efforts to move my arm, and the bags themselves were woven around and under my legs. How about that? My purchases might have provided my skin with a little extra protection. I took this as a sign that God wanted me to shop.
Buoyed by this spiritual support, I clumsily fished in my purse for my cell phone and flipped it open. The blessed little screen lit up, so I punched in 911. I’ve called 911 before, when Nicole Goodwin was murdered and I thought the shots were being fired at me, so I knew the drill. When the dispassionate voice asked the nature of my emergency, I was prepared.
“I’ve been injured. I’m in the mall parking lot—” I told them which mall, which store, and which entrance I was lying outside of, though technically I was now sitting outside of it.
“What is the nature of your injury?” the voice inquired, without the least bit of urgency or even concern. I guess the 911 operator figured that if I were calling, I couldn’t be hurt that much, and I guess she was right.
“Head injury; I think I have a concussion. Bruises, scrapes, general battering. Someone tried to run me down, but she’s gone now.”
“Is this a domestic dispute?”
“No, I’m heterosexual.”
“Ma’am?” For the first time, the operator’s voice had some expression in it. Unfortunately, that expression was confusion.
“I said, ‘she’s gone,’ and you asked if it was a domestic dispute, so I said no, I’m heterosexual,” I explained patiently, which, considering I was sitting on the nasty pavement bleeding, was an example of my self-control. I really try not to piss off people who might be coming to my rescue. I say “might” because so far the rescuing hadn’t happened.
“I see. Do you know the identity of this person?”
“No.” All I knew was that she was a psycho bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to steer a wheelbarrow, much less a Buick.
“I’ll dispatch a patrol car and medics to your location,” the operator said, having regained her professional distance. “I need more information, so please stay on the line.”
I stayed. When asked, I provided my name and address, my home phone number, and my cell number, which I think maybe she already had, because of enhanced 911, plus my cell phone is one of those with a GPS locator in it. I had probably been triangulated, located, and verified. Inwardly I winced. My name was already going across police radios, which meant one Lieutenant J. W. Bloodsworth would hear it and was probably already leaping into his car and turning on his blue lights. I really hoped the medics could get here before he arrived, and clean some of the blood off my face. He’s seen me bloody before, but still…it’s a vanity thing.
The automatic door of the department store opened and two women came out, chatting happily as they carried out their booty and started up the aisle of parked cars. The first one to see me shrieked and stopped in her tracks.
“Don’t mind that noise,” I told the operator. “Someone was startled.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” The second woman rushed toward me. “Were you attacked? Are you okay? What happened?”
Let me tell you, it’s really annoying when help shows up once you no longer need it.
The parking lot was full of flashing lights, cars parked at odd angles, and uniformed men mostly standing around chatting. No one was dead, so there wasn’t any sense of urgency. One of the vehicles with flashing lights belonged to the medics; their names were Dwight and Dwayne. You can’t make this stuff up. I don’t like the name “Dwayne” because that was the name of the man who had killed Nicole Goodwin, but I couldn’t say that to this Dwayne because he was a really nice man who was calm and gentle as he wiped away blood and bandaged my scalp wound. My forehead was scraped, but my face wasn’t cut, which I guess meant that I’d sort of had my head tucked down when I landed. Good news for my face, bad news for my head.
They agreed with my diagnosis of concussion, which on one level was satisfying—I like being right—and on another disheartening, because a concussion would seriously interfere with my schedule, which was tight enough without having this kind of handicap thrown into the mix.
One of the patrolmen was Officer Spangler—I knew him, from when Nicole was murdered. I was lying propped on a gurney and he was taking my statement while the medics efficiently wiped and bandaged and got me ready for transport when Wyatt drove up. Even without looking I knew it was him, because of the way his tires squealed, punctuated by a slamming car door.
“There’s Wyatt,” I said to Officer Spangler. I didn’t turn my head, because I was trying very hard not to move.
He glanced in the direction of the new arrival, and pursed his lips a little so they wouldn’t smile. “Yes, ma’am, it is,” he said. “He’s been in radio contact.”
There had been some conflict between Wyatt and some of the older guys in the police department, because he was promoted ahead of them. Officer Spangler was fairly new, and young, so he was free of that resentment. He stood and gave a respectful nod as Wyatt approached and
stared down at me, his hands on his hips. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt with the cuffs rolled up over his forearms. His service weapon rode in a holster on his right kidney, and his badge was clipped to his belt. He carried a cell phone/radio in his hand, and he looked grim.
“I’m okay,” I said to Wyatt, hating that look on his face. I’d seen it before. “Kind of.”
He immediately switched the laserlike focus of his gaze to Dwayne. Dwight was fiddling with their medic cases, putting stuff back, so Dwayne was the target. “How is she?” he asked, as if I hadn’t even spoken.
“Probable concussion,” said Dwayne, which was likely against some sort of regulation, but I supposed most of the medics and cops knew one another, and maybe cops could get all kinds of info that was supposed to be private. “A lacerated scalp, some contusions.”
“Road rash,” I said glumly.
Dwayne smiled down at me. “That, too.”
Wyatt squatted beside the gurney. The bright light the medics had set up for their work threw harsh shadows on his face. He looked tough and mean, but his hand was gentle as he took mine in it.
“I’ll be right behind the ambulance,” he promised. “I’ll call your mom and dad on the way.” He shot a look at Spangler. “You can finish taking her statement at the hospital.”
“Yes, sir,” said Officer Spangler, closing his notebook.
I was loaded into the back of the ambulance—to be precise, the gurney was loaded in the ambulance, but since I was on it, the end result was the same. The guys closed the double doors, and the last sight I had of Wyatt was him standing there looking both cold and fierce.
Then we pulled out of the parking lot, lights flashing but no siren wailing, for which I was grateful because my head ached so much.
Well, this was familiar. And in this case, familiarity sucked.
Chapter
Four
Wyatt was the last thing I saw before the doors to the ambulance were closed, and the first thing I saw when they were opened.