Protecting His Witness

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.