Authors: Darlene Gardner
Sam's had been the low bid on a contract to provide fuel for police-department vehicles. Even if Gray hadn’t suspected the woman was in possession of an illegal substance, he would have felt obligated to make sure she didn't scare away customers.
Resigned to no longer having time to go home and change his clothes before heading into town for his weekly poker game, Gray walked toward the woman. He was the town's police chief, and he'd long ago gotten used to being on duty even when he was off.
He wouldn’t be able to arrest her unless the drugs were in plain view, so Gray figured he’d have to settle for helping the woman help herself. He mentally ticked off the places — Secret Sound’s drug treatment referral center, the hospital that treated addicts, the psychiatric ward — that might be able to help.
A slight chance existed that her behavior stemmed from something other than drugs, but Gray seriously doubted it. He'd taken some college psychology courses before settling on the law, and whatever was wrong with the woman had nothing to do with reality. If she weren’t on a bad trip, chances are that she was stark, raving nuts.
When he was close enough, he reached out and touched her, hoping to jolt her back to reality.
The sensation of something warm and firm gripping Cara's arm was enough to stop her scream. She glanced down at the object on her arm, vaguely concluding that it was a man's hand, before she yanked her gaze back to the crumpled boy laying in the street.
Except he wasn't there.
Cara blinked once, then twice, but she couldn't deny the stark reality of the scene in front of her. The road was deserted except for an empty fast-food container that tumbled with the wind. There was no car. No tire rubber burned into the road. No stricken child.
But that's impossible
, her mind screamed, even as her eyes scanned the road. A moment ago, a small child had run to his doom. And now he was gone as if he had never been.
Except that she had seen him, heard him, felt for him.
"Excuse me."
A rich, distinctive voice disrupted her thoughts, and Cara remembered the hand on her arm. She tore her gaze from the lonely street, and tried to focus on the man. His khaki shirt was the same color as the one the little doomed boy had worn. She swallowed another scream.
"Is something wrong?"
Of course, she wanted to yell. A helpless child had been run over by a car!
Cara shook her head mutely. How could she explain what she had seen to a stranger who had every right to be suspicious of her? Especially when what she had seen was no longer there.
She tilted her head back to look up at him, and blinked hard when she encountered blue eyes she had seen before. Not the blue of a Caribbean sea or a child’s building block, but the dark, dangerous shade of the summer sky right before a storm.
But his eyes soothed instead of frightened because something in their depths told her he could offer shelter from the very storm he portended.
From somewhere she gathered the strength to fight off the anxiety attack that had gripped her. She drew in a long, slow breath and took her time releasing it.
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" To her dismay, her voice trembled from the aftereffects of shock.
A corner of his mouth lifted in wry humor, and she found herself staring at it, wondering why she yearned to reach out with her fingertips to trace his lips and the line of his strong, square jaw.
"Believe me, lady, you make quite a first impression." His low-timbered voice was as commanding as his presence. She raised her eyes from the level of his mouth, and guessed that he was at least six feet two. He had a strong face, with a nose that might once have been broken, a broad forehead and well-shaped dark eyebrows that matched hair that was short in front but brushed his neck with soft, unkempt curls. Her eyes dipped below his chin, registered an impression of solid sinew and muscle, and she thought inanely that nothing short of a bulldozer could knock him over. "If we had met before, I’d remember."
Disappointment coursed through Cara. His eyes were drawn together so that an indentation appeared between his brows, his mouth was a pencil-straight line, and he was looking at her as though he'd never seen her before in his life.
She didn’t know why that should matter. If this man had approached her in a social setting, she would have made excuses to get away from him. He was too big, too imposing, too much the opposite of the type of man she felt comfortable with.
But she wanted him to look out of those familiar stormy blue-gray eyes and say that he’d felt the same crazy spark of recognition that she had.
Somewhere nearby a dog barked. Cara looked away from the man long enough to see a thick-necked pit bull the color of midnight straining against a fence that enclosed an automobile graveyard. Briefly she wondered if the dog were barking at them or the horror she had seen on the street.
"If you tell me what's wrong, I can help you," the man said, and Cara felt even more miserable and lost than she had a moment ago, because this man was unquestionably a stranger.
She turned away from the pit bull and back toward the man, belatedly realizing that his khaki shirt was part of a uniform that included brown slacks, a gun belt and a gold badge inscribed with the word "Chief." She closed her eyes briefly and cursed her bad luck.
"Nothing's wrong," Cara mumbled. She couldn't accept his offer, because doing so would mean telling him that she had seen something in the street that was no longer there. Could he arrest her for that? Especially if it hadn't been there in the first place?
"Then why were you screaming?"
The question was harsh and perfectly logical. Cara would have asked the same one had their positions been reversed. It dawned on her that he still held her arm, and she was drawn to his warmth. Then he removed it, and chilling reality hit Cara. The man seemed to be questioning not her, but her sanity. The upshot was that she didn't have a sane answer.
"I thought..." she began, and faltered when she saw the doubt that already cloaked the eyes that had seemed so familiar. It already mattered what he thought of her, and that couldn't be anything flattering. "I thought I saw something."
The man's eyebrows rose. He didn't look like any police chief she had ever seen. He was too young, for starters, probably no more than his mid-thirties. And, even though she wasn’t drawn to the overly masculine type, much too attractive. Even now, moments after the strangest, most traumatic moment of her life, Cara recognized his appeal even though she couldn't figure out why she recognized him.
"How could you have seen anything when there’s nobody here but me?"
Cara looked around almost frantically, taking in their surroundings. He was right. There wasn't anybody here but him. How could Cara, who prided herself on being sensible, argue with that indisputable fact? She cast about wildly for the first plausible explanation she could think of for her screams.
"A bat." She fought the unfamiliar cloud of confusion threatening to engulf her. "I saw a bat."
"A bat?" He screwed up his forehead so that a network of lines formed on his brow. He deliberately surveyed the sky around her, which was as free of bats as the street was of life. Or death. "I don’t see a bat."
"There was one here a minute ago. A great big one," Cara snapped, upset because he wasn’t even trying to use diplomacy. He didn’t believe her, and he didn’t care if she knew it.
"And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you always scream like that when you see a bat?"
He’d cocked a hand on his hip and made his eyes go wide. Normally, such blatant skepticism would have made her back down and admit everything, but the mocking light in his hypnotic eyes irked her.
"I don’t owe you any explanations." Cara opened the door of her little green Mazda and scrambled inside, intending to get away both from the vivid apparition that had appeared in the street and the incredulity on the man's face. "Thanks for your concern, but I need to be on my way."
She tried to close the car door, but the man placed a restraining hand on it. Instead of fear, hope leapt inside her. She leaned her upper body halfway outside the car and looked up at him expectantly. She wanted him to tell her that she hadn't been imagining things, that he too had seen the boy in the street, that he glimpsed the same familiarity in her eyes that she detected in his.
"You saw something, too, didn't you?" she asked, her voice slightly breathless.
"All I see," the man said, indicating the hood of her vehicle with a sweep of his hand, "is white steam seeping out of the hood of your car."
Instantly reminded of why she had pulled into the service station, Cara sprang out of the overheated car. Confusion and embarrassment mingled to make her cheeks as hot as the car engine. She couldn't drive off with steam pouring from her car, no matter how much she wanted to.
"It probably only needs a little water in the radiator."
"Lady, you sure do have a vivid imagination," he said dryly. "There's something more seriously wrong with your car than the water level in your radiator."
Irritation bubbled in Cara, because this wasn't supposed to happen. Her car wasn’t new, but she never missed a factory-authorized tune-up and had gotten it checked thoroughly before embarking on this trip. But she knew instinctively that the Secret Sound police chief wasn’t a man who made many mistakes.
"Whatever it is, with any luck it won't take too long to fix," Cara said.
He shrugged, and his eyes seemed to inspect her for defects. After the way she had acted, he couldn't know she was a sensible woman, able to deal with whatever problems confronted her. Except maybe the appearance of a boy who wasn't there, a little voice inside her head whispered.
"You okay?" the man asked, possibly because she was
standing rigidly beside her car. Her next step should be to seek help from the mechanic on duty, but she couldn't seem to move. She thought that concern, real and somehow urgent, had stamped out the wariness in his eyes. She had a wild urge to confide the strange things that had happened since she'd left the interstate.
"Are you okay?" he repeated.
She nodded even though she had never been less okay in her life. She hadn't even been this out of control a month ago when her much-loved parents had died within days of each other. They had been elderly and ailing, and the doctor had told her to prepare for their deaths. But how do you prepare to go out of your mind? And how do you tell a stranger who probably had the power to commit you to an asylum that it's happening?
"Listen," the man said and paused, and something she recognized burned in the depths of his eyes. "Is there someone I can call for you?"
"There’s no one." Cara’s voice caught at the realization that she didn’t have anybody in whom she could confide about the strange visions. Except, perhaps, the man standing in front of her. She bit her lip before she could say so, because that was lunacy.
"You've got to be joking?"
Frustration bubbled in Cara's voice when Sam Peckenbush returned to his office after a brief inspection of her car, but the service-station owner didn’t react. He had a thick, muscular build padded with too much fat, and Cara figured him to be in his mid-forties. His beefy cheeks made his small eyes appear like little more than slits, but he didn't look away from her when he spoke.
"I don't joke about business, lady." He slowly drew out each word. "Your water pump's shot, and if you try to drive that car without a new one, it's gonna burn up on you."
"So can you replace it?"
An atypical edge marred Cara’s voice. After everything else that had happened, how could a car she kept in perfect working condition have failed her?
He gnawed on a toothpick dangling from the side of his mouth and settled deeper into his worn chair. "Sure I can replace it," he drawled, "but not this late in the day."
"I don’t understand."
"You don't shop American." The toothpick moved along with his lips. With his surly curbside manner, she wondered how he survived in a job dealing with the public.
"You'll have to be more specific, because I still don't know what you mean," Cara said, even while a part of her supposed she should be thankful to Sam Peckenbush. A gnawing irritation had begun to replace the panic and confusion that had clouded her brain in the muggy darkness.
He leveled her with a slit-eyed stare. She resisted the urge to look away, refusing to let him see that he had managed to intimidate her.
"I carry a fair number of parts for American cars, but you're driving a foreign job. Since car-part places 'round here close early and I’m fixin’ to close myself, I won't be able to pick up a part for it until tomorrow morning. It'll be sometime tomorrow afternoon before it's fixed."
"Do you mean I'm stuck here?"
An inexplicable dread gripped Cara. Even if she hadn’t been looking forward to spending two weeks in Miami Beach on her first vacation in five years, she wouldn't choose to stay here a minute more than necessary.
The gas-station proprietor laughed, although Cara didn't see anything humorous about the situation. "I reckon you are."
Cara’s heartbeat accelerated, and she frantically searched for something, anything, to make the prospect of staying in Secret Sound more appealing. A mental image of the cop with the stormy eyes formed, but she was hardly likely to see him again. She wasn't sure why that added to her aches.
She swallowed, telling herself the car trouble would only delay her for one night. She could stand anything for one night. By tomorrow at this time, she’d nod with good humor while her less-responsible friends teased her about falling victim to car trouble.
"Can you recommend a good hotel?" Cara asked, even though he didn't seem like an authority on fine lodging. Judging from the dirt on the convenience-store floor and the grease stains on its owner’s clothes, he didn't place a high premium on cleanliness.