LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.

      Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.

      “Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.

      Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.

      Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.

      Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.

      It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.

      The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.

      Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.

      Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.

      Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.

      Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.

      Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.

      Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.

      As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”

      “No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.

      As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.

      The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.

      In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.

      “Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.

      Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.

      “She’s gone!”

      Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.

      “She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.

      Pete yelled, “Nurse!”

      A plump nurse in a blue scrub suit, wearing a plastic ID, ambled inside.

      “Oh, my God!”

      Pete thumbed hurriedly through the missing patient’s chart, reading aloud.

      “No name. A Jane Doe. Brought in by a truck driver who found her hitchhiking on the highway. Tested positive for a multitude of legal and illegal drugs. Head injury. Stitches put in by plastic surgeon. Contusions on wrists and ankles. Disruptive. Belligerent. Very confused. Amnesia. Possible subdural hematoma. Refused CAT scan because she went insane when we put her face inside the machine. Claustrophobic.”

      “What does all that mean?” Lucas demanded.

      “Not good. She’s high as a kite, badly confused.”

      “Doctor—” The nurse’s whisper was anxious. “A while ago someone called about her. Said he was family. Sounded very concerned. Described a girl who could have been this girl. Sammy’s new, and I’m afraid she told him we’d admitted a girl matching her description. The caller said he was coming right over. But when Sammy told the patient that a family member was on his way, she became very agitated.”

      “Get security on this immediately,” Pete ordered. “This young woman is in no condition to be out of bed. Check the entrances. The parking lots. In her condition she couldn’t have gone far.”

      

      Fire and ice.

      Chilled to the bone, burning up at the same time, the barefoot girl shivered convulsively in the parking lot. Her thoughts kept slipping and losing direction like a sailboat in rough waves.

      She didn’t know who she was.

      Or where she was.

       Or who wanted to kill her.

      When that freckled nurse had asked her her name, terrible images had rolled through her tired brain.

       A name? Something as specific as a name?

      “Oh, dear God,” had been all she could whisper brokenly.

      She could remember the van rolling, catching fire. She kept seeing a gray face, its hideous vacant eyes peering at her through plastic.

      Pain and terror shuddered through the injured girl.

       They knew who she was, and they were coming after her.

      Her head throbbed. When she tried to walk, her gait was wide. Her feet felt like they didn’t quite touch the ground, and she had the sensation she was about to topple backward.

      Crouching

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