To Die For (19 page)

I was filled with excitement over the coming day. I was getting my car—finally!—and I was going to work, and after work, I was going to my own home. I had packed my bags and Wyatt hadn’t argued, though he hadn’t looked pleased. That morning I had managed to dress myself, even my bra. I still couldn’t twist my arm up behind my back to fasten the bra that way, but I had turned it backward so the hooks were in front, fastened it, then turned the bra around on my body and worked the straps up my arms. That method didn’t look as sexy as the other way, but it worked.

“Take it easy today,” he instructed as he drove me to my house so I could get my car. “Maybe we should stop at a medical supply store and get a sling for you, so you’ll remember not to move your arm very much.”

“I’ll remember,” I said wryly. “Trust me.” If I tried a fast movement, the stitched-together muscle reminded me in a hurry.

A few minutes later he said, “I don’t like you being away from me.”

“But you knew my staying at your house was just temporary.”

“It doesn’t have to be temporary. You could move in with me.”

“Uh-uh,” I said without hesitation. “That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Well, that’s enlightening,” he said sarcastically. “Because why?”

“A lot of reasons. That would be rushing things way too fast. I think we need to back off and give ourselves some breathing room.”

“You gotta be kidding me. After the past five days, you think moving in with me would be
rushing things
?”

“Well, look at everything that’s happened. Nothing has been normal, not one single minute has been routine since last Thursday night. We’ve sort of been in an emergency situation, but that’s over. Now our real lives kick in, and we need to see how things go under those conditions.”

He didn’t like it at all. I wasn’t crazy about the idea myself, but I knew moving in with him would be a big mistake. I personally don’t think a woman should ever live with a man unless they’re married. I guess there are some really great guys out there who wouldn’t take advantage of having a live-in cook and maid, but guess how those arrangements usually turn out? No, sir. That’s not for me.

I was raised by a woman who knows her own worth, and her daughters firmly believe that life is much better for a woman when a man has to work really hard to get her. It’s human nature to take better care of something you’ve worked for, whether it’s a car or a wife. In my opinion, Wyatt hadn’t worked nearly hard enough for me to make up for what he’d done two years ago. Yes, I was still mad at him for that. I was beginning to get over it, but not enough to move in with him even if I hadn’t thought that it was, in general, not a good thing for a woman to do.

We got to my condo, and there was my sweet little white convertible parked under the portico where it belonged. Wyatt pulled in behind it, and then got both my bags from his back seat. He still had a disgruntled expression, but he wasn’t arguing. At least, right then he wasn’t arguing. I knew I hadn’t heard the last of it, but right then he was backing off the way I’d asked. He was probably busy planning a sneak attack.

I unlocked the side door and went in; the beeping noise from the security system proved that Siana had indeed set it when she left after packing my clothes. I disarmed it, then stood in my kitchen gloriously surrounded by my own Stuff, which I had missed dreadfully. Stuff is important in a woman’s life.

I told Wyatt which bedroom upstairs was mine, if he wasn’t capable of simply looking in the door and telling. He’d been in my condo, but had never been upstairs. Our scene of passion had been played out on my couch, which I had since had reupholstered, not because of stains or anything, because the scene of passion hadn’t gone that far, but because it was my version of washing that man right out of my hair. I had also changed the furniture around and painted the walls a different color. Nothing in my living room looked the same as when he had been there.

The message light on my answering machine was blinking. I walked over and saw that there were twenty-seven messages, which isn’t a lot considering how long I had been gone and that the day I’d left reporters had been trying to find me. I punched the play button and started deleting messages as soon as I verified they were from reporters. There were a couple of personal messages, employees wanting to know when Great Bods would reopen, but Siana had called everyone Friday afternoon and it was now a moot point anyway.

Then a familiar voice came out of the machine, and I listened in disbelief.

“Blair . . . this is Jason. Pick up if you’re there.”
There was a pause, then he continued.
“It was on the news this morning that you’d been shot. Sweetheart, that’s awful, though the reporter said you’d been treated and released, so I guess it isn’t too bad. Anyway, I was worried about you and just wanted to see how you’re doing. Give me a call.”

Behind me, Wyatt said,
“Sweetheart?”
in a dangerous tone.

“Sweetheart?” I echoed, but my tone was totally bewildered.

“I thought you said you haven’t seen him since the divorce.”

“I haven’t.” I turned and gave him a puzzled look. “Unless you want to count the time I saw him and his wife shopping in the mall, but since we didn’t speak, I don’t think that qualifies.”

“Why would he call you sweetheart? Is he trying to get something started between the two of you again?”

“I don’t know. You heard the same message I did. As for calling me sweetheart, that’s what he called me when we were married, so maybe it was just an unconscious thing.”

He made a disbelieving noise. “Yeah, right. After five years?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. He knows I’d never get back with him, period, so I have no idea why he’d call. Unless—Knowing Jason, he was just doing something for his political résumé. You know: ‘The candidate has remained on friendly terms with his former wife, phoning her after an incident in which she was wounded by gunfire.’ That sort of thing. Setting it up so, if a reporter happened to ask me, I’d say yes, that he’d called. He does stuff like that, always thinking about future campaigns.” I hit the delete button and erased his noxious voice from my answering machine.

He put his hands on my waist and pulled me to him. “Don’t you dare call him back. The bastard.” His green eyes were narrow, and his face had that hard look a man gets when he’s feeling territorial.

“I wasn’t going to.” Now was the time for mildness, not for zinging him, because I knew how I’d feel if his ex-wife suddenly got in touch with him and left a message like that. I put my arms around him and nestled my head in the hollow of his shoulder. “I’m not interested in anything he has to say, anything he feels, and when he dies, I won’t go to the funeral. I won’t even send flowers. The bastard.”

He rubbed his chin against my temple. “If he calls you again,
I’ll
give him a call.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The bastard.”

He chuckled. “It’s okay, you can let up on the
bastard
s. I get the idea.” He kissed me and patted my butt.

“Good,” I said cheerfully. “Now may I go to work?”

We both went out and got into our respective cars—I remembered to set the security system on my way out—and Wyatt reversed out of my short driveway into the street, backing up far enough to give me room to back out in front of him. I wondered if he intended to follow me all the way to Great Bods, maybe to make certain no ex-husband was lurking, waiting to talk to me.

I backed out of the driveway and shifted the gear lever to
Drive.
The engine purred as I gave it the gas, and Wyatt fell in behind me.

A hundred yards down the street was a stop sign, where the street intersected with a busy four-lane. I put on the brakes, and the pedal went right to the floor. I sailed through the stop sign and straight into four lanes of traffic.

Chapter
Nineteen

My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I was too busy fighting the steering wheel and screaming
“Shit!”
to pause for any navel-gazing.

I wasted a precious few seconds desperately pumping the brake pedal, praying it would suddenly, miraculously work. It didn’t. Just before I went past the stop sign, as a last-ditch effort I stomped on the emergency brake pedal, and the car went into a hard spin, tires screaming and smoking, as I shot into the intersection. My seat belt snapped tight, jerking me back against my seat. I tried to get control of the spin, but an oncoming car, its own tires screaming as it tried to stop, clipped my right rear bumper and added to the momentum. It was like riding a very fast merry-go-round. In the split second I was facing traffic, I had a lightning flash of a red pickup coming right at me; then there was a hard jolt as my car hit the concrete bumper of the median and jumped it, backward, before slewing sideways across the grass and into the other two lanes of traffic. Terror-stricken, I glanced to the right and, through the passenger window, saw a woman’s face frozen in horror, and time itself seemed to freeze, too, in the instant before the impact. An enormous shock wave hit me like a body blow, and the world went black.

The blackness lasted for only a few seconds. I opened my eyes and blinked, both aware and surprised that I was still alive, but I couldn’t seem to move and even if I’d been able to, I would have been too afraid to check out what damage I’d sustained. I couldn’t hear anything; it was as if I was alone in the world. My vision was misty, and my face felt numb, but at the same time it
hurt.
“Ouch,” I said aloud into the strange silence, and with that sound everything popped back into focus.

The good news was: the air bag worked. The bad news was: it needed to. I looked around me at my car and almost moaned aloud. My beautiful little car looked like a twisted pile of scrap metal. I was alive, but my car wasn’t.

Oh, my God,
Wyatt.
He’d been right behind me; he’d seen everything. He had to think I was dead. I fumbled with my right hand for the seat belt and unclipped it, but when I tried to open my door, it wouldn’t budge and I couldn’t throw my weight against it because my hurt arm was on that side. Then I noticed the windshield had been popped out, so I laboriously hauled myself out from behind the steering wheel—it was like playing Twister—and gingerly crawled through the space where the windshield had been, careful of the broken glass, and out onto the hood, just as Wyatt reached me.

“Blair,” he said hoarsely, reaching for me, but he froze with his hands outstretched as if he was afraid to touch me. His face was paper white. “Are you all right? Is anything broken?”

“I don’t think so.” My voice was thin and shaky, and my nose was running. Embarrassed, I swiped at it, then saw the bright smear of red on my hand and the additional red dripping from my nose. “Oh. I’m bleeding. Again.”

“I know.” He gently lifted me off the hood and carried me to the grassy median, picking his way through a tangle of cars. Traffic in both directions had come to a complete halt. Steam rose from the crumpled hood of the car that had hit me, and other motorists were helping the woman inside. On the other side of the four-lane, two or three cars rested at weird angles in the road, but the damage there seemed to be mostly in the fender-bender range.

Wyatt set me down on the grass and pressed a handkerchief into my hand. “If you’re all right, I’ll go see about the other driver.” I nodded and waved a hand, indicating he should see what he could do. “Are you certain?” he asked, and I nodded again. He briefly touched my arm, then strode off, talking into his cell phone, and I lay back on the grass with the handkerchief pressed to my nose to stop the bleeding. I remembered being hit in the face really hard; that must have been the air bag deploying. My life was well worth a bloody nose.

A man in a suit came over and squatted down beside me, positioning himself so he blocked the sun out of my face. “Are you all right?” he asked kindly.

“I dink so,” I said nasally, holding my nose pinched together.

“You lie right there and don’t try to get up, just in case you’re hurt worse than you realize and don’t feel it yet. Is your nose broken?”

“I don’t dink so.” It hurt; my whole face hurt. But my nose didn’t hurt worse than anything else, and all in all, I thought it was just a bloody nose.

Good Samaritans came out of the woodwork, offering aid in a variety of means: bottles of water and baby wipes, even a few alcohol wipes from someone’s first aid kit, to help clean up the cuts and wipe away blood so you could tell how bad a cut actually was; emergency ice packs; Band-Aids and gauze; cell phones and sympathy. There were seven walking-wounded with minor injuries, including me, but the driver of the car that had T-boned me was injured severely enough that they hadn’t taken her out of the car. I could hear Wyatt talking, his voice calm and authoritative, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

Reaction seized me and I began trembling. I slowly sat up and looked around at the chaos, at the bloody people sitting on the median with me, and I wanted to cry. I had done this? It was an accident, I knew it was, but still . . . I was the cause. My car. Me. Guilt ate at me. I kept my car in good running condition, but had I overlooked some key maintenance? Not paid attention to a warning sign that my brakes were about to fail?

Sirens were shrieking in the distance and I realized only a few minutes had passed. Time was crawling so slowly it felt as if I’d been lying there on the grass for at least half an hour. I closed my eyes and prayed hard that the woman who had hit me would be okay. Because I felt weak and a little dizzy, I lay back down and stared up at the blue sky.

Suddenly I had a weird sense of déjà vu, and I realized how similar this scene was to the one Sunday afternoon, only then I’d been lying on the warm parking lot instead of fragrant green grass. But sirens had been shrieking and cops swarming, just the way they were now. Maybe more time had passed than I thought; when had the cops got here?

A medic went down on one knee beside me. I didn’t know him. I wanted Keisha, who gave me cookies. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said, but he was reaching for my left arm. He must have thought the bandage was covering a new cut.

“I’m okay,” I said. “That’s stitches from minor surgery.”

“Where’s all this blood from?” He was taking my pulse, then flicking a tiny penlight from eye to eye.

“My nose. The air bag gave me a bloody nose.”

“Considering what could have happened, God bless air bags,” he said. “Were you wearing your seat belt?”

I nodded, so then he checked me for seat-belt injuries, and wrapped a cuff around my right arm to check my blood pressure. Guess what? It was elevated. Since I was structurally all right, he moved on to someone else.

While other medics were working with the woman in the car, stabilizing her, Wyatt came back and squatted beside me. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “I was right behind you, and I didn’t see anything unusual, but all of a sudden you started spinning.” He still looked pale and grim, but the sun was in my eyes again and I couldn’t be sure.

“I put on my brakes for the stop sign, and the pedal went all the way to floor. There was nothing. So I put on the emergency brake, and that’s when I started to spin.”

He glanced over at my car where it rested in the far lane, the two front wheels up on the curb. I followed his gaze, stared a moment at the wreckage, and shuddered. I’d been hit so hard the frame had wrapped in a U shape, and the passenger side was nonexistent. No wonder the windshield had popped out. If it hadn’t been for my seat belt, I probably would have popped out, too.

“Have you had trouble with your brakes lately?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. And I have it serviced regularly.”

“The patrolman who drove it to your place didn’t report any problems with it. You go on to the hospital and get checked out—”

“I’m okay. Honest. My vitals are steady, and other than getting popped in the face by the air bag, I don’t think anything else is wrong.”

He rubbed his thumb over my cheekbone, the touch light. “All right. Should I call your mother to come get you? I’d rather you not be alone for the next few hours, at least.”

“After the cars are moved. I don’t want her to see my car; it’ll give her nightmares. I know you need my insurance card and registration,” I said woefully, still staring at the tangle of sheet metal. “They’re in the glove compartment, if you can find the glove compartment. And my bag is in there, too.”

Briefly he touched my shoulder, then stood and walked across the two lanes to my car. He looked in the window, walked around the car to the other side and back, then did something odd: he got down on the pavement, on his back, and slid his head and shoulders under the car just behind the front wheels. I winced, thinking of all the glass that must be on the pavement and hoping he wouldn’t get cut. What was he looking for?

He slid out from beneath the car, but didn’t come back over to me. Instead he went to one of the uniformed officers and said something to him, and the officer went over to my car and he, too, slid underneath it, just the way Wyatt had. I saw Wyatt talking on his cell phone again.

A small convoy of wreckers began arriving, to tow the damaged vehicles away. An ambulance arrived, and the medics began the process of gently removing the woman from her car. One of them held an IV bag over her. Her face was drenched in blood, and they’d fitted a cervical collar on her. I whispered another prayer.

Sawhorse barricades were put on the street, and officers in both directions were directing traffic in a detour. The wreckers sat there idling, but none of the cars were moved. More police cars arrived, driving down the median to reach the accident scene. These were unmarked cars, and to my surprise I saw my pals MacInnes and Forester. What were detectives doing working an accident scene?

They talked to Wyatt and the officer who had been under my car. MacInnes got down on his back and slid under my car himself. What was up with that? Why was everyone looking under my car? He slid out, said something to Wyatt; Wyatt said something to an officer; and before I knew it, the officer came over and helped me to my feet, then led me to a patrol car.

Good God, I was being arrested.

But he put me in the front seat; the motor was running and the air-conditioning was on, and I turned a vent to blow right on my face. I didn’t adjust the rearview mirror to see how I looked. My whole face might be black-and-blue, but I didn’t want to know.

At first the blowing air felt good, but within a minute chill bumps were popping out on my skin. I closed the vent, but that didn’t help much. I hugged my arms.

I don’t know how long I sat there, freezing to death. Normally I would have adjusted the air-conditioning controls, but somehow I didn’t have the initiative needed to mess with a cop’s car. If it had been Wyatt’s car, yeah, but not a patrol officer’s. Or maybe I was just too dazed to take action.

After a while Wyatt came over and opened the door. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” Except for a growing stiffness, and a general feeling of having been bludgeoned. “I’m cold, though.”

He pulled off his jacket and leaned in, tucking the garment around me. The fabric was warm from his body and felt blissful to my cold skin. I hugged the jacket to me, and stared wide-eyed at him. “Am I under arrest?”

“Of course not,” he said, cupping my face and running his thumb over my lips. He kept touching me, as if reassuring himself that I was all in one piece. He hunkered in the V of the open door. “Do you feel up to going to the station, giving us a statement?”

“Are you sure I’m not under arrest?” I said in alarm.

“Positive.”

“Then why do I have to go to the station? Is that woman dead? Will I be charged with vehicular homicide?” Growing horror consumed me, and I felt my lips tremble.

“No, honey, calm down. The woman will be all right. She was conscious, and talking sensibly to the medics. There’s a possibility of a neck injury, so they were being very careful moving her.”

“It’s all my fault,” I said miserably, fighting tears.

He shook his head. “Not unless you cut your own brake line, it isn’t,” he said in a hard tone.

Dwayne Bailey had posted bond, but he was hauled in again and questioned. I wasn’t allowed to be in on the questioning, which is probably a good thing because by then I’d worked myself into a state. My brake line had been cut. My car had been deliberately sabotaged. I could have been killed; others who had nothing to do with witnessing Nicole’s murder could have been killed. I was furious. Wyatt wouldn’t let me anywhere near Dwayne Bailey.

Now I knew why Wyatt had the patrol officer put me in his car: to protect me. I’d been totally exposed, sitting there on the grassy median, in case someone—namely Dwayne Bailey—wanted to take another shot at me. I couldn’t think why he would, or why he would sabotage my car, since he’d already confessed and there was no need to kill me—not that there ever had been, but he didn’t know that. Well, maybe now he did, though I doubted the cops would have told him that I couldn’t have identified him anyway.

I washed off in the ladies’ restroom, using paper towels to scrub the dried blood off my face and out of my hair as best I could. I have no idea how blood from a nosebleed got in my hair, but it was there. I had blood in my ears, behind my ears, on my neck, my arms—and another bra was ruined, damn it! I even had blood on my feet.

There was a small cut across the bridge of my nose, and both cheekbones were red and swollen. I suspected I would have two black eyes in the morning. I also suspected I would have so many other aches and pains that I wouldn’t care about a black eye, or eyes.

Wyatt hadn’t found my bag, so I didn’t have my cell phone. The bag had to be in the car . . . somewhere . . . and the car was in the police lot, secured behind a locked fence. The forensics team had gone over the car there at the scene, at least the exterior, so the wrecker could haul it in without destroying any evidence. They would do their best to check out the interior, too, and Wyatt said they’d find my bag then. I could do without everything that was in it, except my wallet and checkbook. Having to replace all my credit cards, my driver’s license, insurance cards and all the others, would be a pain, so I hoped they found it.