Tess squeezed her eyes shut and braced her hand against the wall. She was probably being ridiculous. What she knew about police procedure had come secondhand through Adam, and he rarely talked about his work to her. But something didn't feel right.
She'd seen enough badges to recognize a phony one when she saw it. Theirs had been the genuine article. She was just being paranoid. Looking at shadows and seeing monsters. Maybe one of the nurses had told them about Jack's face and the bruises there. That had to be it.
Still, something niggled at her.
In her mind's eye, she kept seeing Rivera light up that cigarette. In itself it meant nothing, except what cop in Los Angeles didn't know better than to light up in a public building?
Silly, ridiculous worries, she reasoned, pushing away from the wall. This was real life, not television. Not a Clint Eastwood movie. Bruener and Rivera were just cops doing a hard job. And Jack had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She headed toward the sliding glass doors at the end of the hallway. In the reflection, she saw Rivera leave the waiting area, heading toward the bank of phones near the nurses' station at the end of the hall. He hadn't turned in her direction, but glanced around the empty hallway ahead of him.
Tess stopped walking. Nothing in her experience urged her to do what she did next. In fact, little conscious thought went into it. Adrenaline drove her. That and the stupid promise she'd made to Jack. I won't leave until I'm sure it's okay.
Making an abrupt about-face, she walked silently to the now-empty nurses' station, turning sharply into the carousel while watching Rivera, whose back was still toward her. He was only five feet away. Pulling a chart from the stack, she lowered it behind the counter, then bent as if to pick it up. She heard him punch in a number and wait.
"Yeah, it's me, jefe," he said softly after a moment. "We got him. Yeah. Son of a bitch is still alive."
Cold shock fingered up her spine. She froze against the file cabinets, out of sight, and forgot to breathe. Rivera had fallen silent, absorbing the verbal attack even she could hear coming from the other end of the line.
"I don't know," he said tightly when it was over. "I – I mean … we're not sure. She's one tight-assed chica."
Outrage puckered Tess's mouth before the obvious dawned on her. He wasn't just rude. He was wrapping her into this whole horrid conversation he was having about Jack as if she were part of the whole, unbelievable package!
"Right," Rivera continued. "Uh-uh. Don't worry, he won't get by us this time. Send Ajax."
* * *
Chapter 3
«^»
Tess hardly heard the detective's footsteps recede after he hung up the phone. She crouched, staring at a black smudge on the floor, afraid to move. Nausea roiled her stomach. They were going to kill him!
If they find me, they'll find you, he'd said. Disappear, Tess. Don't tell them what you know.
Jack had warned her. He was afraid. Afraid of this very thing. Had she listened? No, she'd walked right up to the lion's mouth and pried open its teeth!
Somewhere above her, the station phone gave a muffled beep. Someone would come to answer it. She had to get out of here.
On her hands and knees, she crawled toward the opening. The waiting room was directly opposite. She could hear voices from within. Rivera was talking to Bruener, saying something she couldn't make out.
Her heart thundered against the wall of her chest as she peeked around the corner. Coast clear. She shot to her feet and hurried toward Jack, without the faintest idea what she would do. A nurse rounded the corner and gave her a strange look as she walked hurriedly past her, flashing her a smile, Tess veered down the same corridor the nurse had come from, passing room after room of patients.
Think. Think! What to do? Call the police? A hysterical laugh nearly tumbled out of her. They are the police!
Or were they? How could she know? She could call Gil. Gil would know what to do. He was her best friend. She would trust him with her life.
But if she told him, would she be putting his life in danger as well? Undeniably. Could he get here in time to prevent whatever "Ajax" was going to do?
These guys weren't messing around. If they were cops they were bold enough to talk face-to-face with a witness. If they weren't, it could only mean one thing. That they didn't care if she saw them or not. Because they meant to kill her, too.
Your phone number and address for my records, Dr Gordon?
She sucked in air. Dear God. They knew her name. Finding her house would be child's play. Except it was listed under her married name. Hackford. That might slow them down. She had to get out of here. She had to get Jack out of here! That would be a good trick, considering that he had ten milligrams of Vistarel cruising through his veins. She rounded a corner and nearly tripped over a wheelchair parked there.
Rubbing her knee, she stumbled into the curtained area where Jack lay. Earline jerked a surprised look up at her. "Dr. Gordon?"
Out of breath, she smoothed a hand down her unruly hair and smiled. "Oh. Hello."
"Is everything all right?"
"Fine," she answered, gulping down her hysteria. "How, um, how's our patient?"
Earline sent her an easy smile. "Sleepin' like a baby."
Tess let out a breathless laugh. "Good … good." Damn! She rubbed a hand across her mouth, thinking, staring at the thick padding of bandage taped across his shoulder.
Earline raised her eyebrows and grinned a little wickedly at her. "He may be ungrateful, but he's not hard on the eyes, is he? My, my, my…"
Taken aback, she glanced at the nurse, then at Jack and the masculine dusting of hair that veed down toward his taut abdomen. Indeed, he wasn't hard on the eyes. Asleep as he was, the dangerous planes of his face softened to simply appealing and gave him the sort of boyish charm women like her ran from.
"Must be somebody missing him," Earline mused aloud with a shake of her head. "Man like that, he gotta have somebody home waitin' for him."
Did he? Tess wondered suddenly. A wife? A girlfriend? A family?
"You get his name?"
Tess jerked her gaze up at Earline. "Uh … he said … Jack."
"Jack." Earline nodded. "Well, at least that's better than John Doe."
Tess nodded distractedly. "Listen, Earline, I – I can stay here for a while. Watch him. I'm sure you've got a million things to do."
The plump nurse frowned at the chart in her hands, tempted. "Nah, that's okay."
"No, really. You know I can handle it."
She sighed. "We all miss you here, Doc. You know we do."
A smile flickered on Tess's mouth. "Thanks. I miss it sometimes, too," she lied. "I haven't lost my touch. Look, he's in la-la land. I'll call you if anything happens. Why don't you go grab a cup? It's the witching hour."
Earline glanced down at Jack, tugging the light blanket over him. "Well, I suppose he's not goin' anywhere. You sure you're okay here? I thought you wanted to go home."
"I do," she said quickly. "I – I just thought I'd wait till he goes up for surgery. I'm fine. Really. Go."
The nurse replaced the chart. "Thanks. Back in five.
"Don't hurry," Tess told her lightly.
The curtain had hardly swished shut before she was leaning over him, her hands curled into the flimsy blanket covering him. "Jack?" she whispered, shaking him. "Jack, wakeup!"
He mumbled something from the twilight zone.
"Jack, I'm not kidding. Wake up!" Oh, please wake up.
He stirred restively against the pillow.
"This is life or death, Jack. I mean it. This is no time to be sleeping."
"Cupcake?" he muttered.
"Yes!" she almost crowed. "It's me! Cupcake! Wake up, now. You have to open your eyes, Jack."
Slowly, he did. "Huh?" he said, frowning at her, trying to blink away the drug-induced grogginess.
"Oh, you were so right, Jack," she said, yanking IV needles out of his arms and the tape that h
eld them there.
"Ow!"
"Sorry," she mumbled. "Ho, boy, I'm definitely going to lose my license over this." She took his face between her hands, forcing him to look at her. "Jack, I should never have brought you here. We've got to get out of here. You think you can walk?"
He blinked at his feet.
"What am I thinking? Of course you can't."
Jack silently agreed as he watched her yank open a drawer full of bandages and packages of surgical gloves, and stuff a few in her purse. From a pushed-aside tray on wheels, she took some medieval-looking instrument whose purpose he didn't want to think about and shoved that into her purse as well. He blinked hard, trying to clear his head.
She yanked his clothes from the closet, but shoved his arms into a hospital gown. He thought to protest that if they were going somewhere, he wanted his pants on, but she didn't give him the chance.
She disappeared through the curtains and returned hauling a wheelchair. "C'mon," she said, reaching out to him. "Don't ask me what the hell I'm doing. Committing professional suicide," she said in answer to her own question.
His head whirled. He felt a little giddy as she forced him up, and he smiled at her with a silly grin. She was so damned pretty.
She tilted a look at him. "You're in no pain, right? Amazing what a little Vistarel'll do, huh? Oh, one last thing." Mercilessly, she ripped the heart monitor patches from his chest.
"Oww!"
"Sorry again," she said with a distinct lack of sincerity. "Okay, here we go."
He scowled at her, but had the impression that she wanted him to stand up, so he did. At least he tried. His legs didn't seem to get the message. Catching him, her arms went hard around his ribs and her face flattened against his chest as she shoved him back against the bed. He felt like a mizzenmast – all top-heavy and listing. And she…? Hell, she felt spectacular. All warm and soft and—
"Jack," she said, breathing hard. "Listen to me. Right next to you is a wheelchair."
Her skin, he noticed, was pale as porcelain. He wanted to drop his mouth against it. Taste it.
"Jack! Concentrate!"
He blinked hard. She was trying to tell him something, but he couldn't focus. Not with her breasts against him like they were. And why was she calling him Jack?
"One – two – three!"
She pushed him backward and he fell. Something caught him at the knees. The impact stole his breath. The fire in his shoulder leaped back to life and he grabbed it with his hand. Black spots swam before his eyes, and, intermittently, so did her face as she propped his feet up somewhere beneath him.
"Sorry, Jack. Don't pass out on me now. I need you."
Need you. Need you. Those words rattled endlessly in his head as she shoved his boots and shirt and pants into his lap and sped down a hallway at warp speed toward a service elevator whose doors whooshed open for them. He forgot where they were going. But he trusted her to take him there. He had no other choice.
* * *
The monitor alarm at the nurses' station went off just as Earline wandered back from the coffee room. She was stirring in the amaretto-flavored nondairy creamer with a swizzle stick as the warning alarm sounded. She glanced at the board, immediately identified the patient and swore.
"Code blue!" she shouted to an orderly slouching against a laundry hamper nearby. "Code blue, dammit! Stat!" The man leaped into action, scrambling for the nearest crash cart.
The two men in the waiting room watched Earline dump her coffee on the desk and run in the direction of their man. Rivera and Bruener exchanged glances and followed, hard on her heels.
She tore open the curtain, ready to do battle. A perfectly empty bed was the last thing she expected to find. Open-mouthed, she stared at it as if it were a spaceship dropped in for a landing. "Uh-oh."
Bruener skidded to a stop beside her. "Tell me this isn't our boy's bed."
"Oh-hh, yeah," she said.
The detective snarled something colorful as his partner reached the door.
"Where'd he go?" Rivera demanded, out of breath.
Bruener didn't answer as he bolted down the hallway. They both knew where he'd gone, and more importantly, with whom.
* * *
She'd done some crazy things in her life, but nothing even remotely like this, she thought as she crammed Jack's well-muscled frame back into her car. God knew what crime she could be charged with. Kidnapping? Aiding and abetting? Not to mention what she'd stolen.
She slammed the passenger door and raced to the other side. Before she could duck into the driver's seat, however, she saw the service entrance doors fly open with a bang and the two detectives charge out, guns drawn, into the circle of light below the parking lot floodlight. Her heart jumped into her throat.
She ducked into the car, shut the door quietly and turned the key. Jamming the car into Drive, she peeled out of the parking lot without her lights, praying that they wouldn't be able to read her license. In her rearview mirror, she watched them run for a car in the parking lot. Then she lost sight of them.
She gunned the car down the road, squealing the tires and fishtailing onto Arizona.
"Hang on," she told Jack, who braced his hand against the dashboard, his eyes riveted to the road. She tore down Arizona, swung left on Seventeenth, then right on Washington. Minutes ticked by. All the while, her gaze flicked up to the rearview mirror, catching glimpses of headlights a quarter of a mile back.
Damn!
She wrenched the wheel to the right, slipping down a small alleyway between a row of upscale Santa Monica apartment buildings. The engine raced loudly and the Honda flew over a speed bump in the alleyway seconds before she spotted the ungated parking slots beneath the last building.
Slamming on her brakes, she backed up, maneuvered into a spot and cut the engine. Ducking down, she watched the alleyway to her left for the detectives' car to pass. In a few seconds, it did. And it didn't come back.
Tess released the breath she didn't realize she'd been holding and tilted her head back against the headrest. Her hands were shaking and she couldn't hang on to the wheel. She let them fall in her lap and slid a look at Jack. He sat staring wordlessly at her. He looked pale, but better than he'd looked back on the road little less than two hours ago, thanks to the fluids they'd pumped into him in the ER.
"You okay?" she asked, her voice shaking.
His fingers flexed against his throbbing shoulder. "What the hell just happened?"
She propped her hands over her mouth to stay the bubble of hysteria that threatened to burst. "I think," she said, "I just threw away about nine years' worth of medical school."
He looked past her, out the darkened window. "Who were they?"
"Cops." Her voice had risen an octave. "Or not. I don't know. All I do know is they meant to kill you and possibly me, unless my overactive imagination has conjured this whole thing up. Has it, Jack? 'Cause I'm way out on a limb here and I hear the darned thing cracking underneath me!"
He reached out and took her shaking hand in his. For reasons she couldn't imagine, she allowed it. That solitary, silent gesture spoke volumes and dissipated a large chunk of terror that had lodged in her throat. Whatever was going on, they were in it together now:
"Not," he said in answer to her question, "unless we're both imagining this." He glanced pointedly at his shoulder.
She blinked at the feel of his thumb rubbing back and forth against the back of her hand, then pulled away. "You've got to be straight with me. What happened out there and who are those guys?"
He squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't know."
She'd been prepared for a lot of possibilities, but certainly not denial. "What? Don't play games with me here! It's only a matter of time before they swing back this way and find us, but I swear to you I'm not moving until you tell me what's going on!"
His large fist clenched along his thigh. "I'm being straight with you. I don't know."
She blinked twice, reining in her quickly rising tempe
r. "Are you trying to tell me that – that you have no idea who those guys who shot you are? That they decided to kill you for no particular reason? And then pursued you into the emergency room of a reputable hospital with every intention of—" She broke off, unable to finish.
"No. Yes." He tipped his head backward. "I'm trying to tell you that I don't … remember."
"What?"
The pain was ebbing back to his shoulder in dull waves and he stared out the darkened window, trying to grasp the truth himself. "I don't remember. Anything."
She gaped at him for a full ten seconds. "Y-you mean about tonight? About what happened?"
"Anything," he repeated, sliding a look of desperation at her. "Where I live … what I did yesterday, or the day before that." The weight of it settled like a stone on him as he realized the full implications for the first time.
Her gaze didn't stray from his face. "Some memory loss is normal on presentation of a head injury like yours. Missing minutes. Even hours…"
"It's a blank, Tess! My whole damned life is one big black hole! I don't even exist! Do you understand?"
He was scaring her, and she shrank back against the seat. In a small voice, she said, "But you said you thought they'd come for you. How did you know?"
"I just knew. Instinct maybe." He stared at her, unflinching. "I was right."
A full ten seconds ticked by. "If you're lying to me—"
"Why would I lie?"
She narrowed a look at him. "You told me your name was Jack."
"No, I didn't."
"Y-you're Jack. You told me. That's your name."
He shook his head. "I don't even remember telling you that."
"You told me in the hospital, as the Vistarel was taking eff—" Her eyes went wide. "Ho, boy."
She braced both hands on the steering wheel, then dropped her cheek on top of them. "Well, if that's not your name, who the heck is Jack?"
I'LL REMEMBER YOU Page 4
