Coached in the Act

by Victoria Laurie

  Gilley tugged on the handle, too, and shouted, “Sunny! Sunny, wake up!”

  He then joined me in pounding on the window, but it was to no avail. I stepped back from the car and looked around for something, anything that might help us. “We have to break a window!”

  Gilley stopped pounding on the window and flew to the trunk of my car. After pulling up the lid, he rummaged around for a moment and came up with a tire iron. He hurried back to Sunny’s car and was about to shatter the passenger’s side window when I shouted “No!” and caught his arm. “You’ll spray her with glass!”

  “Good point,” he said. After stepping sideways, he brought the tire iron down on the rear passenger window, angling the blow toward the back of the car.

  The glass didn’t shatter so much as spider across the pane.

  “Hit it again!” I urged.

  Gilley beat the glass several more times, eventually carving out a small hole, and then he broke the rest down with a side-to-side sweeping motion. Reaching carefully through the window, he managed to stretch his arm behind the seat and tug at the rear passenger’s side door handle.

  When it gave way, he got in, leaned over the seat and unlocked the front passenger’s side door. I pulled the now unlocked door open and leaned over Sunny, then felt along her body to find her still breathing but quite cold. “Gilley!”

  “Is she alive?”

  “Yes, but barely!”

  “Should I call an ambulance?”

  I was absolutely panicked, but I managed to devise the quickest way to help Sunny. “No,” I said, waving toward the driver’s seat. “Get in.”

  While Gilley ran around to the other side of the car, I got into the passenger seat and carefully lifted Sunny’s body onto mine, pulling her legs away from the driver’s side. “It’ll be faster if we can drive her to the hospital,” I told Gilley as he got into the car. “It’s only about a half mile away.”

  Gilley settled into the seat and looked around the dash and on the floor. “Where’s the key fob?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about it! It’s probably in her pocket. Just hit the START button!”

  Gilley pressed the button to the side of the steering column, but nothing happened.

  “Put your foot on the brake!” I snapped, the fear getting the best of me.

  “My foot is on the brake!”

  “Try again!”

  “It’s not working!”

  “Then we need to call an ambulance!”

  Gilley’s hands were shaking. He jumped out, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and dialed 911.

  While Gilley called for help, I shifted position, laid Sunny’s head in my lap. Her hair felt damp but her skin was cool and dry. I looked her over and saw that she was barefoot and her toes and fingers were blue with cold.

  Placing both hands on the sides of Sunny’s cheeks, I patted them in an effort to get her to wake up. She didn’t even flicker an eyelid. “Oh, God,” I said, feeling tears fill my eyes. “Beautiful lady, what’ve you done to yourself?”

  “Cat!” I heard Gilley say after he’d connected with a dispatcher.

  “She’s unconscious and breathing very shallow!” I yelled. There was, in fact, no need to yell, but I was now legitimately worried that Sunny might expire right in my arms. She felt painfully thin—even for her—which told me she hadn’t been eating well enough. And she seemed so fragile.

  “Cat!” Gilley repeated, more urgently this time.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what she’s ingested?”

  My gaze traveled to Sunny’s palm, but the pill bottle had rolled out onto the passenger’s side floor. “Hold on,” I told him, moving awkwardly around Sunny’s unconscious form to retrieve the prescription bottle.

  After grabbing it and holding it up, I had to squint to see the small lettering. “Ambien,” I said to Gilley and then reached across the seat to wave the pill bottle at him so that he knew to take it.

  He repeated the information on the label to the dispatcher, and then he asked me, “Are there any pills left?”

  The bottle was empty when I’d handed it to him, so I searched around the car, but there was no sign of any pills left. “No,” I said, my voice hitching, as tears stung my eyes. Sunny had taken an Ambien around noon, so I knew she’d been in possession of the pills, but I had never thought she’d purposely overdose on them. “Gilley, tell them to hurry!”

  I reached for Sunny’s wrist and pulled it up from where it dangled over the seat. She was completely passive. Feeling for a pulse again I bit my lip when I found it faint and slow. Stroking her cheek I cried, “Sunny, please, please don’t do this. Don’t leave us, okay? Think of your son! Come on, honey, hang in there!”

  The sound of a siren coming close let me know help was nearby.

  “Yes, ma’am, I hear them,” Gilley said. “Thank you for your help.”

  He hung up the phone and leaned inside the car’s interior. “Oh, my,” he whispered. “She’s so pale!”

  I nodded. Sunny’s complexion in the glow of the overhead light was a ghostly white. Gilley and I both tore our glances away when a patrol car and an ambulance pulled into the small lot. An officer got to us first.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “This is Sunny D’Angelo,” I said to him. “She’s our dear friend. We’d been out looking for her and found her here in her car, with an empty bottle of Ambien in her hand. She’s unconscious and not responding.”

  He waved two paramedics over to us, and Gilley stepped out of the way while I got out of the car from the passenger’s side. Gil came around to stand next to me while the paramedics worked on Sunny.

  “We need to call Darius,” I said to him.

  “And Shepherd,” he replied.

  I bit my lip. “This is the last thing he needs to be dealing with right now. Maybe I should wait until after we know she’s okay?”

  Gilley placed the phone to his ear. “Cat, call him. If the worst happens, he’ll be furious you didn’t let him know in time to get to the hospital.”

  I nodded and turned away to place the call to Shepherd. The phone rang four times and went to voice mail, so I left him a lengthy message, told him to call me back, and added that I’d give him any updates I could.

  After hanging up, I turned back toward Gilley in time to see them loading Sunny into the back of the ambulance. She was wearing an oxygen mask, and an IV had already been inserted into her wrist. Gilley took my arm and hugged it, as if clutching it for reassurance. I leaned my head against his. “She’ll be okay,” I whispered, but my voice hitched again, and my lower lip trembled.

  The officer approached us. “Can you two join me over here so I can get some background information?”

  My breath caught. I’d thought that Gilley and I could simply follow the ambulance to the hospital, and I didn’t want to let it out of my sight should Shepherd call me and ask about Sunny.

  “Officer, could we be interviewed at the hospital? We’d really like to follow behind the ambulance,” I said.

  “No, ma’am. I’m sorry, but I’ll need to take your statement here.” For emphasis, he looked meaningfully at Sunny’s Range Rover, with its broken window.

  “That’s Detective Shepherd’s sister,” Gilley told him angrily. “We really should be with her.”

  The officer’s brow furrowed, and he glanced at the ambulance, which was already pulling away.

  “Well then, I’m definitely going to need you to stay right here with me and tell me what happened,” he said.

  I wanted to sock him. “I’m the detective’s girlfriend,” I said, hating the adolescent sound of the word. “We were at the playhouse this evening, and Shepherd asked us to find Sunny and tell her about Yelena Galanis.”

  He blinked at me for a moment, clearly surprised to learn that we’d been at the scene of a homicide as well as at the scene of an apparent overdose, but then he pulled out a small notepad and a ballpoint pen. After clicking the pe
n, he began to scribble. “Let’s start with the basics,” he said. “Like your names and addresses. . . .”

  Chapter 6

  We got to the hospital nearly an hour later. The stupid cop had taken his sweet time jotting down every single bit of information about us he could think of, and about the events leading up to our finding Sunny. He had finally released us after we’d repeated our story to him at least three times, and it had been all I could do not to simply turn my back on his pestering questions and head to the hospital before he could give me and Gilley the okay.

  We arrived at the emergency room and found Darius pacing the hall, looking worried sick. Seeing us, he rushed over.

  “Have you heard anything?” he asked us.

  Gilley looked from me back to Darius. “We just got here.”

  Darius shook his head. He seemed unable to form coherent thoughts, he was so distraught. “Right. Right. I . . . this whole night . . . she . . . Why?” he said, his eyes glistening with tears. “Why would she take all those pills? Why would she try to kill herself? Why?”

  Hearing the words come out of his mouth hit me like a blow to the midsection. “We don’t know anything other than she probably took too much Ambien, Darius. For all we know, Sunny could’ve taken the very last pill and it simply hit her too hard.”

  He shook his head. “The nurse came out to ask me about the prescription bottle found in her hand. It was mine. Sunny picked it up for me today because she knows how hard the jet lag hits me when I fly home from L.A.”

  “She took one this afternoon,” I confessed to him. He pulled his chin back in alarm, so I was quick to explain. “She said she took only a half a pill, because she hadn’t been sleeping herself. She called Tiffany and asked her to come watch over Finley while she got some rest. She wanted to be fresh when you got home.”

  Darius was shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. “No, no, no,” he insisted. “She knows better than to take Ambien. Why would she risk that?”

  “What do you mean?” Gilley asked.

  Darius rubbed his eyes with his palms, and I could tell the man was exhausted both physically and mentally. “Ambien hits Sunny really hard. She’s taken one of my pills before, right after Finley was born, and she went to sleep for about two hours, then woke up and started acting crazy. She got the ladder out of the garage and insisted that we needed to clean the gutters. The more I tried to talk sense into her, the crazier she sounded, and then she got so frustrated with me when I pulled the ladder out of her hands that she walked around the house and right into the ocean, fully clothed. I didn’t see her until she was about neck-deep, and I had to swim like hell to reach her. When I did, she kept telling me that she was trying to catch a mermaid. I had to drag her out and lock all three of us in the bedroom together until she fell asleep again. When she woke up seven hours later, she had no memory at all of what she’d said or done.”

  “Oh!” Gilley said. “I’ve read about that. Some people who take Ambien fall into a sort of dreamlike state, where they can appear to be perfectly awake, but they’re actually not. They can do all sorts of crazy things and never remember it.”

  Darius nodded. “I talked to my doctor about it, and he said the same thing. He said Ambien can affect women very differently than men, and for some women, it can be really dangerous.”

  I glanced down the hall toward the double doors of the ER, through which Sunny had, no doubt, been taken. “That would explain why Sunny didn’t tell Tiffany that she was leaving and, if she in fact did come back to the house, why she left again without her phone.”

  “It could also explain why she took the rest of the pills,” Gilley said. “She wasn’t in her right state of mind.”

  Darius stumbled over to a chair and sat down heavily, his chin falling against his chest. “Jesus,” I heard him say. “I should’ve picked up the prescription. If I’d known she was going to pinch one of the pills, I would’ve never let her pick it up from the pharmacy.”

  I moved over to sit down next to him. “This isn’t your fault, Darius,” I said. “Sunny was exhausted when I saw her this afternoon. She was probably so exhausted that she threw caution to the wind and simply gave in to the impulse.”

  But Darius didn’t seem to hear me. He just sat there, bent over, shaking his head back and forth, no doubt continuing to blame himself.

  My phone buzzed, and I got up to answer it. Caller ID said it was Shepherd. “Hi,” I said, not quite knowing how to begin.

  “What’s happened to Sunny?” he demanded, his voice sharp with emotion.

  “I need you to brace yourself,” I told him.

  “Just tell me,” he said quietly but firmly.

  I took a deep breath and dove in. “She took an overdose of Ambien, and she’s now at the hospital, where the doctors are working on her.”

  Shepherd was quiet on the other end of the line. He was probably stunned.

  I thought it best to do the talking until he could compose himself to speak and ask me any questions he wanted. “Gilley and I went to her house, just like you asked, but when we got there, we were met by the babysitter, who told us that Sunny had gone out two hours earlier and that she hadn’t taken her phone. We pressed her for more details, but she didn’t really have any. As we were leaving, Darius showed up. He didn’t know that Sunny had left the house.”

  “Darius is back already?” he said, and there was an icy note in his tone.

  “Yes. He got in just a little while ago. When we told him what was going on, he was upset that Sunny had left the house without her phone. We split up to look for her in the two spots she likes to go when she needs some quiet time.”

  “The yoga place?” Shepherd asked.

  “Yes. Darius headed there, and we headed to the park.”

  “What park?”

  “Herrick Park. It’s off Newtown.”

  Shepherd grunted. “What’s her prognosis?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Is Darius there?”

  “He is. He’s beside himself with worry.”

  Shepherd let out an audible sigh, and I could tell he was irritated with his brother-in-law, no doubt for leaving Sunny with all the duties of rearing a toddler when she was so obviously exhausted. “I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.

  “What’d he say?” Gilley asked me when I turned back to him and Darius.

  “He’s headed here.”

  Gilley widened his eyes. “That man has had one busy night.”

  Darius looked up and said, “He’s the detective assigned to Yelena’s murder, isn’t he?”

  “He is,” I said. “And there was another murder that took place this evening right across the street from the theater.”

  Darius’s brow furrowed. “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not. It appears to be a mob hit.”

  Darius’s jaw dropped. “A mob hit?”

  I nodded.

  Gilley said, “There are more of those in this part of town than you’d think.”

  “Laney,” Darius said, mentioning Shepherd’s ex-wife, who was executed by a Mafia hit woman.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Darius put his head in his hands. “This night is freaking surreal.”

  I moved over to sit next to him again and awkwardly patted him on the shoulder in an effort to comfort him. “For us too.”

  We had sat like that for a good ten minutes when Shepherd rushed into the ER, out of breath. I wondered if he’d run from the parking lot.

  “Any news?” he asked, directing his question at Darius.

  “No,” Darius said. “They took her back over an hour ago, and they were gonna pump her stomach and give her some meds to counteract the effects of the Ambien in her system.”

  “How much did she take?” he asked next.

  Darius’s lower lip quivered slightly. “The whole bottle, Steve.”

  One look at Shepherd, as his face drained of color, told me how worried he
was for his twin. I stepped forward and took his hand, then guided him over to the set of chairs opposite Darius and Gilley.

  He sat down heavily. “Why would she take a whole bottle of Ambien?”

  Darius’s expression was a mask of guilt. “She picked up my prescription from the pharmacy today. I asked her to, because I was out of pills, and I always have trouble sleeping when I come back from L.A.”

  Shepherd’s lip curled as he angrily regarded his brother-in-law. “Then you must almost never have trouble sleeping,” he said meanly.

  I bit my lip and watched as Darius dropped his gaze to the floor. “I gotta work, Steve. And it wasn’t my choice to move back East.”

  Shepherd shook his head. I had the distinct feeling there was no love lost between the two men.

  “Sunny took a half a tablet earlier today, Shep,” I said softly.

  His gaze slid to me, and his brow arched in question.

  “I visited her just before noon. She looked exhausted and thin and at the end of her rope. She called Tiffany to come watch over Finley so that she could get some sleep, and she confessed to me that she took half a tablet so that she could be sure she slept until Darius arrived home. We think that even that small amount put her in a sleepwalking state, and she likely took the rest of the Ambien while she was in that condition.”

  Darius said, “Remember a couple of months ago, when I told you about how she’d tried to catch a mermaid?”

  Shepherd nodded absently, his stare at the floor faraway and almost disconnected. At that moment his phone buzzed, and he pulled it out to look at the display. Muttering a curse under his breath, he got up from his chair and said, “I gotta take this.”

  Shepherd walked down the hall, and I could tell by the tense set of his shoulders that it was official police business, very likely about one or both of the cases he’d been working tonight.

  Just as he made it through the double doors to the outside, a grizzled-looking man with a short, untidy beard, thick glasses, and a crooked nose came through the double doors. He was wearing scrubs and a lab coat. “D’Angelo?”

  “Yes,” Darius said, getting up quickly, his hands balled into fists, as if he was trying to brace himself for bad news. Gilley and I got up too.