* * *
Flame exploded from the barrel of the snub-nosed .38, hammering him with all the sound and fury of a cannon and sending him flying.
He jolted awake with a guttural gasp, the blast still ringing in his ears. Hands pressed him backward. Agony exploded in his shoulder. A voice said something from far away, but he couldn't comprehend it. An antiseptic smell assaulted his senses.
Dark figures swam through the overhead lights that were blinding him, and instinct warned him back toward that darkness he'd just left. That haven of nothingness appealed.
Then he heard her.
That throaty, familiar voice. A tether he reached for, linking him to something. Anything recognizable.
"He didn't tell me his name," he heard her say. "Let me try."
He blinked at the feel of a hand on his arm. Warm. Don't stop, he thought, forcing his eyes to focus.
"Hey, can you hear me?"
Shadows coalesced into form. Chocolate-brown eyes peered down at him from a face that he could only compare with a valentine – heart shaped, delicate, angelic.
He remembered then: the headlights; the violent chill of the pavement. The woman. She hadn't left him.
"Cupcake?" he croaked.
A breath of relief escaped her. "Close."
"Where—?" His voice rasped in his throat like sandpaper.
"You're safe now. Don't worry." She glanced up at the little baggies of fluid strung above him, somehow connected to his arms. "Just lie still. You're gonna be okay."
Okay? His shoulder burned like a son of a bitch and he felt like a piece of Swiss cheese, full of black holes and questions. He couldn't remember anything after he'd passed out back there on that road. "How did I … get—"
"You don't remember? I brought you here." She tugged on her lower lip with her teeth. "How do you feel?"
He swallowed thickly. "Like roadkill."
A reluctant smile escaped her.
He remembered her name now. Tess. Tess with the voice like Tennessee whiskey, and guts to match. The overhead lights hurt his eyes. His hand encountered the gauzy bulk of a bandage wrapped against his skull. Beneath it, a tenderness that throbbed its way back to a dull ache.
The pale green walls and sterile curtains surrounding them reminded him of something. He couldn't think what. Something stiff was pressed under his nose, blowing air up his nostrils. He clawed it off as the situation sank in.
IVs. Antiseptic.
Hospital.
His pulse galloped into overdrive and pinged like a depth charge from some machine out of his view. Damn! She'd taken him to a hospital!
"Don't take that off," she scolded, pushing him back with surprising ease and readjusting the annoyance under his nose.
He cursed silently at his pathetic lack of strength. He needed to tell her. Warn her. This was all wrong. "Listen to me—"
"Try to relax." Her hand circled his bare forearm. "I promise I won't leave until I'm sure you're okay."
Okay? What the hell was okay? And would she know it if she saw it?
"Get the hell out of here," he told her, shoving himself up onto one elbow as the room took a slow spin.
She looked vaguely insulted. "What?"
"I mean it."
She shook her head. "You're upset. That's expected. You've had a terrible—"
Expected! He threw his covers off, only to feel the cold, telling rush of air against his bare skin.
"Damn!" he growled, looking down at himself.
He heard her gasp and saw the flush of color tint her cheeks as she took in the sight of him in the altogether.
Yanking the sheet back over him, he swore again. "Where the hell are my clothes?"
Her gaze jerked guiltily back up to his face. "Um, they're…" She jerked a thumb toward a closet behind her, then pressed her lips together and stiffened her shoulders. "Don't worry about your clothes. You're not going anywhere."
He grabbed that bird-like wrist of hers and drew her closer. The sight of his blood on her pale blue T-shirt crystallized his urgency. "I gotta get out of here."
"You're scheduled for surgery in—"
"They'll find me," he interrupted. "And when they find me, they find you."
Tess's lips parted in shock.
"You okay, Dr. Gordon?" a female voice asked from the doorway. As he released Tess's wrist, a plump nurse with skin the color of fine Swiss chocolate appeared, narrowing a look at him. He wondered who she was talking to, and he searched past Tess's shoulder for the bastard who'd hooked him up to all these tubes.
"I'm fine, Earline. He's just upset," Tess answered, as if the nurse had directed the question at her. "He's still a little disoriented."
He was definitely a little slow on the uptake, but he blinked up at her, comprehension dawning. "You – you're … a doctor?" he stammered.
She shrugged with a guilty little lift of her shoulder.
"She saved your sorry behind tonight, and that's a fact," Earline interjected. "You were one lucky man, my friend.
Um-hmm. She's one of the best ER docs around, no matter what she calls herself these days."
Tess studied the floor. "I don't think your patient is particularly interested in my personal life, Earline."
On the contrary, he thought. This was just getting interesting.
Duly chastised, Earline concentrated on a syringe she was filling, but the "you-can-deny-it-all-you-want" look on her face remained.
When Tess leaned over him, she'd recaptured her professional cool. "Do you remember what happened tonight?"
He squeezed his eyes shut and moistened his cracked lips with his tongue. They felt as swollen and raw as his thought processes. Her question tumbled over and over in his brain until he forgot what she'd asked him. He felt certain of only two things: the gnawing feeling that if he didn't get the hell out of here now, he would never leave this place alive, and the certainty that she was neck-deep in it beside him.
Above him, Earline was doing something to his IV, eyeing him like a wildcat trainer would an unpredictable animal. He returned the favor.
"Not very grateful, is he?" Earline remarked.
Tess's mouth lifted in a crooked smile. "He's not the grateful type.
He turned his scowl on her. "We need to talk." He swung a dark, impotent look at Earline, then deliberately back at Tess. "Alone."
Tess hesitated for only a moment. She cleared her throat. "Earline, could you, um, excuse us for just a second?"
"Ohh…" Earline frowned. "I don't know… You sure, Dr. Gordon?"
"It's okay."
"Well, all right, but you call if you need me, hear?"
Tess didn't take her eyes off him. She simply nodded. When Earline had gone, she lifted the slender guardrail at the side of his bed with a deliberate clank, placing it firmly between them.
Gauntlet thrown, shields up. All right then.
His gaze slid up to her face. His first impressions out there in the dark hadn't been wrong. She had the kind of face painters search for, with dark, soulful eyes that belied the cool restraint she showed the world; pale, flawless skin that seemed almost translucent under the harsh hospital lights; and a mouth that undid all the straight laces she'd wound around herself. And as she regarded him now, those lips trembled ever so slightly, searching for control.
"You're afraid of me," he said. It wasn't a question.
She stiffened. "Should I be?"
"Hell, yes," he said, his eyes never straying from hers. "You should'a left me there."
"Hindsight is the better part of valor," she retorted, then looked away. "Besides, I couldn't."
"Why not? Hippocratic oath?"
The phrase had an edge of sarcasm that made her blanch. "Something like that."
"There's a comfort."
Her knuckles whitened on the rail. "You asked me to help you."
"I was out of my head." His gaze fell to the telltale bruises on her throat. He'd put them there.
"You were dying. Do you thi
nk you're the first out-of-it patient to wake up disoriented, and blindside me?"
He remembered the crush of her breasts against his chest and he wondered if her lips were just as soft. Ruthlessly, he shoved those thoughts from his mind with the knowledge that had she been damned lucky he hadn't killed her tonight.
"I want you t'leave," he said, ignoring the thickness spreading through his bloodstream like blackstrap molasses. "Take yer name off the charts an' go."
She frowned. "I – I'm not the attending. I … I don't even practice anymore."
"Who … signed me in?"
"I did, but—"
"Tess, gimme my clothes."
That brick-wall look crept back into her expression. "I can't do that."
"Goddammit!" He rolled to his side. She promptly stopped him.
"Who did this to you? Who are you afraid of?"
Fuzziness was stealing into his brain. His lips, his fingers, his legs tingled with the odd sensation. "Yer init now, too," he said, hearing the words slide together. "Disappear, Tess. Don' tell 'em wha'chu know."
"What?" She blinked uncomprehendingly, fear etched in her expression. "I don't know anything. I don't even know your name!"
His name … his name…
Frowning, he looked at the closet across the room. It looked a thousand miles away. But he shoved himself up and pulled the IV needle ruthlessly from his arm.
She gaped at him. "Wh-what do you think you're doing?"
He yanked the sheet out of its moorings and threw his legs over the opposite side of the bed as Tess scrambled around the end of it. The room tipped dangerously.
"Don't even think about trying to—"
He lurched to his feet, sure he could make it as far as the damned closet, but the floor seemed to shift under his feet like the deck of a boat. He clamped a hand against his throbbing head and skewered the IV with a black look. "What? Did'yu drug me?"
Tess was there then, wrapping her arms around his naked chest, holding him up. He groaned at the contact against the mass of bruises on his ribs and kept a precarious hold on the sheet dangling around his hips.
"You idiot," she said, catching her breath against his shoulder. "Of course we drugged you! What are you trying to do, kill yourself?"
He sent her an ironic look. "Tha's funny, Tess. Really … funny." Stumbling backward as the room started a slow rotation, he held on to her as a drunkard would a lamppost. Only Tess was no lamppost, and the way she felt in his arms was something even his hazy brain couldn't ignore.
Maybe it was the drugs buzzing through his veins, or the soft press of her breasts against his chest. Maybe it was just that he felt so damned alone. But it stunned him how much he wanted her to hold him, how much he didn't want her to let go.
But she did.
Tess siphoned him backward onto the bed. "Is there someone I can call for you?"
Her voice had an echo that throbbed at the back of his head. The room continued its slow sickening spin. Who should he call? A friend. A friend would help him. His brain ached. He couldn't think. Couldn't remember a friend. Did he have any?
"What's – yoourr – naaame?" she asked oh-so-slowly.
He blinked. Numbness stole through him. His name? Hell, it was right on the tip of his tongue. Couldn't spit it out. An image of a hand slipping into a pocket flitted through his mind, then vanished. Closet. Look in my jacket, he wanted to say. It's all there. It must be. I'm somebody.
"Yoourr naaame," she repeated more urgently. "Tell meee your naaame."
"Jacke—" Jacket. Jacket.
Surprise spread across her heart-shaped face. "Jack? Your name's Jack?"
Oh, hell.
Blackness circled in on him again, a dark wing flapping away any arguments. Another voice slipped into the swirl of noise. He strained to hear it.
"Dr. Gordon? The police are waiting outside to talk to you."
And then there was only silence.
* * *
The two men standing near the window turned as she entered the waiting room. The taller one, a thick-waisted man of fifty with graying hair and a nose like a hammer, smiled at her. She supposed it was meant to be friendly, but she was too tired to respond in kind.
"Dr. Gordon?"
"Yes," she answered, taking the man's extended hand, and hoping he couldn't feel the tremble in hers. She looked down at the blood still smeared on her T-shirt and caked under her fingernails. "Sorry," she said.
"No problem," he said. "Detective Bruener, ma'am. This is Detective Rivera." He pointed to his partner. The other man, a slightly younger version of Robert DeNiro, was all swagger and pecs. "We understand that you were the one who found the gunshot victim up on Angelo Canyon?"
"That's right. Can I see some ID, gentlemen?"
They exchanged looks and reached into their pockets. Both flashed badges at her, then withdrew them. "We understand it's been a trying night, ma'am, so we don't want to prolong it." He flipped open a small notebook and took a pen from his pocket. The younger detective lit up a cigarette and half turned toward the hallway leading to the ER.
"If you could just give us your full name, phone number and address for our records—"
Uneasiness flared through her. "There's no smoking in here, Detective Rivera."
The man didn't seem to hear her immediately, then spun around guiltily. "What?"
"Your cigarette."
"Geez, Rivera," Bruener snapped. "You know better than that. Snub that out."
Rivera did. "It's been a long night," he said in his own defense.
"Dr. Gordon," Bruener began again. "Your address? For my report."
"What division did you say you were from?" she asked. Bruener narrowed his eyes. "Santa Monica. Have you talked to the victim, ma'am? Has he given you any indication of how he was shot? Or … who shot him?"
Disappear, Tess. Don't tell them what you know. Tess blinked. Tell who? Surely he didn't mean the police? Still, she said, "He hasn't talked much at all. He's quite ill."
Bruener looked at Rivera. The younger detective looked away and flicked at his fingernail with a click-click-clicking sound.
"We're anxious to talk to him."
"That's impossible right now. He's going up to surgery soon."
"You his doctor?"
"I don't practice anymore, Detective."
"No? How come?" Bruener gave her a blank, detective stare.
"I hardly think that's relevant."
"Kind of a coincidence, you finding him up there, you bein' a doctor and all," Rivera commented in a voice that betrayed his East L.A. roots.
"How's that?" she asked. "Do you mean that if I hadn't been a doctor I wouldn't have stopped?"
Rivera smiled at her. "No ma'am, I didn't mean that at all."
Bruener interrupted again. "Approximately what time did you stop for him, ma' am?"
"Around eleven forty-five."
He scribbled that down. "You sure about that time?"
"I looked at my dashboard clock after I nearly ran off the road swerving to avoid him." She glanced at her wristwatch. Little more than an hour had passed since then. For the first time since it all happened, fatigue pressed in on her. She longed to close her eyes.
"And he didn't say what happened to him?"
"I was more concerned with saving his life than interrogating him, Detective."
"Sure. Naturally."
Glancing distractedly at his book as he scratched out something in ink, she thought of Jack lying unconscious in that bed. Uneasiness tugged at her. His words had frightened her, but they could have been nothing more than disoriented rantings. Still, instinct argued that point. Someone had done their damnedest to kill him tonight. What if what he said was true? What if she was in danger? What if they both were?
"—who'd been beaten and shot wouldn't be in much of a mood to talk," Bruener was saying, still writing in his notebook.
Tess blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"
The older cop looked up. "Just saying it's not unco
mmon to get very little out of a shooting victim at the scene. These things are usually related to some kind of crime, and the perp, if he's conscious, has no reason to spill his guts."
"Perp?" she repeated incredulously. "As far as I'm concerned, Detective, he's a victim. Now if there's nothing else—"
"You never gave me your phone number and address, ma' am."
She hesitated. Don't tell them anything.
Rivera swiveled his head, looking at her intently. Bruener's pen sat poised above the paper.
"Tell you what. I'll come down in the morning and give you a full statement. I'm tired. I want to go home. Santa Monica, you said?"
Bruener's mouth opened and closed, then he shrugged. "That's a lot of trouble for you."
She smiled thinly. "No trouble at all. Ten o'clock, then?"
He flipped his notebook shut with a look at Rivera. "Ten is fine."
"Good night, gentlemen."
"Ma'am," both men said as she turned and left the waiting room.
She walked past the nurses' station, down the hallway toward Jack's room. Her head ached. She suddenly wanted to put this whole ugly night behind her, go home and sink into a hot, steaming tub of water. She didn't want to think about guns, or blood, or Jack. Or the niggling sense that something was wrong.
Of course something is wrong, idiot, she berated herself. Your life is a Clint Eastwood movie, gone awry!
She ran a hand through her hair as she passed her reflection in a door. God, she looked like hell. Ten o'clock would come early tomorrow. She should have just given them her address and been done with the whole mess.
She slowed her step. Why hadn't she? Tess stared at the granite speckles on the polished linoleum floor. Because they'd made her uncomfortable? Because she didn't like the way Rivera looked at her?
"A guy who'd been beaten and shot wouldn't be in much of a mood to talk."
Bruener's words echoed in her head. Beaten and shot. She frowned. Listening to the rush of blood in her ears, she felt a sick sensation work its way up her throat. No one had said a word about "beaten." She certainly hadn't. And they hadn't had a look at Jack yet. How would they know that?
An orderly hurried by her, rattling a crash cart. A flurry of activity moved to the other end of the hall.
And the detectives hadn't asked her one question about where in Angelo Canyon she'd found him. She was familiar enough with police procedure to know that they would yellow tape the area to investigate. Maybe even take her back up there to point out the place. But Bruener and Rivera had seemed more concerned with what the man had said to her. Why?
I'LL REMEMBER YOU Page 3
