LITMIR.BIZ

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married to a woman who laughed a lot, had the warmest heart in the world and drove him crazy in bed.

      The automatic shutoff on the pump clicked, prompting Joe to remove the nozzle. He’d been so lost in thought that he hadn’t noticed two young men in baggy clothing walking toward him, he realized with a start.

      Where had everyone else gone? Despite the freeway traffic roaring along nearby, the station was deserted. From out here, Joe couldn’t even see the attendant inside the mini-mart.

      The men separated, one heading directly toward him and the other coming around the far side of the car. Please don’t let Meg come out of the station now, he thought with a spurt of alarm.

      He would willingly give up his wallet and the car, too. Just so no harm came to his family.

      “Can I help you?” Joe asked.

      “Yeah.” The man closest to him pulled a gun from his gray jacket. “Get in the car.”

      “Here’s the keys.” Joe held them out, along with his wallet.

      “And leave you to yell your head off?” Gray Jacket swiped the wallet and waggled the gun. “Get in or I’ll shoot.”

      Joe shifted uneasily, trying to figure out what to do.

      “Now!”

      His buddy, a stocky guy in a blue baseball cap, cut off escape in the other direction. Joe weighed dodging between the gas pumps, but if Meg emerged at the wrong moment, things could turn deadly. “Okay, okay.” He got into the driver’s seat. Blue Cap swung in beside him while Gray Jacket hopped in back, keeping the gun aimed at Joe’s head.

      “Move it. Fast! South, toward L.A.”

      The muzzle pressed into his neck. Joe rolled the car forward.

      If only there were a way to leave a message for Meg. He hoped that at least someone had witnessed his abduction, so she would know he hadn’t run off.

      His cousin in Tennessee had told her how unreliable he was. For all he knew, that might once have been true. But he would never leave Meg.

      Blue Cap rifled through the glove compartment, cursing at finding nothing but maps, candy and baby wipes. The men grew angrier when they extracted only a small amount of cash from Joe’s wallet.

      They were looking for drugs and drug money, he gathered. He hoped they would leave when they couldn’t find any.

      It made him uneasy to realize how many miles were disappearing between him and Meg. Why didn’t the men let him pull over and get out?

      As he drove, the Los Angeles freeway system began to seem familiar, which was strange considering that Joe hadn’t driven much around here before. Not as far as he knew, anyway.

      Finally his captors ordered him to exit the freeway in a central city area full of boarded-up buildings covered with graffiti. Blue Cap and Gray Jacket muttered to each other. “Not here.” Although Gray Jacket spoke in a low voice, Joe’s hearing was keen. “Some place less public.”

      “Naw. Around here they won’t notice the shots,” hissed Blue Cap.

      They were going to kill him.

      Joe’s gut tightened. Why would they want to shoot him? Because he could identify them for a crime that so far had done no serious harm? It seemed a ridiculous reason to take someone’s life, but these men obviously didn’t care.

      He had to get away. Had to get back to Meg, to let her know how much he loved her.

      At a yellow light, Joe halted sharply. While the two men were regaining their balance, he thrust open the door and leaped out.

      “Hey!” Gray Jacket started to roll down his window. About to run across the street, Joe had to scramble back as a truck sped toward him.

      Expecting to hear the crack of a bullet at any moment, he zigzagged around the front of the car. Blue Cap grabbed the wheel and hit the gas, coming after him.

      Joe flung himself over the curb a split second before the car reached it, but he wasn’t safe yet. As he ducked into an alley, he heard a gunshot.

      Desperately, he flung himself to one side. His foot connected with a slippery patch of sidewalk, some kind of spilled food, and he couldn’t check his fall.

      Flailing in a desperate attempt to regain control, Joe twisted and toppled off balance. For a suspended moment, he registered the fact that his skull was about to hit the corner of a building.

      Blinding pain shot through his head. Vaguely, Joe heard a distant siren and the screech of tires as the carjackers fled. Then darkness closed in.

      “EVEN WITH the recent advances in imaging technology, there’s still a lot we don’t know about brain damage,” a voice said somewhere in the stratosphere.

      A throbbing ache kept his eyes shut. He inhaled the scent of antiseptic and heard a familiar blur of noises: doctors being paged on an intercom, carts jouncing out in a hallway.

      “This fresh injury on top of the old one, how is it going to affect his memory?” asked a woman’s dry voice.

      He recognized the sound, but he couldn’t place her. A faint image came into his mind of a rounded face with a charming touch of freckles.

      Someone leaned over him. He squinted up through the harsh light.

      The face belonged to a woman in her sixties, with wavy silver hair and hazel eyes. Instinctively, his mouth formed the name, “Mom.”

      His parents were dead. That’s what people said in…where?

      He tried to recapture the name of the town, or the face he’d visualized earlier. It seemed terribly important, but all he could see was his mother’s startled expression.

      “He’s awake!” she cried. “Hugh’s awake!”

      Hugh. He rose on a warm cloud of relief. Of course, his name was Hugh, and he’d just come out of an immense black hole. The last thing he remembered was struggling to breathe through shattering waves of cold water.

      He’d been sailing with his friend Rick when the boat overturned in the wake of a cabin cruiser. “How’s Rick?” Hugh asked thickly.

      “Oh, thank God!” his mother cried. “He can speak!” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll talk about Rick later.”

      Something was wrong, he gathered, but couldn’t figure out what. Was he worried about Rick or something else?

      Impossible to concentrate.

      Whatever was nagging at him, he couldn’t deal with it now, and he didn’t have to. He was safe, in a place where he belonged.

      After all, where should a doctor feel more at home than in a hospital?

      HOURS LATER, Meg sat drinking tea across the table from her father in his Santa Barbara home. She was still trembling with disbelief.

      The events of the day had passed in a nightmarish glare of unreality. Coming out of the gas station to find no sign of her husband. Calling the police, answering endless questions, listening to speculation about how and why Joe had disappeared.

      “Somebody must have forced him,” she kept saying, but no witnesses could be found. Zack O’Flaherty had driven down when she called and waited for her, clumsily offering to help with Dana, tactfully refraining from voicing the suspicions Meg knew he must feel. She would always be grateful that, at this time of need, her father had come through for her.

      The phone rang, startling her so badly she spilled tea on the table.

      “I’ll get it.” With his thin face and pouchy eyes, Zack looked older than his forty-five years, but he walked to the phone with a steady gait.

      Meg couldn’t bring herself to look at Dana, sleeping nearby in a crib borrowed from a neighbor. What if the police had found Joe’s body? What if her little girl had to

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