Reckless Page 11

  The village lay in ruins, hit by allied bombers that had flown in earlier; trying to dislodge the last of the Iraqi soldiers fleeing Kuwait as the U.S.-led forces moved in to liberate the land. A row of captured soldiers stood at the edge of the village, hands locked behind their heads. “Poor bastards,” someone said. Some of the Iraqis wept in gratitude.

  Jake prowled the village, feeling sick. It was sparsely populated. Most of the occupants had fled into the desert when the Iraqis invaded, and it had been bombed as a known headquarters for Saddam Hussein’s army.

  But not everyone had fled. Toward dusk came a cry, high and thin and miserable. Jake heard it and carefully worked his way from house to house, calling out. He finally located the child in a ruin, a single hand stretching from underneath a pile of rubble. When Jake closed his hand around the small, cold fingers, the child cried out again, a piercing, hurting, lonely cry. Jake yelled for a cluster of soldiers to come over and see what could be done, then asked one of the Iraqis to tell the child they were doing what they could.

  The child screamed as they started to dismantle the building, and a medic shook his head. Jake insisted they keep on, the little boy’s hand clutching his in a fierce, unyielding grip.

  The last scream was the worst. The pressure of the debris that had kept the boy’s wounds from killing him also masked his pain, and when the final load was removed, the child breathed his last with the most unholy sound of pain Jake had ever heard.

  It tore into Jake’s mind, shattering his sleep, and he bolted upright, blinking. His eyes flew to the clock—he’d been sleeping exactly seventeen minutes.

  And now the panic attacked in full force. Rushing, he put on a light jacket and grabbed his car keys. He couldn’t quite catch his breath as he fumbled with the door. Once outside in the bright, clean light of early morning, he sucked in a deep lungful of air and leaned against the wall.

  As his breath returned, despair followed close behind. He pressed his forehead against the rough wood wall. He was losing his mind. Day by day, piece by piece. He felt utterly isolated, the man caught on the wrong side of the movie screen again. Restless and aimless, he got in his car and started driving. Just picked a road and followed it.

  A strange exhilaration grew as he made his way around the sharp mountain turns and up and down steep hills. The car responded to his quest for more speed with nary a jump, and he clamped both hands on the wheel. Wind blew in through the open window, cold and light and breathable. The ZZ Top cassette stuck out of the tape deck and he shoved it in, letting La Grange blaze from the speakers.

  Fear. All he had to face was his fear. The road was as intimate to him as his own body, and he stepped on the accelerator with giddy pleasure, feeling the wild mix of adrenaline and terror and excitement roar together through his blood as his speed increased and the car responded as if it was made for this.

  The tires hit leftover winter gravel on one of the passes, and for a blinding, terrifying second, Jake teetered between control and disaster, fighting to save himself from the hundred-foot drop over the edge of the mountain. When the car smoothly regained its grip on the road, he laughed aloud.

  His highest speed ever on this same road was seventy-seven miles an hour, clocked in a race with his brother, Lance—which Jake had won. Their mother, learning of the crazy race, had taken their car keys for a month.

  Now he eyed the speedometer. It read seventy-four miles an hour, and the hard turn was coming up. He edged up a mile at a time, loving the giddy thrill of the car hugging the road like a skier on the slopes, steady and easy. Seventy-five and the road began to rise and turn.

  He pressed a little harder, focusing utterly on the challenge. Seventy-six, and the wind whipped through the car with a violent noise, tossing his hair in and out of his eyes.

  Seventy-seven... Jake grinned and pushed it even higher. Seventy-eight. He roared around the turn, slid on a rock and skittered, bumping the guardrail lightly, then breaking free.

  He whooped on the downward side, sticking his fist out the window, and raced downward now, heading for the last turn and then a straight shot into town. Seventy-nine... eighty...eighty-two. He gripped the wheel and leaned close over it, feeling like a racing driver headed for the finish line.

  He took the last wide turn at ninety-three, an almost sickening speed in any other vehicle, but the tiny sports car took it as if she’d been raised by mountain goats. He laughed, loving the way his terror had evaporated now and was replaced with pure, almost sexual, exhilaration.

  At the foot of the hill, he saw the sheriff’s car too late. Plainly marked, it waited behind a tree near the Mallard place. By the time he fully registered the police car, Jake had zoomed by it at an unbelievable ninety-five. Wouldn’t need radar to check his speed.

  Fast.

  The lights and siren came on instantly, and Jake gradually pressed his foot to the brakes, slowing a little at a time. Eighty-eight...eighty-four... seventy-nine.

  His undoing was a simple cardboard box, torn by the wind from someone’s trash, no doubt. It danced over the highway on a current of wind, and as Jake approached, it flew up in the wake left by a truck just ahead.

  There wasn’t time to dodge it. Jake slammed on the brakes and held on to the wheel as the cardboard was blown over the windshield and plastered there by his speed. He shouted a curse and swerved toward the grassy field on the side of the road. The car took it for one minute, and Jake thought he was going to be okay.

  It bumped wildly over ruts in the earth, and then he heard a sickening, deep thunk. The steering wheel was torn out of his hands and he was flung to one side. The car veered crazily on two wheels. Then, as if in slow motion, it tipped over out of control and still going way too fast. Instinctively, Jake put his hands over his face as the car went into a full roll. He had an impression of something coming through the windshield, then everything went mercifully, silently black.

  Chapter 10

  Ramona’s beeper went off at 6:02 a.m. She was not sleeping—the alarm had rung ten minutes ago, and she’d smacked the snooze button. In the drowsy confusion of awakening, she thought at first it was the alarm going off again and hit the button twice before she realized it was her beeper.

  Instantly, she was on the phone to the dispatcher. “Car accident on Gate Pass,” the man on the line told her. “One man. Maybe serious. The ambulance is on its way out.”

  It took three minutes to brush her teeth and throw on her sweats and tennis shoes. In five, she was on her way down the hill toward town.

  For all its recent advancements, Red Creek still had inadequate medical service. The clinic Ramona ran served a population of ten thousand residents scattered over a sixty-square-mile county, a county with an average altitude of seven thousand feet. One other doctor operated in town, and the VA home boasted two resident physicians, with a host of specialists who could be summoned from Denver.

  When Ramona had accepted the job heading the clinic, she had insisted the emergency room—the only one for over seventy miles—be upgraded. With the ski slopes so close, she wanted to be able to handle traumatic injuries in case of inclement weather. An emergency medical helicopter was parked in the police department headquarters and could transport cases to Denver in just under thirty minutes, but patients often needed to be stabilized first.

  The number of emergencies was no higher than average, but given the combination of the slopes, winding mountain roads and a lot of flatlanders who didn’t respect the roads or the weather they way they should, sometimes the emergencies were quite serious.

  She beat the ambulance by five minutes. Her nurse, shoving a cap over her head, had beaten Ramona by one. As the siren and lights roared toward the clinic, Ramona said, “Did you hear anything on the scanner?”

  Christy shook her head. “Only that it was a rollover at the foot of Gate Pass. Possible head injury.”

  The ambulance drew up and both women looked toward it. The back doors opened, and the ambulance driver turned to
pull out the gurney. Obviously, the patient was alive—and very unhappy. Ramona couldn’t see him, but she gave Christy a wry glance at the complaints pouring out of the ambulance. “I’m fine! Let me out of here!”

  Jake.

  She recognized the voice an instant before he was wheeled out on the gurney. His dark hair was matted with blood. Streaks of blood and dirt marred his face. His blue eyes were startlingly bright He saw Ramona and swore.

  For one brief moment, her heart gave a tight, fierce squeeze. A rollover in his sporty, impractical little car. He could have been killed.

  It nearly paralyzed her, and Ramona wondered if she ought to call in another doctor. The paramedic muttered, “He’s mouthy as hell, but his blood pressure indicates shock. Maybe a concussion by the pupils.”

  Galvanized, Ramona moved forward, feeling the objective and scientific physician take charge as they moved him inside. She gave orders and checked him over. Definitely a concussion, and the gash on his head would require a substantial number of stitches. Dark bruises marked one shoulder and arm. His left cheekbone was scraped and bruised.

  He said nothing as she stitched up the cut on his head. Ramona respected his silence until she’d tied the last—the sixteenth—stitch on his scalp. “That’s it,” she said, putting her scissors on the tray. “We’re going to keep you overnight just for observation, but you should be able to go home tomorrow.”

  “Fine.” He didn’t meet her eyes.

  Ramona looked at her nurse. “I’ll take it from here. You can check out if you like.”

  Christy looked from Jake to Ramona and an almost imperceptible smile touched her mouth. “Will do, Doc.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got just about enough time to catch some breakfast at the B&B café. Join me there if you can?”

  “I will.”

  She exited, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the highly waxed linoleum floor. Ramona watched her go, then turned back to Jake in the silence left behind.

  His eyes were lowered. A bluish swelling marked his left cheekbone, creeping into the vulnerable tissue below his eye. He looked weary and lost and utterly impenetrable. He must have felt Ramona’s perusal, but he didn’t show it.

  “What were you thinking, Jake?” she finally asked.

  A studied shrug.

  “You were damned lucky not to kill yourself.”

  He nodded.

  Ramona inclined her head. “Was that the whole idea? Just kill yourself and be done with it?”

  “No!” The answer was vehement. “I couldn’t sleep, so I got in the car, trying to...I don’t know. Just...” His jaw tightened. “I don’t know. Escape.”

  Ramona reached for his hand. It was cold, and across the knuckles were a series of small scrapes. “The sleeping pills aren’t working anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we’ll try something else, then. Some people develop a tolerance to almost any drug very quickly—and you might be one of them. That was a pretty mild sedative, too. Maybe we’ll try something stronger.”

  Touching her patients was something Ramona did instinctively—a hand to the arm or shoulder, or the clasp of fingers, gave strength and calmed distressed or weary people. Jake’s hand lay like wax under hers, and she felt suddenly like a teenager making up an excuse to touch the object of her crush. She stuck her hands in her pockets.

  “But, Jake,” she said, “I don’t really think any sleeping aids are going to help you until you can get to the root of your problems. Think of your trauma as a boil—it’s going to cause you pain until it’s drained of its poison.”

  “What the hell do you know about it, Ramona?” Bitterness drew his face into a sharp mask. “You sit here in your safe little world and your safe little life, making jelly and playing Mother Earth. You don’t know a damn thing about my life.”

  She could have sworn he was very close to tears. It was nothing so definite as a sheen in his eyes or a waver in his voice, just a sense that it took everything he had to turn his sorrow to anger. Mildly, she said, “Appearances can be deceiving.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They have group sessions at the VA home. You’re not the only soldier to ever experience this problem, and you might find it helps to talk to others.”

  “Leave me alone, Doc. Get the hell out of here and go preach your love and truth to someone else.”

  Ramona told herself his anger was only a manifestation of pain, that he was struggling with feelings he couldn’t name and didn’t dare confront, but his rejection stung anyway. She nodded. “Try to get some rest.”

  His snort of ironic laughter rang a long time in her ears.

  Louise was fixing breakfast when the call came in from Ramona. She had bacon sizzling in a big cast-iron skillet, enough to feed herself and Alonzo, who stayed in the guest house and somehow managed to appear at just the right moment every morning. Weekdays, she got up at six to cook so he’d have something in his stomach before he went off to work, and she’d grown used to the easy, quiet camaraderie of the man these past months.

  He came in at seven, his black hair neatly combed away from his face, his work shirt clean and pressed, his hands clean. He smelled of after-shave. “Buenos días,” he said.

  Louise smiled. “Same to you, handsome. I’ve just about got everything ready. Sit down and have a cup of coffee.” The phone rang, and Louise picked it up without the slightest presentiment of danger. “Good morning!”

  “Louise, this is Dr. Hardy. Look, he’s okay, but Jake has been in an accident and I’m keeping him overnight at the clinic. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “What, an-accident?” Louise sank onto a chair. “Jake? What happened?”

  “He rolled his car at the foot of Gate Pass. He’s got a concussion and I put stitches in his head. By tomorrow morning, he’s going to look like he was in a brawl, but the injuries are not serious.”

  A cold fist hit Louise’s stomach. She bowed her head and rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to take it in. “Rolled his car?”

  “Louise, he’s all right.”

  Across the screen of a mother’s imagination, Louise saw the sporty car rolling over and over, crushing the body of her son within, tearing his body to shreds. “He was lucky.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Yes,” Ramona agreed.

  Louise straightened. “I’ll be over there in a little while.”

  “Good.”

  As she hung up, Alonzo asked, “Bad news?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Not good. Jake rolled that damned car of his. He’s at the clinic. I’m sorry about breakfast, but I’m going to have to run over there.” With shaky hands, she untied her apron, then moved the skillet from the burner and turned everything off. Struggling for control, she said, “I reckon there’s enough bacon cooked and you can scramble some eggs and eat that.”

  “No, no. I will drive you.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to put yourself out.” She blinked. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  And then, somehow, Alonzo was beside her, and his arms were around her, solid and strong, and his shoulder was exactly the right height for her to lean her head on. His shirt smelled of after-shave and laundry soap. It had been so long—so long—since she’d had the comfort of a man’s arms. Years and years. She let her arms snake around his waist, where he carried somehow comforting love handles made of tortillas and pork.

  “I’m so worried about him, Alonzo.”

  “I know.”

  “He doesn’t care about anything. Nothing. I don’t know how to help him.”

  Alonzo’s hand moved on her hair. “Just love him. That is all a mother can do.”

  She allowed herself to lean on him for a few minutes longer. Since he had moved into the guest house last fall, Louise and Alonzo had become good friends. Both widowed, in their late fifties, it had been only natural. Alonzo missed home cooking, and Louise missed cooking for others. It had been a natural and companionable relationship.

/>   But as she rested in his arms, Louise felt something else stir, something she could have sworn was nearly dead. Against her breasts, his chest was smooth and hard, and his hands moved gently on her hair. A sudden surge of heat swept through her body, and embarrassed, she made to step away.

  He didn’t let her. He caught her arms just above the elbows, and Louise looked up at him in surprise. He was not a great deal taller than she, and his face was very close. The warm brown eyes did not twinkle just now, and his mouth under the thick black mustache was serious. Caught in her strange rush of emotion, Louise only looked at him, sure it couldn’t be desire she saw on his handsome face. Not for her—a plump matron who never remembered to get her hair cut regularly, a woman who’d not been able to keep her own husband at her side even when she was young and slim and attractive.

  But it looked like desire. His gaze, so rich and warm, touched upon her lips, and against her arms his thumbs moved in that restless, unmistakable way that meant a man wanted to put his whole hand somewhere a lot less proper than her elbow.

  Suddenly, he stepped back, letting go of her. “We should go. eh?”

  Flustered, Louise only nodded. Of course he wasn’t attracted to her. How ridiculous.

  In her office, Ramona gnawed a pencil distractedly. She had about three dozen different items of paperwork to be addressed, but she couldn’t focus. Her mind kept straying to the clinic’s single patient.

  Just after Louise and Alonzo had left, the sheriff had come in and cited Jake for reckless driving, careless driving and speeding. Ramona grew dizzy when she saw the speed the sheriff had recorded: ninety-six miles an hour.

  On the downward stretch of Gate Pass.

  It made her feel ill to think of what might have happened. Not only to Jake, either. If he’d lost control when there had been other cars around, he might have killed someone else.

  Jake showed no emotion when he was ticketed. No remorse, no fear, not even resignation. He simply accepted the tickets, put them in the drawer with his wallet and lay back on the pillows. Ramona, watching from the hall, experienced the fear on his behalf.