2 Death Makes the Cut, page 13
A scream and the sound of running feet from the direction of the movie set saved me. My attacker checked, aimed a last savage kick into my side, then turned and fled. I tried to see who it was, but could only make out a figure in blue. Sobbing and gasping, I lay still for what seemed a long time, head spinning, trying not to throw up. My arm and shoulder felt like they were on fire and my ribs ached, but the worst was my head, where there was more throbbing going on than in a romance novel.
Move, I told myself. Nothing happened. It felt like the horrible dream that comes halfway between wakefulness and sleep when your body is paralyzed. Move, I told myself again. And this time, slowly and reluctantly, my body obeyed. I couldn’t stand, but I made it onto hands and knees and crawled out of the puddle and across stones to the concrete rise. I wasn’t sure I could make it up the three-foot incline, but somehow my tennis shoes scrabbled against the rough surface and found purchase. I dragged myself to the top. Disoriented, I wasn’t sure which way to go, but the sound of voices to my right pulled me in that direction.
The feel of crushed gravel cutting into my palms provided the incentive I needed to try to stand. I pushed myself up, the world dipping and whirling as I did so. Swaying, I made it to an upright position and staggered forward. Blood still poured freely down the side of my face, spilling onto my white shirt and dripping onto my legs and the ground, although at least now I could see out of one eye. A few more paces, and I made it around the bend in the path, reeling drunkenly into the clearing where the camera crew waited.
To my shock, I was met by a chorus of screams, and a herd of panicked tennis kids sprinting toward me, looking over their shoulders as they ran as though being chased. Terrified they would run me over, I held up bloody hands to ward them off, and they balked and scattered like startled horses, parting and flowing around me. As they passed, I thought I saw huge gray shapes in hot pursuit, running beside a camera rolling like a freight train on silver rails. I caught one glimpse of Michael Dupre’s astonished eyes, and then I collapsed.
Chapter 10
MUGGINGS AND MOTIVES
The next bit was pretty much a blur. I heard someone yell, “Cut!” and within seconds I was surrounded by a chorus of disembodied voices. I was vaguely aware of Brittany’s face, then Dillon’s, but I couldn’t seem to focus on anyone in particular. In the background Michael Dupre was yelling at someone in a particularly penetrating voice.
“Was this your idea? No one fucks with my shots, do you hear me? Did you plan this? Did you actually think it would work?”
Wow, someone was in big trouble. I wondered who it was.
Then someone said, “I think she’s really hurt.”
“Is that real blood?”
“For God’s sakes, someone call an ambulance.”
Someone was hurt? Was it one of my kids? I tried to lift my head to find out, then realized they were probably talking about me. It didn’t really feel so bad lying on my back like this. I just wished everything would stop tilting and that other people would stop shouting. I wanted to tell them about the guy who’d hit me, to tell them to go after him, that he was dangerous and needed arresting, but I must have gone to sleep instead. I have a fuzzy memory of being lifted onto a stretcher, of riding in the back of a rocking ambulance, and of getting very sick over someone’s very white shoes. Other than that, I have no idea where the next few hours went.
When I finally became myself again, I was lying in a hospital bed, and Kyla was sitting in the visitor chair reading a magazine. She looked pale and uncomfortable, shoulders loosely wrapped in a hospital blanket, hair slightly askew on one side as though she’d been asleep. I looked at her fondly, absurdly glad that I wasn’t alone.
I stirred, trying to find my voice, but she was instantly alert and at my side.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, then went on without waiting for me to respond. “Everything is fine. You are doing great, nothing to worry about at all. You’re in the hospital.”
I opened my mouth again, and she continued, not giving me a chance to speak. “The tennis kids have gone home, I’ve taken care of Belle, the school knows what happened, and I decided not to call your mom and dad since you’re going to be just fine.”
I closed my mouth and looked at her, impressed. In two sentences she’d told me everything I really needed to know.
“Not bad,” I croaked out, throat as dry as summer. “How long did you work on that?”
She looked taken aback for a second, then broke into a wide grin. “Guess you’re not brain damaged after all. Or at least not more than before.”
I gingerly raised my right hand to my head. The left was hooked up to about a thousand tubes. Well, one tube, but it felt like more. I hated needles. My head seemed to be wrapped in bandages, and, despite whatever was dripping into my arm, it ached like a hillbilly’s last tooth.
“So how bad is it?”
“Just a mild concussion. Not even a linear fracture, whatever that is, although they seemed to be worried about it for a while. No internal bleeding. All is well. Except, according to some kid named Dillon, you looked like ‘Freddy Krueger’s latest’ when they brought you in. That’s a quote, by the way. He was pretty hyped up.”
“He’s not still here?” I asked, alarmed.
“Not anymore. He and the rest of them insisted on coming with you to the hospital, and if you’ll believe it, that film crew loaded them on the bus and brought them. Michael Dupre himself even stopped by,” she added in an impressed tone.
“I … wait, you know who Michael Dupre is?”
“Well, duh. Everyone knows who Michael Dupre is. He’s pretty hot, too,” she added with a gleam in her eye. “Even in person. So many of those film types look tiny off screen, but he’s all right.”
“So glad you approve. What happened to the kids?”
She shrugged. “A nurse came in and had a cow when she saw them, so they left. I assume the film crew dropped them back at the school. Anyway, who cares about all that? What happened to you? No one can figure it out. One minute you were wandering off, talking on your cell phone, and the next thing anyone knew you were covered in blood. Did you fall?”
I stared at her, appalled. “Well, only after someone tried to kill me. Are you telling me no one is out looking for the guy?” I struggled to sit up.
“Hey, don’t do that!” she protested, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You shouldn’t be moving around yet.”
“I have to call the police,” I told her. “Someone tried to kill me.”
For a moment I could see that she wasn’t sure whether to believe me, but then her expression hardened. “Look, promise me you won’t move, and I’ll go and call Detective Gallagher. He’s been by twice, asking after you. He wanted me to call him the minute you woke up anyway.”
“He did?”
“Yup. So, let me go call.”
“Call here.”
She looked embarrassed. “They threatened to confiscate my cell phone if they caught me talking on it again. I’ll be right back.”
In my semidazed state, this seemed reasonable until the door closed behind her and I actually thought about it. Then I caught sight of the bedside phone and realized that she hadn’t wanted me to hear whatever it was she was going to say. I wasn’t sure what that meant. A number of unkind thoughts crossed my mind, ranging from thinking she needed privacy because she did not believe me and wanted to say I was raving or that she wanted to flirt with Colin. Either way, I decided I did not have enough energy to worry about it and found myself drifting into a light doze.
The next time I opened my eyes, Colin Gallagher was sitting in the chair by my bedside, thumbing through a magazine. Someone had turned off the glaring overhead lights, and the room was lit by the bluish fluorescent glow from the light strip above my bed. A curtain was drawn across the window to my left, but a slim gap revealed a night sky. Kyla was nowhere to be seen.
Colin looked up from his magazine and smiled. He was wearing a pale dress shirt, tie loosened and collar unbuttoned. The unnatural hospital lighting cast odd shadows, stripping the color from everything it touched, streaming over his high cheekbones and the planes of his face, turning his eyes into black pools under their dark brows. He looked tired.
He said, “Awake at last. How are you feeling?”
I struggled to sit up, feeling the sharp ache return to my head, but not as bad as before. Colin leaned forward and pushed a button, raising the head of my bed a few inches.
“Too early to tell. What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “About three o’clock. In the morning. I sent your sister home—she was beat.”
“Cousin,” I corrected automatically. But I was glad Kyla had gone home.
Colin rose and poured me a cup of water without being asked. I sipped gratefully, pretty sure some animal had crawled into my mouth and used it as a litter box while I slept. Lifting a cautious hand to my head, I explored the bandages stretching across my forehead and temple.
“It’s not too bad,” he said. “You have a pretty good shiner, but the swelling is already going down.”
“A shiner? You mean a black eye? Me?” My voice squeaked in alarm. “Mirror. I need a mirror.” I threw back the blankets, then realized I was still attached to tubes.
He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back in alarm. “Don’t try to get up.”
I frowned, then had another thought. “Purse. Where’s my purse? I have a mirror in there.”
A wardrobe was built into the wall on the far side of my bed. He hurriedly opened the door. “Nothing here.”
“Someone stole my purse?” My voice rose to something uncomfortably close to a shriek.
He made placating gestures with his hands. “No, no. I doubt it. I’m sure your cousin took it for safekeeping. Now why don’t you calm down? The black eye isn’t going anywhere. You’ll be able to see it in the morning. It’ll probably be even more impressive then.”
I glared at him. “If that’s supposed to be comforting…”
“No, no. I just meant…” He stopped and took a breath and started over. “Just calm down and tell me what happened. Then, when we’re done, I’ll get a nurse in here, how about that?”
I didn’t think much of it, but the need to report my attack slightly outweighed concerns about my appearance. Slightly. Besides, if it was three o’clock in the morning, he had to be exhausted.
I told him exactly what had happened in the creek bed, which didn’t take long. He listened without comment, jotting down notes. When I had finished, he looked thoughtful.
“So you don’t know which direction the guy came from?”
I tried to remember, but at last shook my head, then wished I hadn’t. A stabbing pain behind my eyes told me not to do that again. “I was facing the creek, looking away from the path. I didn’t realize he was there until the last second.”
“And this was while you were talking to me?”
“Yes, we’d just finished when I heard him. No, wait.” I tried to think back. “No, I’d heard someone a minute or two before then. I heard shoes crunching on the gravel. You know what I mean? But, I looked and didn’t see anyone, so I turned away again.”
“So it’s possible he was waiting in the bushes for a few minutes. I’ll go out there in the morning when it’s light and see what I can see. It’s unlikely I’ll find anything, but we’d better make sure.”
“Yeah,” I said, sighing.
After all, other than a few drops of my own blood, what would there be to find? The rocks of the creek would not hold footprints. Footprints. Foot. The memory of that last nasty kick suddenly returned. “You know, whoever did this was really … mean.”
“Mean? You think someone who brutally attacked you without warning, who struck you hard enough to give you a concussion, and who was apparently trying to kill you was … mean?” He mimicked my word choice and voice with some accuracy.
I wanted to be offended, but despite myself my lips twitched.
He saw it and went on. “Wow, I’d hate to have you on my jury. I bet you think that Ted Bundy was quite unpleasant and Jack the Ripper! Well, Jack was just downright naughty.”
His blue eyes crinkled as he grinned, the first real smile I’d seen from him. It changed him—the grim, tired cop transforming into a warm, attractive man. My eyes dropped briefly, taking in the long jaw, darkened slightly with a day’s growth of stubble, then moving along the width of his shoulders. Catching myself, I quickly looked away.
“Stop!” I told him, mostly because holding in laughter hurt my head. “You know what I meant. Kicking me after I was down was…” I fumbled for what I was trying to say.
He sobered, realizing what I meant. “You mean it was personal. More than just a mugging?”
“It was so angry.” Even now, I could still feel the rage and desperation that had poured from my attacker.
He thought about this, rising from his seat and pacing back and forth in the tiny space at the foot of my bed. I leaned my head back against the pillows and watched him, trying to keep my eyes from focusing on his butt. He had very longs legs and a flat stomach. Not even a hint of man-boobs.
He glanced at me. “What are you smiling at?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Hey, did you interview Ed Jones? I found out he’d been talking to Fred out by the courts the day Fred died.”
His eyes narrowed at the change of subject, but he let it go. “How did you find that out?”
“I hear things. Anyway, did you?”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell, but I talked to a lot of people. Why?”
This question stumped me. After all, did I really think Ed Jones, he of the tight knit shirts and watery eyes, had anything to do Fred’s death?
I didn’t answer. Colin shot me a curious glance but returned to the subject of my attacker.
“You think someone targeted you specifically. You weren’t just the first person on the path who looked alone and vulnerable?”
“I wasn’t carrying my purse, because I’d left it on the bus. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, so it should have been pretty obvious that I wasn’t carrying much. If the guy was a mugger, surely he would have at least been looking for wallet or keys. He didn’t even bother to go through my pockets.”
“Okay, then that brings up the standard cop question. Do you have any enemies?” He made it sound like a joke, but he also wanted an answer.
Yesterday, I would have laughed and said no. Today, in a hospital bed, IV dripping clear liquid into my veins, I had to pause and think. Did I have enemies? It seemed completely ridiculous. After all, I was cute and lovable. Then I thought about everyone I had annoyed in the past few days.
Gary Richards wasn’t happy with me about the tennis team, but he couldn’t know for sure that I’d maneuvered him into that anthill, and no one would harbor a grudge over something like that anyway. A strongly worded letter of complaint to the school board, maybe, but a sneak attack in a park? As for everyone else, Ed Jones desired the coaching position I had claimed, Nancy Wales was pissed off because I’d stopped her from running a theater sweatshop, and Roland Wilding was ticked because I’d stolen a chance for his club to be the extras in a movie, however inadvertently. But so what? Those were small things, the minor grievances of daily life in a school. Plus, did any of them really have the rage it would take to become physically violent? In fact, usually the only thing I associated with violence was drugs. Which did bring up the joints in Coach Fred’s desk—the lumpy, poorly wrapped tubes of marijuana concealed in Marlboro packs. And even those hardly counted as drugs. There weren’t enough of them to warrant a slap on the wrist, at least not in Travis County.
Unless they tied someone to murder. Had the questions I’d been asking over the past day or two been enough to get someone very worried? Beside the folks I’d annoyed, I’d spoken to Stan the Parking Nazi and to Maria Santos in the front office. Pat Carver had overheard everything I’d said to Maria, and, of course, any of them might have talked about me to anyone else. Had something I’d asked or said frightened a murderer?
Colin had stopped pacing and now stood with his arms crossed. “I wish you could see the expressions going across your face. What are you thinking about? Did you hear my question?”
“I don’t have enemies. A few people might not send me a Christmas card this year, but that’s it.”
“Okay, well, I’m going. You get some sleep, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Giving me a searching look, he left with an awkward little wave. I sat motionless as the door closed behind him with a quiet click, not quite shutting out the constant drone of hospital noises, dormant now at 3:00 A.M., but never quite still. Somewhere in the building, machines hummed without pause, nurses padded down halls in rubber-soled shoes, and janitors pushed floor polishers between yellow warning cones. I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for myself. The worst part of being single always came at moments like these when it became very clear that no one minded that I wasn’t at home in my own bed. Kyla had taken care of Belle, but other than my fat, curly-haired poodle, no one was lying alone in the dark wishing I was beside him.
I wondered what Colin Gallagher was like when he wasn’t working. There was something very attractive about the man, and more than just his looks, which were pretty darned okay all by themselves. I liked the flashes of humor I’d seen and had a feeling he’d be fun and funny when he was off duty. And I liked the way he focused on what was being said. Even when nothing important was happening, he gave the impression that he was paying attention. Of course, the unending stream of questions and his ability to track me down could get annoying. Which reminded me, I was supposed to be mad at him still for spreading rumors about drugs and Fred. And he still had Fred’s key. My key. I would ask for it tomorrow.
