In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (42 page)

Patrick smiled. “Hope for the best, Dr. Lassiter,” he said gravelly. “Just hope for the best.”

“Oh, I do, Dr. Tremayne. I most surely do!”

Mel eased down
on the air brakes, brought his semi to a gentle stop in the darkened parking lot of the abandoned strip mall. It was still pouring, but the occasional overhead flashes of lightning were decreasing. The storm moving out to sea. He looked at his watch.

“I’ll give ‘em another twenty minutes before they show. There’s no sense in getting out in this muck until we have to.”

Jake nodded. Folding his arms, he scrunched down in the seat and closed his eyes.

It was going to be a long night.

Edna Mae saw
the brown car before Del did. Leaning forward, she tapped him on the shoulder. “There’s Thais.”

The station wagon pulled in just behind the other car and both parked as close to the limo as space would allow. One of the occupants of the car got out and climbed into the back of the station wagon.

“You ready, Miss Edna?” Delbert asked as he reached for the handle to the limo’s door.

“Yes.”

It was a wet, slippery run to the car for Edna Mae and Del. They nodded a quick greeting to the female patrolman who passed them on her way to the limo. Once inside the car’s musty interior, Edna Mae let out a long breath.

“Any word?” she asked.

“Not yet.” Thais introduced them to the law enforcement officers who were in the front seat.

The CB came alive with the female state trooper’s throaty voice. “You boys be careful now, you hear?”

The limo’s lights came on and it pulled out of the rest area on its way back to the rental agency in New Orleans.

The parking lot
of the Hancock Medical Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was nearly barren as Galen Dupree headed for the emergency entrance. He was more than aware of the ambulance nearly on his heels.

“Here we go,” Galen whispered as he began to maneuver his vehicle up to the emergency room doors. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two men piling out of the other ambulance’s rear doors.

Andrew Tremayne
was vaguely aware of the people from the hospital emergency room coming out of the building pushing a gurney, but his eyes were on the ambulance that contained his brother.

“What you got?” the head nurse shouted at Galen as he stepped out of the ambulance.

“Stop,” Tremayne yelled, pointing at the people gathering around. “I demand you stop!!”

Galen smiled at the head nurse, opened the doors of his ambulance and grunted as Beecher reached out to shove him aside for Andrew Tremayne.

Without stopping to think, Andrew climbed into the ambulance, his eyes wide and flashing, his lips drawn back over clenched teeth. He came to a skidding stop when the woman lying on the ambulance’s gurney sat up and let out an ungodly scream.

“What the...?” Andrew said as he stared down at the screeching woman. “Where is James?”

“James?” the woman bellowed. “Who the hell is James???”

The head nurse’s forehead crinkled. “What’s going on here?”

“Where the hell is my brother?” Andrew screamed at the ambulance driver.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the driver snapped. “Get the hell out of there so I can get this woman into delivery. Can’t you see she’s about to have a baby?”

For the first time Andrew noticed the huge mound that was the woman’s belly. He stared at her for a split second, then pushed angrily out of the ambulance. He turned deadly eyes to the driver of his own ambulance.

“You’ve been following the wrong damned ambulance, you imbecile!”

Andrew strode to his ambulance with the others in tow.

“Call in the chopper from New Orleans,” Andrew yelled. “Find that ambulance!”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Tremayne,” the ambulance driver shouted as he climbed hastily behind the wheel of his vehicle.

“May I ask
what’s going on here?” the head nurse inquired after the one ambulance peeled out of the parking lot and into the flowing darkness beyond.

“Nothing,” Galen answered. He smiled. “Just a case of stupidity, I suppose.”

She sniffed. “Well, let’s get this lady into—”

“There’s no need,” Ellen replied as she flung aside the blanket covering her and removed the pillow resting on her stomach. “We were just making a practice run.”

Half an hour
later, Galen drove his ambulance into the back of Mel’s semi and parked his vehicle behind the one already there, got out and joined Carol Remington and Ellen Vittetoe inside the sleeper of the cab. It was a tight fit, but it would have to do until they met up with the motor home.

“Got word from Snowbird that the boy is doing better,” Jake told Galen as Mel shifted the rig out onto the highway. “They’ve got him stabilized.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,” Galen sighed. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

At 3:20 in
the morning in the parking lot of the Florida welcome station just west of Pensacola, two people transferred from the cramped sleeper of Mel Vanderwoode’s semi to the relative comfort of Dick Warrington’s motor coach.

The semi gave a light blast of its air horn as it pulled out of the parking lot and headed for Birmingham, then Memphis to deliver the ambulances back to their rightful owners.

Across the rainy parking lot of the welcome station, the driver of the station wagon turned on its headlights and backed out of the slot in which the wagon had been sitting. Inside, behind the steamy windows, three law enforcement officers talked quietly among themselves as the fourth member of their fraternity pulled onto Interstate 10. Glancing behind him, Thais saw Edna Mae and Delbert entering the motor home from the welcome station’s brightly lit interior. He turned to Galen and smiled.

At 3:30 a.m.
, the motor home eased onto the concrete slab of I-10 heading for its connection to I-75 that would take those inside up through Georgia.

At 4:06 a.m., Andrew Tremayne finally got up enough nerve to call his father to tell him they had lost James.

At 4:45 a.m., at the Santa Rosa Truck Stop in Milton, Florida, Edna Mae made a call to Iowa.

At just a little past 10 a.m. the next morning, as the motor home neared Valdosta, Georgia, on I-75, Liam Tremayne began to experience something he had never thought he ever would—towering fear.

He came awake
slowly, reluctantly, because his head throbbed with an intense agony behind his right eye and his stomach rolled with nausea. There was movement beneath him: slight bumps, jars, and a whining sound he couldn’t quite identify. He wondered why he didn’t smell the antiseptic stench of betadine and alcohol; why he didn’t hear the mumbling voices of the nurses and orderlies going about their tasks outside his room. Dimly, he was aware of a different feel to the mattress upon which he lay, a hardness that seemed vaguely out of place.

Without opening his eyes, he moved his hand along the sheet and encountered a rough, textured surface that somehow felt all wrong. It didn’t feel like his blanket. In fact, it didn’t feel like anything he was accustomed to. He shifted and heard a tinny squeak as springs popped beneath him. His brow furrowed and he concentrated on experiencing the aches and pains that tormented his body. He could feel the IV in his arm and wondered briefly why they’d felt the need to feed him in that manner, but mentally shrugged away the question. Why did they do anything to him?

“Gabe?”

Somewhere above him, to his left, he heard the soft, feminine voice, but it meant nothing to him. The name meant nothing, so he ignored it, knowing whomever had spoken had not been speaking to him.

“Gabe?”

He wished whoever the hell it was would leave him alone.
Go away. Drop off the face of the earth.
He hurt so bad, felt so rotten, that the single word was like an ice pick being driven in his ear.

Another sound, spoken with more authority, broke over him in a wave of agony. “Jamie?”

Slowly, with little real inclination to do so, he opened his eyes. There was a bright light above him, two blurred, floating faces he couldn’t quite see or make out looking down at him. He squinted, trying to block out most of the light, closed his eyes again to keep the pain at bay. He winced as the stronger, male voice spoke again.

“Does your head hurt?”

“Go away,” he forced himself to mumble. The sound of his own voice was excruciating and he pressed his cheek down into the cool softness of his pillow.

Again the voice skewered into his pounding brain. “Give me fifty of demerol, Jen.”

He felt his arm being lifted, something cold and clammy being wrapped around his upper arm. He tried to pull away, but the movement brought fresh pain to his head and he groaned.

“Hang in there, buddy,” the masculine voice whispered to him as the blood pressure cuff began to fill and a tight constriction banded his arm.

“Please,” he sighed, wanting to be left alone. He was so tired of them hurting him.

“Can you turn over on your side?” the feminine voice asked him as the sheet covering him was pulled away.

“No.” He heard the petulance in his voice and flinched, thinking they would hurt him for sure now. He forced his eyes open and tried to look at the woman, but all he could see was the round blob of a face bending over him. “Leave me alone.”

Gentle hands, warm and soft, reached under him and carefully rolled him toward the right. He felt hands on his pajama bottoms, pulling them down over his hip, exposing his flesh to the cool air. He opened his mouth to protest as the chill wash of alcohol swabbed over his skin and the woman’s velvety hands spread over his hip.

“You’re going to feel a little prick,” she told him just before the needle slid into him.

The liquid fire spread through his muscle and he whimpered, hating the feel, knowing what it would do to him. Even as they rolled him back over and adjusted the sheet, the languid unreality of the drug began to take hold.

“Shit,” he managed to mumbled.

“Give it a few minutes and the pain should be gone,” the man told him.

He felt the pain receding, leaving him, and he sighed. There was a heaviness in his chest, a pressure on his senses that commanded him to sleep, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t. A part of him wanted desperately to know what game they were playing with him now. With a great deal of effort, he made his eyes open and he willed them to focus on the faces.

“How ya doing?” the masculine voice asked.

James Gabriel Tremayne stared up at the face weaving into focus. He concentrated hard on making out the features.

“Do you remember who we are?” the feminine voice inquired.

He shifted his eyes to her. Her face—smiling, sweet, freckles ranging blatantly across her pert nose and sun-blushed cheeks, green eyes warm and friendly—looked down at him with expectation. He could see worry in her eyes.

He shook his head. He didn’t know her.

“How about me?” the man asked.

There was something vaguely familiar about the man. His ruddy complexion bore the unmistakable stamp of the outdoors. The man was deep into middle age—fifty, sixty, maybe. His face was craggy, his eyes showing many years of seeing what probably shouldn’t ever have been seen in them. There was a gentleness in those eyes, but a great sadness as well. The peaked eyebrows, silver-shot hair, the rugged build all seemed familiar, but the name wouldn’t surface.

He shook his head. He couldn’t really remember ever seeing the man at the clinic before.

“Do you know where you are?” It was another voice, deeper, more gruff, filled with impatience.

He looked past the woman and saw a man standing behind her. As he watched, all three people swayed and the bed beneath him lurched upwards. He heard the blare of a horn and blinked.

“You’re in a motor home.”

The explanation might as well have been someone telling him he was on his way to Mars. His eyes widened and he tried to lift his head, tried to look around him, but couldn’t. He glanced up and saw a ceiling that wasn’t the white tile that stretched over his bed in the clinic. Shifting his vision, he saw curtains, moving gently to some unknown rhythm. He saw polished oak and a fancy wallboard, saw what looked like cabinets at the far reach of his vision. Slowly, his eyes shifted back to the woman.

“It’s all right, sweetie,” she told him. “You’re safe now. You’re with people who love you.”

He closed his eyes.

He wondered where they were taking him. What godawful place would be his prison. Who would be his warders from then on.

He sank down into a silent, uncommunicative limbo into which no one could follow. Their words passed over him like flotsam along the seashore. He went deeper beneath the waves, shutting out their gentle words, wondering when their anger at him would surface and their real purpose make itself known.