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But then, she thought ruefully, as sadness strummed through her again, if he could have seen her, there would have been no reason to have a loaded gun hidden in the largest canister on her counter.
The stranger’s eyes were still closed.
And he was still bleeding.
Kasey made up her mind. She had the training and she could help him, the way she couldn’t help Jim.
Unlocking her door, she gingerly stepped over him to enter her house. Once inside, she turned around. She was going to bring him in.
“Okay, mister, this is your lucky night. But I promise you, if you try anything—anything at all—it’ll also be your last night.”
The stranger opened his eyes again and looked at her. She couldn’t begin to fathom what he was thinking. The next moment, he tried to struggle to his feet. Kasey had the feeling that if she blew on him, he’d fall backward like a stack of cards.
“Hold it,” she cautioned before he could do any damage to himself. “This is going to be a team effort.” Tossing aside her purse, Kasey squatted down beside him. “Give me your arm.”
Not waiting for him to comply, she draped his arm around the back of her neck herself. Holding tightly on to it, she placed her other arm around his waist as best she could. To gain a better grasp, she slid her fingers through the belt loop of his jeans. She hoped the loop would hold when she needed it.
Kasey took another deep breath, bracing herself. “Okay, on the count of three, I want you to try to get up, understand?”
He made some kind of noise in response. “I’ll take that as a yes.” Ready to push off, she counted, “One, two, three.”
She only managed to get a couple of inches off the ground before the stranger threw her off balance. Caught off guard, she fell over on him.
Instantly, Kasey drew back. Had he done that on purpose? She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but trusting no longer came easily to her.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” she told him.
There was no answer. She realized that the stranger was unconscious again and deadweight. She sighed. “Not going to make this easy for either of us, are you?”
She needed another approach. Rising to her feet, she got behind him and put her arms around his chest. She laced her hands together and pulled him across the threshold and along the floor.
Progress was made by inches but she had always prided herself on her strength and even in these dire times—or maybe because of them—she worked out religiously, concentrating on weight training and building up her upper body strength.
Finally getting all of him inside her small house, Kasey felt like collapsing. Not only was the man deadweight, he was rock solid. But rather than take a breather, she straightened up and turned on the closest light. No way would she voluntarily stay in the dark with this man. Closing the door, she turned around to face her uninvited guest. There was a very disconcerting trail of blood leading from the threshold to the living room.
She was going to have to clean that up before the bloodstains set in permanently. But first, she had to stop the blood at its source.
Kasey glanced over her shoulder. Her sofa was only a few feet away from the back door, but it might as well have been in the next county. Even if she managed to pull him the distance, she wouldn’t be able to get him onto the sofa. At least, not without going through extraordinary contortions and she was much too tired for that.
Which meant she had to treat him on the floor. Everything in her training balked at that, but you couldn’t always pick your settings.
“Not exactly the ideal conditions,” she murmured to herself. She laid him flat on his back. “Who are you and why are you here?” she couldn’t help wondering aloud.
Well, there was time enough to learn that later, once she stopped the bleeding and sewed up his wound. Despite the situation, a small thrill raced through her. It had been much too long since she’d done anything close to her profession—and she missed it. Missed her life. Missed a lot of things.
She hurried off to the bathroom to wash her hands and to get what she needed in order to take care of this man that fate, with its sardonic sense of humor, had deposited on her doorstep.
She couldn’t help the dry laugh that rose to her lips. The way her luck had been going this last year and a half, the man on her floor would probably turn out to be a serial killer. Wouldn’t take much for her to be his next victim.
Drying her hands, she started throwing things she was going to need into the small, pink rubber basin she kept under the sink: alcohol, swabs, a scalpel and sutures she kept in a small blue container on the top shelf of her medicine cabinet.
Being his next victim might not be so bad, she mused. It might even be a blessing in disguise. She was weary of hiding, weary of looking over her shoulder so often. Maybe, if he repaid her act of kindness by killing her, at least this awful game of hide-and-seek would be over and she’d finally know some peace. Know what it was like not to have her heart leap up, hammering wildly with anxiety every time the door to the bookstore opened, or she looked up to see someone looking her way. She was tired of all the paranoia. If she couldn’t have her life back, she didn’t want any life at all.
You’re just tired and not making any sense, she chided herself ruefully.
If she meant any of that, she wouldn’t be doublelocking her door, or taking all those precautions every day. Maybe this life she led wasn’t so great, but it certainly did beat the alternative. At bottom, she wanted to live. And live long enough to get the person who had killed Jim and tried to kill her.
After checking to make sure she had everything she needed, for now she focused on her patient. Kasey didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that, as uneasy as she was, she was still smiling.
The smile faded the moment she stepped out into the living room again.
There was no one lying on the floor by the back entrance.
Chapter 2
For one frantic moment, Kasey thought the stranger had either left, or, worse, lay in wait for her somewhere in the house.
But then she saw him. It took a second for her heart to stop pounding as she realized that the stranger had just moved. He was still on the floor, but now closer to the kitchen. She guessed that he must have come to, tried to get up and collapsed when he found that the effort was too much for him.
But why the kitchen? Why hadn’t he tried to go out the door?
“You were probably disoriented,” she said under her breath as she crossed to him. She knelt down, setting the basin with its supplies next to her. “I can certainly relate to that.”
Every day, when she first woke up, she had to take stock of where she was and who she was. There were times when it all felt so jumbled up in her brain, she wanted to give up running, give up hiding and just return to her old life.
Which, she guessed, she’d probably be allowed to live for a total of ten minutes before word got around that she was back and among the living. And someone decided to do something about the latter.
Was that who this man was on her floor? Someone running from something?
Or was this an elaborate plan to flush her out, she wondered, her fingertips growing icy. Someone sent to get her, once and for all. She knew there was always a chance of that, but getting shot just to lull her into a false sense of security seemed like quite a stretch.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. It was one of the mantras she’d been taught in medical school and it applied not just to the field, but to life. The unconscious man in her living room was probably a horse, not a zebra. Some poor victim, not a hit man.
And if he was to continue being a horse, she had to help him live. And pretty damn quick.
She raised his blood-soaked shirt away from his body. It was a bullet wound all right. Right there just under his arm. She’d seen worse, but there was no such thing as a good bullet wound. Slipping on a pair of plastic gloves she’d picked up at the local drugstore, she took a sterile swab, soaked it in peroxide and proceeded to clean the wound.
With each stroke, Kasey raised her eyes and watched the unconscious stranger’s face with apprehension. But there was no reaction, no indication that he was only pretending to be unconscious. No involuntary wincing. He was out cold.
“Lucky for both of us,” she murmured. “I’m probably a little rusty at this.”
The wound cleaned, she reached for the scalpel she’d scrubbed less than five minutes ago.
Poising the blade over the bullet’s point of entry, she told him, “This is going to be the hard part.” Still nothing.
Which was good. But she still wished she had something to knock the man out in case he woke up and began to struggle. But things like that, other than 101 proof whiskey, couldn’t be purchased in the local pharmacy. Besides, she honestly never thought she’d need something in the way of an anesthetic ever again. She’d left that life behind, not willingly, but of necessity. It all boiled down to the same thing. She wasn’t a practicing doctor anymore.
Very carefully, she began to probe the wound. Glancing up at the stranger’s face, she saw him tense even though he was in another realm where hard-core pain didn’t exist. Her patient continued sleeping. Satisfied that, at least for the time being, he was unaware of what was happening, she probed deeper. Just where had this bullet gone?
After a couple more minutes, she was finally rewarded with the feel of metal against metal.
Gotcha.
Holding her breath, she secured the bullet and gingerly retracted the instrument until she could pull it free of the flesh around it.
Like a fisherman who had managed to finally pull a marlin out of the water, she held up the tiny bit of mangled metal, examining it against the overhead light. She shook her head.
“Not much to look at, is it?” she marveled. Small but deadly was an apt description. She wondered if the man on the floor knew how close he came to never seeing another sunrise. “Bet that could have ended your life with no effort at all if it’d hit just a little bit higher and to the left. Talk about lucky…”
Again she shook her head, awed how some people died after tripping on the sidewalk and hitting their head, while others walked away from what appeared to be certain death after taking a fall from a second-story window. Or catching a bullet just beneath their rib cage, she thought, amazed.
Cleaning the wound a second time, Kasey then picked up the sutures and very carefully sewed up the small hole. She wished she had access to some antibiotics to insure against infections, but he would have to take care of that for himself. Once he was awake.
It didn’t take long to finish stitching him up, even though she took her time, studying his face after every stitch was taken.
“You really are dead to the world, aren’t you?” she marveled. Finished, she put what was left of the sutures into a small white envelope and sealed it again.
There wasn’t much.
“Now what?” she asked herself out loud, looking down at her patient.
He was still unconscious, still in her house. What did she do with him? She had no one to turn to, no one to go to for help. And that was strictly her own doing. Edwin Owens, the owner of the used bookstore Rare Treasures, had indicated that he was very willing to be her friend. Very willing to be more than that if she wanted him to be. But while he seemed like a nice man, she knew better than to make friends or form attachments. Friends asked questions, they noticed things about you. Things they could repeat, however innocently, to people who might come looking for you.
So this was better, remaining an isolated mystery. It was also far less complicated. Now that she thought about it, this path she’d been forced to choose was also a great deal more lonely. Until right this minute, loneliness had not been a real problem for her. God knew she had more than enough on her mind to keep her occupied and busy. Too busy to feel lonely.
But right now, if not an actual shoulder to lean on, she could have really used an extra pair of hands to help her with this man.
Blowing out a long breath, Kasey shrugged as she put everything back into the basin and went back to the bathroom with it. There was no point in dwelling on what she didn’t have. She would have to make the best of it.
The way she had these last endless months.
Switching off the bathroom light, she went to the minuscule linen closet next. It was hardly big enough to hold a handful of towels and the extra bedding she kept there for cold winter nights. Grabbing the pink flannel blanket and the lone pillow from the top shelf, she returned to her patient.
On her knees, Kasey gently raised his head and slipped the pillow under it, then threw the flannel blanket over him. She spread it out, making sure all of him was covered.
“Who are you?” she asked softly as she rose again to her feet.
He’d had no wallet on him, no ID. She’d already checked his pockets. Had he been mugged? Or was there some other reason he didn’t have any identification with him?
Too many questions, no answers, she thought.
Looking down at herself, Kasey realized that she’d gotten the stranger’s blood on her when she’d dragged him in as well as on the floor and her rug. It wasn’t going to scrub itself out. So, for the next forty-five minutes, she did what she could to wash the telltale streaks of blood from her house and herself.
When she was finally finished with that, she paused to check the lock on the bathroom door. Satisfied that it would hold, she still brought in a chair. Closing the door, she wedged the chair underneath the doorknob— just in case. She’d learned the hard way that trusting made you exceptionally vulnerable.
Kasey took the world’s fastest shower.
Coming out of the bathroom, dressed in a pair of jeans and a fresh shirt, still relatively damp from the shower, she checked on the stranger one more time. This time, he was exactly where she’d left him and he was still unconscious. The body was doing its part to help him heal.
As for her, she knew that her body was far too keyed up now to sleep. Resigned to yet another restless night, not unlike so many other nights, Kasey staked out a place for herself on the sofa, turned the TV on to one of the classic cable channels and turned the sound down to a whisper. She didn’t really need to hear what was being said. She knew the dialogue to this particular movie by heart. Even so, there was a certain amount of comfort in hearing the familiar repeated.
She smiled as Cary Grant, resplendent in a tuxedo and radiating charm, came on the scene. Some things you could always count on. It made her feel a tad better.
He felt as if his body had been disassembled and then put back together incorrectly, with some of the parts missing. Every single bone and muscle in his body made its presence known with one hell of an ache.
But pain was a good thing, right? Pain meant he was alive.
Either that or in hell.
With effort, Zack pried open his eyes. The first thing that came into focus was the flannel blanket.
He was no expert, but he was fairly certain that there were no pink blankets in hell. Which meant that his first impression was right. He was alive.
It was a good starting point.
He played dead for a moment, lowering his eyelids until all that remained opened were two tiny slits. Zack scanned the immediate area in front of him. He was lying on the floor of someone’s house.
Whose?
And for that matter, what was he doing on the floor, covered with a blanket? It wasn’t pulled over his head, so they—whoever “they” were—obviously didn’t think that he was dead. But why had they brought him here?
And, while he was at it, just where was here?
And what the hell was that searing pain all about? It threatened to take off the top of his head. The only way he could have felt worse was if he’d fallen headfirst into a wood chipper.
Zack struggled to extract his brain from the center of its cotton-batting prison. He needed to think clearly in order to piece things together.
He thought back. The last thing he remembered was going out into the alley behind the Internet café.
No, wait, the last thing he remembered was being shot and struggling with the man he’d been tailing. He’d tried to get possession of the man’s weapon before he could get off another shot. But it did go off again. And this time, the bullet had gone into the other man’s body.
Had it killed him?
Zack didn’t know. He always hit what he aimed for but this time, he wasn’t aiming. The discharge had been by accident, forced by the other man’s hand.
No, wait, that wasn’t the last thing he remembered, he amended again, desperately trying to hang on to loose, stray thoughts. He remembered trying to get away. He did get away. He’d managed to leave the strip mall and find his way into a development of white brick houses. A whole village of them. It was like something out of that silly fairy tale about the three little pigs. Except that he wasn’t the big bad wolf.
Even so, when he’d knocked on one door after another, nobody would let him in. No one would help him. And then, too weak to go on, he’d fallen to his knees before the last house.
After that, there was nothing. Had he passed out?
There was a woman on the sofa, dozing from the looks of it. Did he know her? He didn’t think so. He would have remembered a woman who looked like this one did, he thought. Even from this distance, with his eyes all but shut, he could see the woman with the curly brown hair had class. And looks.
Too bad he wasn’t going to meet her, but he really had to get out of here. There was someplace he had to be by noon. Dawn was breaking, so he judged that he still had some time left. But he had a feeling he wasn’t exactly himself today and that getting to where he had to be would require a lot of energy. If he didn’t make it in time, all hell could break loose. He knew that without being told. This was a delicate operation that required precise timing.
Removing the blanket from his body with a hand that felt incredibly stiff, Zack started to sit up.
The flash of sharp, excruciating pain was completely unexpected. So was the moan that involuntarily escaped his lips.