Obsession (6 page)

“Lisa,” she cried in terrified warning as she instinctively ducked down beside the dryer. “Look out.”

Whirling, Lisa recognized her danger instantly. Katharine saw her spot the pistol, and the emotions that flitted in rapid succession over Lisa’s face were as heartrending as they were impossible to mistake. Her eyes went huge; her mouth contorted. Her face turned ghostly white in the reflected light. Katharine could read her fear and desperation in every tense line of her body. Her hands came up in a classic defensive gesture.
"No . . .”

Katharine was still looking at Lisa when she heard a peculiar whistling sound.
What?

Her head was in the process of instinctively snapping around to try to ascertain what the hell that was when the answer became clear. Lisa squealed, the cry fraught with shock and pain. Katherine watched with disbelief as her friend was lifted off her feet and slammed hard against the door as if she had been picked up and thrown against it by an invisible hand. Behind her, the window shattered with a boom of exploding glass. The tinkle of glass raining down on the concrete steps and walk outside formed an eerie accompaniment to Katharine’s horrified realization that Lisa had just been shot. The whistling sound—the gun was clearly equipped with a silencer—that she had heard was the bullet speeding past.

“Lisa,” she screamed, too overwrought in that moment of extremis to remember her own danger. Surging to her feet, she darted toward her friend as Lisa’s limp body slowly slumped to the floor.

“Bitch.” The guttural expletive from the doorway was the only warning she got before a metallic
thwack
sounded right behind her.

Katharine’s every sense refocused and went on red alert. A bullet had just smacked into the corner of the dryer. A bullet aimed at
her.
If she hadn’t moved at that exact moment, she would have been hit. Her stomach knotted. Her skin crawled. With all need for concealment past now, she let loose with a scream that would have done a teen fright-queen proud, the sound tearing painfully out of her throat, echoing off the walls, never-ending. A lightning glance back over her shoulder revealed that the shooter was all the way inside the small room now. He was on the move, taking up a stance in the corner, positioning himself so that he had a clear shot at her as she hurtled toward Lisa—and the door. Another male silhouette—the second bad guy—filled the doorway where he had been.

The shadowy figure that was the shooter grunted in answer as he crouched slightly, both hands steadying the gun as it tracked her flight. Cold sweat broke over Katharine in an icy wave. Her heart pounded out a desperate rhythm: She had to escape, had to escape, had to escape. . . .

There was no way out.

As she waited with agonizing certainty for the bullet to slam into her back, time seemed to slow to a crawl. It was almost as if she had become separate from her body and was observing herself from a distance. It was, she thought grimly, the out-of-body experience from hell. She was still screaming, long, continuous riffs of sound over which she had absolutely no control. Her frantic shrieks ripped through the miasma of fear and violence and imminent death that shimmered like heat vapor in the small room.

No more than a couple of seconds could have passed. Terror sharpened her mind as it lent strength to her limbs and wings to her feet. In that instant of terrible clarity, as she raced toward the locked door and felt the tingle of a gun taking aim at her back, she already knew that she had no chance. There was no way she was going to be able to fit the key in the lock and get the door open before they shot her. She was as trapped in that small, dark laundry room as any cornered animal in a snare. At any instant now a bullet was going to rip its way through her trembling, sweating, cringing flesh and she would die.

She stretched out, the key in her hand yearning for the lock that was less than a yard away, just as the bullet she’d been dreading sang past her cheek and slammed into the drywall beside the door frame with the sharp sound of a hand slapping flesh. Hard, dry grains of plaster blew back into her face, stinging her eyes.

“No!”
she screamed. As her head snapped back in instinctive reaction, her frantic gaze fell on Lisa. Her friend’s now-glassy brown eyes stared blankly up at her from the semi-sitting position she had slumped into. Black as oil in the near darkness, blood welled from Lisa’s chest as she rested limply against the door.

Above Lisa’s head, the streetlight glowed brightly, a beacon.

Even as her forward impetus continued, even as she reached out for the knob and thrust the key desperately toward the lock, Katharine realized that she was no longer seeing the outside world through glass. Warm night air now mixed with the chill of the air-conditioning. Underlying the near-deafening shrillness of her own screams, she could just hear the ubiquitous chorus of cicadas—and the approaching wail of multiple sirens.

“Hey, what’s going on in there?” a man’s deep voice shouted from outside. A blur of movement in the darkness beyond the door told her that someone was racing across the backyard toward the town house. Help was just seconds away—but that was still an eternity too far.

“Kill her!” came the roar from behind her.

This time the bullet was so close she could feel the wind of its passing in her hair.

There was only one chance of escape. Katharine took it.

Hurtling forward, leaping like she had never leapt in her life, she grabbed the doorknob and window frame for leverage and threw herself headfirst through the rectangular opening in the top of the door where glass had formed a barricade moments before.

For a mixed-up instant as she cleared the door and tumbled earthward, she got a glimpse of starry sky and the leafy branches of the young maple in the backyard swaying in the slight breeze, and the luminescent eyes of a neighborhood cat staring at her from beneath the neatly trimmed bushes that crowded against the detached garage.

Then she slammed hard into concrete, and the world went dark.

“Katharine. Katharine, can you hear me?”

It was a man’s voice, slow and heavy with the drawled cadences of the Deep South. The tone was authoritative. She must have been hovering on the verge of consciousness anyway, because when she heard it she opened her eyes.

Only to be practically blinded by the bright beam of a penlight shining directly into her face. Her eyes squinched closed again, fast. She took a deep breath, only to discover that she couldn’t breathe. At least, not through her nose. When she tried, pain shot through her sinuses.

God, what was up with that? She was dragging in air through her mouth like a landed fish, she felt heavy and sluggish and totally out of it, and to top it off, she had the mother of all headaches.

“I’m sorry.” He sounded genuinely contrite. “Look, the light’s off. Can you open your eyes?”

Now that she had given up on the whole trying-to-breathe -through-her-nose thing, the pain in her sinuses merged with the pain in her head to settle into a dull throb behind her eyes. Unpleasant, but she would live. Anyway, there was something about that voice. It was deep and soft and compelling, and she wanted to obey it. Raising her lids cautiously, she did.

Everything was blurry, but she was immediately aware of a light-colored ceiling and walls and knew that she was indoors. Her surroundings were gloomy and gray, shadowy with the absence of any direct light, although there seemed to be enough light from some nearby source—a hallway, perhaps?—to allow her to see shapes, to see him. She was lying on her back on a bed, narrow and faintly uncomfortable, not her own. She wasn’t lying flat, though: Her head and upper torso were elevated as the surface beneath her rose at a slight angle. His head dominated the center of her field of vision. His face was lean and tanned, topped off by a thatch of longish dark blond hair that waved back from his forehead. A profusion of curls flipped out untidily around his nape, but, with the light source behind him, she could not yet make out any details of his appearance beyond that. He leaned closer, peering down at her intently, blocking her view of the rest of the room. With his shift in position, the source of the light was no longer directly behind him, and she was able to see him a little better. He was frowning, she saw, and he wore glasses with narrow wire frames. The penlight, turned off now, was in his hand.

Even though his features were still slightly indistinct—that was the fault of her vision, she decided, as much as the absence of adequate lighting—she felt an immediate strong sense of familiarity.

Along with a little frisson of—something. Tension of some sort. Not a good kind of tension.

“Hi there,” he said as their eyes met and held. There was definitely some kind of connection between them, but the harder she tried to latch on to it, the more elusive the memory became. Then, after the briefest of pauses in which he almost seemed to be waiting for something, he turned on the small lamp near the bed. Blinking in its sudden low-wattage glow, she realized that she was in a hospital room. It was all there, the heavily curtained windows limned with grayish light that managed to creep in around the edges, the dark TV affixed to the wall at the end of the bed, the banks of medical equipment, none of which, fortunately, seemed to be attached to her. Oh, wait, there was one narrow tube snaking out from the inside of her right elbow. Following it from where it emerged from beneath a strip of white tape up to the plastic bag half-full of clear liquid that hung from a shiny metal pole beside the bed, she realized that she was hooked up to an IV.
Not good.
Before she had time to think any more about the ramifications of that, he added, “Remember me?”

“Yes,” she said instantly, because she did, absolutely, positively, no doubt about it at all. Then she got stuck again. Try as she might to pull his identity out of her subconscious, it wouldn’t quite come.

But that little frisson of something was still there.
Was it . . . hostility?

Blinking in consternation, she concentrated as his features came into sharper focus. What she registered first was an overall impression that here was a good-looking guy. His eyes, which narrowed as he watched her, were medium blue beneath the thin, rectangular lenses that didn’t distort them in any appreciable way. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which came partly from the sun but mostly, she thought, from the intentness with which he was regarding her. They were nice eyes, mild, intelligent, maybe a little reserved, set off by short, stubby, fair lashes and unruly slashes of ash-brown brows that formed thick, straight lines across his forehead. He had high cheekbones, a long, masculine, slightly off-center nose, a thin-lipped mouth, and an angular jaw with a stubborn-looking chin. He was tall, maybe six-one, although it was difficult to judge when she was lying on her back looking up at him, broad of shoulder, lean of build, probably in his late thirties. There was the faintest hint of stubble on his chin, more three-o’clock than five-o’clock shadow. He wore a limp blue oxford-cloth shirt with a slightly frayed button-down collar, no tie, open at the throat, with a white doctor ’s coat pulled on over it.

It was the coat that gave her memory the nudge it needed.

“Dan . . . Howard.” The name popped into her mind on a wave of relief. “Dr. Daniel Howard.”

Once she had the name, everything else fell into place. Of course, he was her next-door neighbor, the physician. He had lived in the adjoining town house since—when? Maybe the beginning of the summer. Not that she had seen a whole lot of him. She couldn’t quite remember specific occasions, but probably they had introduced themselves once, then said hi whenever they happened to cross paths dragging trash cans to the curb and such. Had they had words at one time? Maybe his trash cans had blocked her garage, or her cat had walked on his car, or something? A minor dispute of that nature would account for the tiny flicker of antagonism, if that was indeed what it was, that had flared up inside her when she had first set eyes on him. Whatever, it couldn’t have been too serious, because it was already fading away into the mists of her subconscious.

“That’s right.” Dan nodded, looking pleased, and she relaxed a little, as if pleasing him was important to her. Why that would be the case she couldn’t imagine, though. Then, as the thought pricked at her, she wondered if she was shallow enough so that the answer was
just because he’s a hottie.
Yeah, probably. That was also probably the reason she had been able to dredge up his name.

As she worked that out to her own satisfaction, she felt herself relaxing again.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

"O-kay.” She drew the word out, because what she really meant was okay, except for the headache and the impossibly stuffed nose and the small but sharp pain that shot through her chest whenever she moved and the nagging conviction that all was not right with her world, with which she was presently afflicted. It also didn’t help that her voice sounded funny, all thick and nasally and not really like her voice at all. In other words, she was definitely
not
okay.

Not that she meant to say so.

“Good.” He sounded pleased again.

“Where am I?” There was something wrong with her face. Or, more precisely, her nose. It felt weird. Thick and hot and, as she had previously discovered, totally congested. Swollen. Sensitive when she tried to wrinkle it, but not really—exactly—painful.