“No. You won’t.” It was an order, not a medical opinion.
Screw him.
“Yes, I might.” And Jane meant it. Her stomach was in her throat, and her heart was down in her gut. She’d hit her head, and her legs were shaking, and the thin line of terrified horror that had shot through her when Corinna had taken her dive was still thrumming through her body.
She’d thought it was the end. That he’d forgotten where he was and taken a wrong turn. No one, she’d thought, who remembered that there was no floor in a certain warehouse would drive into that warehouse at eighty miles an hour, just hitting the brakes after it was damn well too late.
“You’re fine,” he said calmly.
“That’s what you said when we crashed.”
“We didn’t crash.”
The hell we didn’t.
God, it was dark.
What in the world had she gotten herself into? she wondered. The scraping sound of metal. The vertigo-inducing angle of their descent into this black pit. The rolling of her stomach. The awful sinking feeling of thinking she’d come to her end—the fear, stark and terrifying … Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Three years at the Immaculate Heart School for Young Women in Phoenix hadn’t left her particularly prayerful. The whole time she’d been there, a good ninety percent of her prayers had been to get out. But tonight she’d found a reason to petition the Sacred Virgin.
“If you turn on the lights, we can see where we are,” she suggested.
“I know where we are.”
Good. That was great—for him, king of the one-line response. For the record, she didn’t know where they were, enough reason for her to want to shed a little light on the situation, that and the trembling she couldn’t seem to control.
“We can’t just sit here in the dark.” Really, she couldn’t, not pitch dark, not tomb dark, and if he’d remembered anything about her, he would have remembered that.
“Yes, we can.”
Okay. Fine. If he wanted to play it that way, she could sit in the dark as long as he could, maybe longer … maybe not.
The last time she’d seen him, the night before he’d left and not come back, they’d ended up in a place this dark. He’d taken her out east of the city, to the Midnight Doubles, a place she’d heard about lots of times but had never seen. They’d watched the races and wagered a meal on the outcome, and as much as she’d known she was going to miss him, she was glad to have the bet: win or lose. She’d wanted to know she would see him again, and he’d promised her she would. That he’d be gone for a few months, but probably not six months, and that he’d be thinking about her while he was gone to wherever he was going, which he’d never said. She’d found out later, at his funeral, when the country of Colombia had been mentioned during the service.
Colombia—she’d thought at the time that she’d never heard of such an exotic place, and that she’d never so hated a place, because J. T. Chronopolous had gone down there and died.
But the night before he’d left hadn’t been about dying—it had been about living…
Wynkoop and 18th, eight p.m.—Jane hurried along the street, excitement running through her veins, happy. She was meeting J.T. again. Two days after their breakfast at Duffy’s, they’d had lunch at a great Mexican restaurant in town, Mama Guadaloupe’s. The whole thing had been very cool. He was practically famous at Mama’s, and everyone had made a big fuss over him and over her, and tonight they were meeting for dinner.
They weren’t dating. There was nothing date-like about the meals they shared. She very much got the feeling that he was feeding her—and she had no complaints. Great food served hot was always welcome.
But he thought she was beautiful. He’d said so that first night, and they were headed out to the car races at the Midnight Doubles.
Three more blocks to go and right on time. She came around the corner onto Wynkoop from 15th and ran into a man coming out of the bookstore with a bag of books. It was nothing, just a small run-in, an accident, the sort of thing that happened hundreds of times a day on every block in the city—but she got the guy’s wallet.
She ran into people all the time, at least four or five times a day when