LITMIR.BIZ

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to the bathroom.”

      But Letton was already reaching into the van. The girl hesitated. A soccer ball rolled out and started heading toward her. She automatically went after it, the movement drawing her closer to the van. She picked it up and said, “I can’t take it now, I’ll come back for it,” reaching toward him, intending to hand it to him. He didn’t make a move to meet her, just waited for her to approach.

      Don’t go, Lucky thought, foot off the brake. Stay back.

      The girl hesitated. Lucky could practically feel when she made the decision that Letton was “with” their team.

      Before the girl could take another step forward Lucky smashed her foot down on the accelerator and jammed the horn with her fist. The car leapt forward like a runner at the gate. The girl jumped back, startled. Edward Letton forgot himself and lurched for the girl, but she’d automatically moved out of range of the silver car shooting down on them, running for the safety of the soccer fields. Letton glanced up darkly, his plan foiled, glaring murderously at Lucky. His mouth open to…what? Berate her for unsafe driving? He looked mad enough to kill.

      She slammed into him at thirty and climbing. Threw him skyward. Threw herself forward. The steering wheel jumped from her hands. The sedan’s grill grazed the back bumper of the van. Someone screamed. She grabbed the wheel hard, turning, both arms straining, sensing calamity. Then she spun past the van, tires squealing. Letton’s flying body thunked off the roof of her car and bounced onto the asphalt, an acrobat without a net. He lay still.

      In her rearview mirror Lucky stared hard at Letton’s body. She drove away with controlled speed, slowing through a tangle of neighborhoods, weaving her way, heart slamming hot and fast in her chest, zigzagging toward Highway 26. She had to get this car out of the area and fast.

      It was only when she was safely away, heading west, keeping up with fast-moving traffic, that she saw the blood on her steering wheel.

      A glance in the rearview. Her face was covered with blood. The impact had smacked her face into the steering wheel. Her left eye was closing. She hadn’t even noticed.

      There was Windex in the back. Rags. Bleach. She would wipe up the evidence, clean herself and the car. All she had to do now was keep the growing pain and swelling under control. Her vision blurred.

      She had to get to an off road near Carl’s Automotive, one of the myriads of turn-outs on this winding highway through the Coast Range. Later tonight she would sneak the car back onto the weed-choked gravel lot and hope that the front grill, lights, and body weren’t too damaged. The vehicle needed to stay undiscovered at the Hunk O’Junks lot for a long time.

      She swiped at the blood running down her forehead, blinding her.

      Not good. Not good at all.

      But she was lucky. She would get away with it. She would…

      She just hoped to hell she’d killed him.

      Chapter Two

      Surfacing from a yawning pit of blackness, her eyes adjusted to an unfamiliar room: cream vertical blinds, cream walls, television on a shelf bolted high on the wall, blankets covering what must be her feet, wood veneer footboard.

      A hospital room.

      Her heart clutched. She thought of surgery. Pain. Inside her head was a long, silent scream.

      Automatically, her hand flew up and touched the bandage wrapped around her head. One eye was covered. She didn’t know why, but it wasn’t the first time she’d blacked out. Far from it. But this time she’d hurt herself, maybe badly. What had happened?

      She had a terrible moment of not knowing who she was.

      Then she remembered.

      I’m lucky, she thought, memory slipping back to her, amorphous, hard to grasp, but at least it was there. At least some of it was there.

      And she was angry. Hot fury sang through her veins, though she couldn’t immediately identify the source of her rage. But someone had to pay. She knew that.

      A nurse was adjusting a monitor that was spitting out paper in a long, running stream. Red squiggles wove over the paper’s lined grid. Her heartbeat. Respiration, maybe? She closed her eye and pretended to be sleeping. She wasn’t ready for the inquisition, yet. Wasn’t ready to find out the whys and wherefores of how she’d come to be at this hospital.

      She heard the squeak of the nurse’s crepe soles head toward the door. A soft whoosh of air, barely discernible, said the silent door had been opened. Not hearing it close, she carefully lifted her eyelid. As suspected, the wheelchair-wide door was ajar. Anyone could push inside and stare at her, which consumed her with worry. She had to stay awake.

      The last vestiges of what seemed to be a dream tugged at her consciousness and she fought to hang on to the remnants but they were slippery and insubstantial, spider threads. She was left merely with the sensation that she was heading for a showdown, some distant and unwelcome Armageddon that was going to shatter and rearrange her world. Maybe not for the better.

      But then she always felt that. Always awoke with that low-grade dread which followed the gaps in her memory. Maybe someday she would wake up and not know who she was at all. Maybe her memory would be gone for good.

      What would happen then?

      The door swung in noiselessly and a man in a light-tan uniform entered the room. He was with the county sheriff’s department and, seeing her looking at him, he said, “Hello, ma’am. I’m Detective Will Tanninger with the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department.”

      She nodded, eyeing him carefully. He was in his mid-thirties with dark brown hair and serious eyes, but she could see the striations at their edges, from squinting them in either laughter or against the sun. “Where am I?”

      “Laurelton General Hospital. You’ve been admitted as a Jane Doe. Could you tell us your name?”

      He was steely polite. Alarm bells rang. What had she done? It took her a long moment to come up with her name. “Gemma LaPorte.” She hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “Are you here to see me?”

      “We don’t know how you got here, Ms. LaPorte. You walked into the ER and collapsed.”

      Her hand fluttered to her head once again. “Oh…?”

      “Did someone bring you? Did you drive yourself?”

      Gemma moved her head slowly from side to side and she felt a twinge of pain. “I don’t remember.”

      Will paused, regarding her with dark, liquid eyes. She could sense his strength and knew he was good at his job. A tracker. Someone who never gave up. Someone dogged and relentless. She shivered involuntarily as he said, “You don’t remember the circumstances that brought you here?”

      “No.”

      “What’s your last memory?”

      Gemma thought about it a minute. “I was making myself breakfast at home. Oatmeal and cinnamon. I was looking out the window and thinking we were drowning in rain. It was a downpour. The dirt was like concrete and the water was pouring over it in sheets.”

      The deputy was silent for so long that Gemma felt her anxiety rise. She sensed that he was deliberating on an answer.

      “What?” she asked.

      “It hasn’t rained for three days.”

      Will Tanninger regarded the woman with the scared green eye and stark white bandage with a healthy sense of skepticism. Her skin had paled at his words. He understood about trauma-induced amnesia. More often than not, serious accident victims couldn’t remember the events that led to their hospital stay. But they usually lost a few hours, not days. In Gemma LaPorte’s case, he couldn’t tell if this was a ploy or the truth. The half of her face he could see was swollen and bruised, blue and purple shadings of color already traveling from her injured side to the other. Even so, he could

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