Agent to the Rescue

“Hang in there,” he urged her.

She shook her head and dizziness overwhelmed her, making her stomach pitch and pain reverberate in her head like a chime clanging against the insides of a bell.

“You’re strong,” he said. Instead of clasping her wrists, he took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “You must be strong, or you wouldn’t still be alive. You’re a fighter. You can hang in there.”

She had suspected he was lying to her earlier—when he’d told her she would be okay and especially when he had urged her to trust him. Now she was certain that he was lying. She had never felt weaker than she did right now. At least she didn’t think she had...

Memories still eluded her.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She blinked, trying to focus on his face again. He really was quite handsome—with that tanned skin, those dark eyes so heavily lashed and his thick, black hair. It was a little long—longer than she would have thought a government agent would be able to wear his hair.

“What’s your name?” he asked again. Moments ago he’d shushed her when she’d tried to talk. Now he was getting insistent, as if he needed her name in case she didn’t survive until the ambulance arrived.

She gathered the last of her strength and admitted in a raspy whisper, “I don’t know...”

Her memories weren’t just eluding her. They were completely gone, as if they had seeped out with her blood—leaving her mind entirely blank.

“I don’t know...” she murmured again...just as oblivion returned to claim her.

* * *

“WHERE’S THAT DAMN AMBULANCE?” Dalton demanded to know. Maybe the trooper had called only minutes ago for help, but it felt like hours—with the young woman lying unconscious in the trunk of the car.

Dalton had pressed her veil onto the wound on the back of her head, trying to stem the bleeding. But the fabric was flimsy.

Trooper Littlefield pointed down the gravel road where he must have abandoned his squad car, since he’d come up behind Reyes on foot. “I can hear them coming now.”

The faint whine of sirens reached his ears, too. And in the distance a cloud of dust rose up into the trees.

“Help’s coming,” he told the woman, hoping that she could hear him even though she was unconscious. “Stay with me. Help’s coming.”

Then he turned back toward Littlefield. The trooper was older than him—shorter and heavier. And he was sweating so badly that it streaked from his bald head down his neck to stain the collar of his tan shirt. He probably hadn’t chosen to walk the rest of the way down the gravel road. Had he crashed? Or had the car just overheated from the chase?

“Can they get around your car?” he asked.

He nodded. “I parked it off to the side—” he gestured toward the FBI SUV “—like you did.”

Dalton hadn’t exactly parked there; he had just been fortunate enough to have ended up there instead of in the ditch like the Mercedes had.

“Why did you abandon your car?” Dalton asked.

The trooper pointed toward the Mercedes. “I heard the cars stop. I wasn’t sure what the situation was...” He glanced at the woman in the trunk. “I didn’t think it would be this, though.”

Despite all those bodies Dalton had found in car trunks over the years, this wasn’t the situation he had expected, either. It was just too ironic and coincidental since he’d just been at a wedding himself that he would find a bride locked inside a trunk. Then he remembered that conversation he’d had outside the church—the one with profiler Special Agent Jared Bell.

Could this bride have been the next intended victim of Bell’s serial killer?

As far as he knew, the guy hadn’t killed another woman for a couple of years. He wouldn’t claim this victim, either—if Dalton could do anything about it.

Finally the sirens grew louder and lights flashed as the ambulance approached. “Help’s here,” he told her. “You’re going to be okay.”

Her lashes fluttered, and she peered at him through her barely opened lids. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Help really is here.” And as he said it, paramedics rushed up to the car. He released the blood-soaked veil to one of them and then he tried to release her hand—that he hadn’t even realized he still held—and step back out of their way.

But she clasped his hand tightly in hers. She was stronger than she thought—stronger even than he had thought. “Don’t leave me,” she implored him.

Recently another agent had nearly lost a witness at the hospital when bank robbery suspects had tried to abduct her right out of the ER. Dalton wasn’t about to take that risk. This woman had already been through too much.

“I need to ride along,” he told the paramedics. Then he told her, “I won’t leave you.”

Her eyes closed again. Somehow she trusted him—when she had no reason to trust him or anyone else after what had happened to her. What exactly had happened to her?

“Was she shot?” he asked the paramedic who eased the veil away from her head wound.

The young man shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll get a CT scan in the ER. So we need to get her to the hospital ASAP.” He and another man snapped a collar around her neck and then lifted her onto a board that they carried up to the gurney they’d left on the road.

Dalton had to run along beside the stretcher they rolled along the gravel road to the ambulance. He hurried inside the rig just as they closed the doors and sped away. From their urgency, it was clear that her condition was every bit as critical as Dalton had feared it was.

“How far from the hospital are we?” he asked.

“Twenty minutes out,” the driver replied.

He would bet every one of those minutes counted in her situation. The paramedic in the back had administered an IV and an oxygen mask. It was more than he had been able to offer her. But it wasn’t enough. Not if there was a bullet in her head.

“What is her name?” the paramedic asked.

“She doesn’t know,” Dalton replied. “Could she have amnesia?”

“It’s possible if she has a concussion,” the paramedic replied. “But what is her name?”

“She couldn’t tell me,” he pointed out, “so I don’t know.”

“You’re not her groom?”

A strange shiver rushed over him. “Of course not. I’m an FBI agent. I found her in the trunk of that car.”

The paramedic glanced down at Dalton’s tux and nodded, as if humoring him.

“I just came from a wedding,” he explained his attire. “It wasn’t mine.”

It would never be his.

“I don’t know who she is,” he repeated. But maybe something had been left in the trunk of the car that would have revealed her identity. A purse. A wallet. A receipt. Or the registration for the car that might have been hers.

He should have stayed behind at the scene. He could have done more for her there than by playing nursemaid in the back of the ambulance. And why would the man who’d put her in that trunk risk showing up at the hospital?