скачать книгу бесплатно
“Hang in there,” he urged her.
She shook her head and dizziness overwhelmed her, making her stomach pitch and pain reverberate in her head like a chime clanging against the insides of a bell.
“You’re strong,” he said. Instead of clasping her wrists, he took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “You must be strong, or you wouldn’t still be alive. You’re a fighter. You can hang in there.”
She had suspected he was lying to her earlier—when he’d told her she would be okay and especially when he had urged her to trust him. Now she was certain that he was lying. She had never felt weaker than she did right now. At least she didn’t think she had...
Memories still eluded her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She blinked, trying to focus on his face again. He really was quite handsome—with that tanned skin, those dark eyes so heavily lashed and his thick, black hair. It was a little long—longer than she would have thought a government agent would be able to wear his hair.
“What’s your name?” he asked again. Moments ago he’d shushed her when she’d tried to talk. Now he was getting insistent, as if he needed her name in case she didn’t survive until the ambulance arrived.
She gathered the last of her strength and admitted in a raspy whisper, “I don’t know...”
Her memories weren’t just eluding her. They were completely gone, as if they had seeped out with her blood—leaving her mind entirely blank.
“I don’t know...” she murmured again...just as oblivion returned to claim her.
* * *
“WHERE’S THAT DAMN AMBULANCE?” Dalton demanded to know. Maybe the trooper had called only minutes ago for help, but it felt like hours—with the young woman lying unconscious in the trunk of the car.
Dalton had pressed her veil onto the wound on the back of her head, trying to stem the bleeding. But the fabric was flimsy.
Trooper Littlefield pointed down the gravel road where he must have abandoned his squad car, since he’d come up behind Reyes on foot. “I can hear them coming now.”
The faint whine of sirens reached his ears, too. And in the distance a cloud of dust rose up into the trees.
“Help’s coming,” he told the woman, hoping that she could hear him even though she was unconscious. “Stay with me. Help’s coming.”
Then he turned back toward Littlefield. The trooper was older than him—shorter and heavier. And he was sweating so badly that it streaked from his bald head down his neck to stain the collar of his tan shirt. He probably hadn’t chosen to walk the rest of the way down the gravel road. Had he crashed? Or had the car just overheated from the chase?
“Can they get around your car?” he asked.
He nodded. “I parked it off to the side—” he gestured toward the FBI SUV “—like you did.”
Dalton hadn’t exactly parked there; he had just been fortunate enough to have ended up there instead of in the ditch like the Mercedes had.
“Why did you abandon your car?” Dalton asked.
The trooper pointed toward the Mercedes. “I heard the cars stop. I wasn’t sure what the situation was...” He glanced at the woman in the trunk. “I didn’t think it would be this, though.”
Despite all those bodies Dalton had found in car trunks over the years, this wasn’t the situation he had expected, either. It was just too ironic and coincidental since he’d just been at a wedding himself that he would find a bride locked inside a trunk. Then he remembered that conversation he’d had outside the church—the one with profiler Special Agent Jared Bell.
Could this bride have been the next intended victim of Bell’s serial killer?
As far as he knew, the guy hadn’t killed another woman for a couple of years. He wouldn’t claim this victim, either—if Dalton could do anything about it.
Finally the sirens grew louder and lights flashed as the ambulance approached. “Help’s here,” he told her. “You’re going to be okay.”
Her lashes fluttered, and she peered at him through her barely opened lids. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Help really is here.” And as he said it, paramedics rushed up to the car. He released the blood-soaked veil to one of them and then he tried to release her hand—that he hadn’t even realized he still held—and step back out of their way.
But she clasped his hand tightly in hers. She was stronger than she thought—stronger even than he had thought. “Don’t leave me,” she implored him.
Recently another agent had nearly lost a witness at the hospital when bank robbery suspects had tried to abduct her right out of the ER. Dalton wasn’t about to take that risk. This woman had already been through too much.
“I need to ride along,” he told the paramedics. Then he told her, “I won’t leave you.”
Her eyes closed again. Somehow she trusted him—when she had no reason to trust him or anyone else after what had happened to her. What exactly had happened to her?
“Was she shot?” he asked the paramedic who eased the veil away from her head wound.
The young man shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll get a CT scan in the ER. So we need to get her to the hospital ASAP.” He and another man snapped a collar around her neck and then lifted her onto a board that they carried up to the gurney they’d left on the road.
Dalton had to run along beside the stretcher they rolled along the gravel road to the ambulance. He hurried inside the rig just as they closed the doors and sped away. From their urgency, it was clear that her condition was every bit as critical as Dalton had feared it was.
“How far from the hospital are we?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes out,” the driver replied.
He would bet every one of those minutes counted in her situation. The paramedic in the back had administered an IV and an oxygen mask. It was more than he had been able to offer her. But it wasn’t enough. Not if there was a bullet in her head.
“What is her name?” the paramedic asked.
“She doesn’t know,” Dalton replied. “Could she have amnesia?”
“It’s possible if she has a concussion,” the paramedic replied. “But what is her name?”
“She couldn’t tell me,” he pointed out, “so I don’t know.”
“You’re not her groom?”
A strange shiver rushed over him. “Of course not. I’m an FBI agent. I found her in the trunk of that car.”
The paramedic glanced down at Dalton’s tux and nodded, as if humoring him.
“I just came from a wedding,” he explained his attire. “It wasn’t mine.”
It would never be his.
“I don’t know who she is,” he repeated. But maybe something had been left in the trunk of the car that would have revealed her identity. A purse. A wallet. A receipt. Or the registration for the car that might have been hers.
He should have stayed behind at the scene. He could have done more for her there than by playing nursemaid in the back of the ambulance. And why would the man who’d put her in that trunk risk showing up at the hospital?
If the guy was smart, he was still running.
“What the hell...” the driver murmured from the front seat.
Dalton glanced up and peered out the windshield—at the police car barreling down the road toward them with lights flashing and sirens blaring.
“Does he want me to pull over?” the driver asked as he reached for the radio on the dash. “Why doesn’t he tell me what he wants?”
Another shiver rushed over Dalton, this one so deep that it chilled his blood. They hadn’t passed the trooper’s abandoned vehicle. He had a bad feeling that it was that vehicle heading straight toward them now.
But it was not Trooper Littlefield driving it. It wasn’t the bald man behind the vehicle. This person had a hat pulled low over his face. But that wasn’t the reason he was driving straight toward them. He wanted to run them off the road; he wanted to reclaim the victim who had nearly escaped him.
The ambulance driver jerked the wheel and veered toward one of those deep ditches. At the last moment, he jerked the wheel back and kept the rig on the road, riding along the steep shoulder. “What the hell’s that trooper doing?”
“It’s not the trooper.” It had to be the man who’d run from the Mercedes. He must have circled back around and found the trooper’s abandoned vehicle. “And don’t pull over...”
“But he’s going to kill us!” the other paramedic exclaimed. “He’s heading straight toward us!”
But the man couldn’t have expected that an FBI agent was riding along in the rig. So Dalton had the element of surprise. He pulled his gun from his holster, leaned forward over the passenger’s seat and pointed the barrel out the open passenger’s window.
Maybe the man saw the gun, because he sped up as if trying to run them off the road before Dalton could fire a shot. Dust billowed up behind the trooper’s car, forming a cloud thicker than fog. Dalton could barely see through it, but he fired his weapon. Again and again.
He couldn’t tell if he struck the car, though—let alone the driver. And the vehicle kept coming toward them. Faster and faster.
The ambulance driver cursed.
“Keep going straight,” Dalton advised him. The road was too narrow; the ditches too deep and the gravel too loose. “Don’t swerve.”
But his warning came too late.
The ambulance driver didn’t have the nerves for the dangerous game of chicken. Cursing, he jerked the wheel, and the rig teetered on two wheels.
The paramedic in the back shouted in fear.
The driver couldn’t regain control of the van and it flipped—over and over—hurtling Dalton over the seat and toward the windshield. If he went through it—if he lost consciousness—he risked losing the bride...
But then the accident would probably be enough to finish her off. She was already critically wounded. He held his breath and tried to brace himself.
But it was too late.
* * *
THE AMBULANCE LAY crumpled on its side in the ditch, but its lights flashed and sirens blared yet. With a gloved hand, he turned off the lights and sirens inside the state police cruiser. But he could hear an echo of the ambulance’s sirens in the distance.
More emergency vehicles were on their way to the scene. Maybe the trooper had called for more help. Maybe the agent had managed to get a call out before the ambulance had crashed. The agent was inside that crashed vehicle. He’d seen him climb into the ambulance with the woman—determined to protect her.
The agent had even shot at him; the windshield of the police cruiser bore holes too close to where his head had been. He shuddered at how close those shots had come to hitting him. Even with both vehicles moving, the agent had nearly struck him. He was a damn good shot. A dangerous man.
Maybe that was why he hesitated before approaching that crumpled ambulance. He didn’t know what he would find inside: dead bodies or a still-armed government agent.
The ambulance sirens grew weaker, while those sirens in the distance grew louder as those vehicles approached. He could hesitate no longer. He had to hurry. Before the other emergency personnel arrived, he had to make certain that both the woman and the lawman were dead.
* * *
HER HEART AND her head pounded with fear and pain. Strapped to the gurney, she had actually taken little impact from the crash. Since the gurney was anchored to the floor, she hadn’t been thrown around like the others.
The blond-haired paramedic who’d been in the back with her had bounced around like a rag doll and then crumpled against the side of the ambulance where it had come to rest in the deep ditch next to the road.
She couldn’t tell if the man was just unconscious.
Or...
A cry burned her throat, but she held it in—refusing to panic. Yet.
Strapped down and hanging on her side, she could only twist her neck to peer around the vehicle—to see what had happened to the others. To the FBI agent.
The driver was pinned beneath the steering wheel, so he remained in his seat. Like the other paramedic, he wasn’t moving. How badly was he hurt?
They had come to help her. But now they needed help. Because of her?
Guilt struck her with all the force that the ambulance had struck the ditch. Could this be her fault?
Could she have done something to cause this destruction—this pain? How much destruction?
She craned her neck, but she couldn’t see the agent. Had he catapulted out of the windshield? The glass was broken. But then, he might have shot it out. He had been shooting—trying to stop the other vehicle from running them off the road. According to the paramedics’ comments, the other vehicle had been a police car.
The trooper’s uniform had looked vaguely familiar to her. Had she seen him before? Was he the one who’d put her in the trunk?
Was there anyone she could trust? Special Agent Reyes had done his best to save her. But where was he now? Pinned beneath the vehicle when it had rolled?
She shuddered as she imagined the worst. And her head throbbed more with dull pain. The pounding wasn’t just inside her head, though.
Someone was hammering on the back doors of the ambulance—trying to open them. She struggled against the straps, but they held her fast to the gurney. She couldn’t move—she couldn’t escape. She could only wait for whoever had run them off the road to finish her off.
Chapter Four (#ulink_662a9866-f751-53da-bdd0-a2794363d4e5)
Water seeped through the tuxedo, chilling Dalton’s skin. He awoke with a jerk—then grunted as his head slammed against metal. Stars danced behind his eyes as oblivion threatened to reclaim him. But then he heard the hammering and felt the force of it rocking the ambulance.
Fortunately he wasn’t beneath the vehicle. Instead of going through the windshield, he had grabbed hold of the dash and had somehow wound up wedged beneath it—between the passenger’s seat and the door. Water surged through that door from where the van lay on its side in the ditch. If he hadn’t awakened, he may have drowned.
But now, as the doors creaked and finally gave, he still could die because he had no intention of letting anyone hurt the injured woman more than she had already been hurt. He fumbled around on the wet floor, looking for his gun. Finally his fingers grazed metal. He closed his hand around it, but the barrel was stuck—wedged between the seat and the crumpled passenger door.
As he tugged on the Glock, he lifted his head to assess the situation. The bride, strapped to the gurney, was suspended on her side. Her silvery-gray eyes were open and wide with fear. She knew she was trapped. Then she noticed him.
And he saw hope brighten her face, infusing her pallid skin with a hint of color. Of life...
She was okay now.
But he wasn’t sure how much hope he offered her—when he couldn’t get his damn gun loose. So he turned away from her to focus on those opening doors. And he released his breath in a ragged sigh of relief.
