Safe in the car, alone in the car, Temple felt pain pool into one tidal wave of agony and almost swallow her.
Home. She had to get home. Safe at home. Keys in ignition. Yes. Taken-for-granted motions were returning. Her teeth suddenly started chattering, scaring her more than the pain, than the mental haze that still surrounded her. Shock. Shouldn’t drive. Had to. They might come back.
The Storm’s valiant little engine purred obediently at the right movements with the key. She would have to shift with her right arm. Ow. Reverse. Back out. The pallid red reflections of her own taillights startled her into braking sharply for an instant. Then the car was backed up. She gritted her teeth and pushed the automatic gear into Drive. The Storm was idling along to the exit ramp, ready to circle down. No one coming. She entered the concrete corkscrew. Dizzy, oh God! She hit the brakes, then reconsidered. Had to circle out. Had to. Only way.
Every turn set the whole gray concrete world lurching, made her stomach do somersaults. She turned and turned and turned before finally seeing the straight stretch that led to the attendant’s booth. Maybe here—?
But the sullen young man on duty barely glanced at the guest parking placard on her dashboard, and she was already beyond him, rolling toward a wall of blazing Nevada sunshine.
Sunglasses! Her right hand pawed for the familiar case in her disheveled tote. She must find her sunglasses before her bloodshot eyes hit blaring daylight. She had to see better to drive in traffic.
Her fingers played blindman’s buff among a raft of displaced items—makeup bag, not glasses case!—while the Storm rolled toward a force field of sunlight as inevitable as a wall of fire. Then she clutched the padded vinyl case, clawed the glasses out, forced the bows open and clapped the glasses to her face just in time.
Masked, disguised, sheltered, she breathed again. She could see to drive. She could get home. Or should she drive downtown to the police station? No. Far. And she’d have to say why. They wouldn’t believe her, or if they did, she’d get Max in more trouble. Apparently he was in enough already.
Las Vegas streets were clean, uncomplicated, pin-straight for the most part. The Storm virtually smelled the way home, the wheel canting right and left in a specific rhythm. Second nature took over. Even the occasional red light passed in a blur of gleaming, sun-baked auto bodies and the funny static buzz in Temple’s head, funny because she didn’t have the radio on.
And finally every tree looked familiar and the oleanders were massing in predictable clumps. The driveway into the Circle Ritz parking lot was one more right turn away, one more interminable pull on her bad right arm.
Someone had left the shady spot for her.
Temple struggled out of the car in the reverse order of her painful entrance. She teetered beside it for numb instants before she locked it, hating to leave her mobile safety zone. Maybe the men were waiting for her here. No. Too close to where she lived, not enough crowds around to disguise their purpose. Too many witnesses who might know her. No. Besides, they’d have to tangle with Midnight Louie, almost-twenty-pound watchcat, if they tried anything funny in her own place. Right.
She lurched forward, touching the ball of her left foot to the asphalt and keeping her heel in the air at the right height, so she barely limped. Like the wine, the properly aged instep remembers. She was amazed to find a rueful brand of humor resurfacing amid the shock and pain, like unsuspected flotsam from a shipwreck. Something she could hold on to.
Just a few more steps to the gate. Once there, she struggled to open it, her key ring and the severed heel still keeping clumsy company in her right hand, her left arm captive to the heavy tote bag slung over the wrist.
The cumbersome stockade gate scraped across the concrete and pulled shut again as ungraciously, but at last it was latched. She could cross the searing cement to the nondescript side door that offered shade and safety in equally blessed doses.
Only a few more steps. This one. That one. Careful. Don’t shake the shoulder, the head, the eyes. Step as daintily as a cat on a hot tin roof. Fire-walking.
She was halfway there when the voice came.
“Temple,” it said.
She paused, swallowing. Her throat was as sore as if she had strep. Temple. She had to think about that one.
“Temple?”
Closer now, the voice. It was becoming a person. She didn’t want to see a person. She didn’t want a person to see her. She froze like a rabbit. A stupid, helpless rabbit on a moonlit lawn. Maybe you can’t see me. Maybe you will just go away, or I will. Maybe—
“Temple, what happened?”
Shocked now, the voice, and too familiar to ignore. She turned, looked through the comforting dark of her glasses to find Matt Devine approaching her in cautious disbelief, like a nosy neighbor in a TV commercial viewed through a distorting fish-eye lens.
Go away! she wanted to scream, but her throat hurt too much to shout.
“Good God, Temple, what happened to you?” he demanded in the hushed, awestruck tones reserved for funerals and hospital rooms.
The words, the shock, did what she had feared. They released the logjam in her emotions, rejoined her physical and mental selves, forced her stability meter off the scale.
She opened her right hand, where the keys she’d clutched had impressed their cryptic profiles into her flesh, across her lifeline and headline and heartline. The severed heel lay there, too, a greater cipher to anyone but her.
She felt the tide coming, sensed the flash flood behind her eyes, heard the flux thickening her voice. “They... they broke it. They broke the heel off my shoe,” she managed to explain, heartbroken as a child with a shattered toy, before she began sobbing.
17
Official Abuse
“I hate this,” Temple muttered, tears and a blood taste mingling on her lips.
She leaned against the welcome support of the faded chartreuse wall outside her condominium. Matt had set the tote at their feet and was frowning at her key ring in the dimly lit entryway.
He had reacted to her breakdown with swift, masculine action. He had taken the tote bag in one hand, then scooped her up and carried her in, up in the elevator, and to the door of her unit.
Not long ago she would have adored being swooped away in Matt Devine’s strong, lightly tanned arms. Of course in her imagination she would have been perfectly coiffed, gowned and made up and they would have been heading for a devoutly mutual rendezvous somewhere high above the city. She had not yet decided where.
But now the ease with which he had swept her off her feet, however gallant and practical the intention, only reminded her how easily the two thugs had overcome her free will by the same expedient. Besides, now she felt like a child who’d been in a scrape at school—dirty, humiliated and in the wrong, somehow, for being hurt at all.
The right key finally clicked and Matt picked up her bag and took her elbow to guide her inside. Her right elbow. She cringed away, sucking in her breath.
His hand dropped as if he had touched a hot burner. Temple tottered in on her own power, through the hallway and into the living room, where she sat on the white-muslin-upholstered sofa.
Matt gingerly set the tote bag down on the cocktail table in front of her. “Can I get you anything?”
“Water.”
He vanished, and Temple looked around cautiously, toting up her possessions, marking their unchanged presence, becoming thankful for that.
He returned with a lowball glass full. Apparently he hadn’t found the twelve-ounce tumblers in the next cabinet. She found it hard to swallow, and the liquid didn’t help her stomach.