CHAPTER THIRTY

Jamie listened to every word without interrupting, his only response being an intrigued, interested look that grew more pronounced with each revelation.

When she was done, Allison sat back and regarded him with wary expectation. "Well?"

"Wow," he said.

"Wow? Is that all?"

"You've got to give me a minute to let it all sink in."

"Okay." She needed a minute herself, really. She already felt better for having gotten it all out, but at the same time was wondering what she had been thinking to tell him so much. He wouldn't let her walk away now. He'd insist on being with her, on helping. He couldn't leave her to face this alone.

It would, she thought, serve her right if that was exactly what he did. If he gave her a hearty commiserating clap on the back and said, "Gee, Allison, that's a hell of a tale, thanks for sharing, thanks, see ya, bye." It would be just what she deserved.

"So you think this woman – Jade – killed someone this morning," he said after a long, thoughtful pause.

"Yes," Allison said.

"You should call the police."

"But I'd have to tell them how I got myself into this mess."

"Yeah, they'd probably like to know."

"I'd be arrested! I stole her purse –"

"For God's sake, Allison, do you really expect her to press charges?"

"What about all the other purses?"

"Slap on the wrist," Jamie said, and he sounded mildly annoyed with her, as if she was quibbling over petty meaningless details and ignoring the bigger picture. Which, in fact, she was. "If they even care about that at all. You'd be giving them a murderer. A serial killer."

Allison shivered. "A serial killer?"

"Well, maybe not," he amended. "She doesn't sound like a psycho, like the ones you hear about on the news. But a repeat killer, at the very least. A multiple-murderer. An assassin. You can't possibly believe that this is the first time she's done this. From everything you told me about the tape, and your conversations with her, it sounds like she's done this plenty of times before. If you can hand the police a way to tie up who-knows-how-many unsolved murders, the last thing they'll care about is you swiping a few handbags."

"It isn't that easy," she said, though she knew he was right. "I don't really know anything about her. She didn't leave her driver's license in her purse."

"Fingerprints, her voice on tape, and you've seen her. More than once. Are you telling me you couldn't describe her? That'd give them a good place to start."

"What if they don't catch her, though? She knows who I am. She knows where I live. She'll come after me." Allison touched her bruised cheekbone. She already didn't feel safe in her own home, and to have a professional killer mad at her was enough to ensure she might never feel safe again, anywhere.

"We're not going to let that happen," Jamie said. "The police will catch her. They'll protect you. Besides, you have other places you can go."

"I don't want to bring Uncle Bob any more into this than I already have. And my family … I don't want them to know at all."

"There's me."

"You've done too much already."

"Don't push me out of this, Allison. Don't even think that." He squeezed her hand almost hard enough to hurt.

"Jamie …"

"And you have a lot of friends in this neighborhood," Jamie said. "You know how they rally 'round."

"Oh, sure," Allison said. "When it's something like Needles breaking the arms of that pervert, or even the way they supported Hector for shooting Jon … because those were bad guys. Bad guys getting what was coming to them. And when Mrs. Oberdorfer, or Needles and Tisha, or anybody else finds out what I've been doing, they'll think that I'm a bad guy, too. That if some killer shoots me in the head, I'll be getting what's coming to me, too."

"They won't."

"They will! And then I won't have anywhere to go, anyplace I can call home."

"Allison." He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. "I'm sorry to say it like this, but … this isn't about you."

"What?"

"If you don't go to the police, that woman is going to get away with what she's done. She's going to get away with murder. What if she does come after you, and kill you? Then she'll get away with that, too. And she'll go whack this Westbrook guy and he'll die, and even if she leaves him alone, what about all the other people after him? You think she'd quit? She'd just move on to the next job. And you'll be responsible."

She blinked at him, feeling thunderstruck, and the only thing that came out of her mouth was incredibly childish and inane. "Well, if I'm dead, I won't care, will I?"

"Won't you?" he countered.

"What, is this an afterlife thing? God's going to punish me?"

He shrugged. "Nobody knows for sure."

"I never would have guessed you as the religious type," she said, thinking that if anything, he should have refused to believe in, or outright turned away from, any good Lord so merciful as to stick him in that awful wheelchair.

The corner of Jamie's mouth lifted in a slantwise grin. "It's a miracle I'm even alive, so who am I to doubt? I should have died in that accident."

Her gaze shifted to his legs, which looked so normal. A little thin, maybe, the muscles not as toned as the rest of him. Then, feeling guilty for staring at him like that, she blushed.

"You've never asked how I ended up on wheels."

"I thought it'd be rude and nosy." And, though she couldn't bring herself to say it, she'd always just figured he had been born that way.

He smiled. "You'll steal and paw through some stranger's purse, but it's rude and nosy to ask a friend about himself?"

"Well … I …"

"Remember the other day, you came over and caught me watching adventure racing? I used to do it."

"You did? With the … rock climbing and the kayaking and the freezing your butt off in the remote wilderness?"

"Yeah." Jamie's smile softened into a faraway expression, part nostalgia, part bitterness for what was lost, part exhilaration. "It seems like such a long time ago. I was outdoorsy as a kid. Hiking with my dad, mountain biking, white water rafting. Mom hated it, thought he was going to get both of us killed. She was a city girl. The funny thing was, that was what killed them. The city."

"The city killed them?"

"They were mugged one night coming home from a restaurant. It was their twenty-fifth anniversary. I was in college. The way I heard it was that Dad thought he could take the robber. But as fast as he was, he couldn't beat a bullet."

"Oh, Jamie, I'm so sorry!"

"School seemed meaningless after that," he said. "I wasn't learning anything that I couldn't learn from books. So, with the insurance money and what I got from selling the house, I dropped out of school and became an adventure racer. Bought all the highest-tech gear. Flew all over the world. South America, New Zealand, Russia, everywhere. I was getting pretty good. Good enough to compete. My dream was to get on a team for the Eco-Challenge, the big one by Mark Burnett."

"The Survivor guy, sure," Allison said, recognizing the name.

"Then, my luck ran out," Jamie said.

"You don't have to tell me –"

"I know."

"Okay," she said. "If you're sure."

He got that faraway look again. "It was a biking leg. I was with my girlfriend and her –"

Allison jumped a little, and Jamie laughed. She started to blabber some apology, but he gestured her to silence.

"Yes, I even had a girlfriend," he said. "Kirsten. Another racer. She and her brother Kevin were rising stars on the circuit, and we all sort of fell in together. Kevin was the driving force, though. We all saw what we were doing as a personal challenge, but Kevin really had a conquer-the-world thing. Nothing was ever good enough. He was the one who had to go higher, faster, more extreme. But even when he was being Captain Ahab, he had a way of encouraging us to go to lengths we would have thought were impossible."

"Was she pretty? Kirsten?" She was disgusted with herself to find that as Jamie revealed his tragic past, what most hooked into her like cat claws was jealousy at this mention of a girlfriend.

"Honestly? Not really. Tough, healthy, tanned, strong, fit … but not really pretty. It didn't matter, though. There are so few female racers that any of them are considered a good catch."

"Like in skateboarding," Allison said. "A lot of groupies, not many girls who actually get on a board."

"It was late," he said, and she could tell that he was seeing another place far removed from this musty book-smelling back office. "Sunset. Gorgeous country. We were up in the Canadian Rockies, in a part of the world where you could almost believe you were the first explorers on a new planet. The only signs of civilization we could even see were the contrails from jets. Kevin wanted to make the next marker by dark, and we'd had some delays along the way. A rockslide that we had to get off our bikes and climb over, carrying them. Winds, some snow."

Allison felt awestruck by his simple words, and at the knowledge that Jamie Tremayne, pleasant Jamie from the bookstore, had once led a life far more filled with risks and thrills than her own. She also felt juvenile and stupid. What was Scoot and a skateboard compared with this?

"So we pressed on," Jamie said. "At twilight, at that elevation, everything was unearthly. The snow on the mountains seemed to glow like moonlight, though the moon wasn't up. The first few stars were out, and the last of the sunlight was this clear gold that made all the colors and details leap at you. The air was icy-crisp and sharp as a scalpel. I was bringing up the rear, behind Kirsten. My front tire hit a rock, and when I bounced over it, I came down on a patch of ice. That was it for me."

"What happened?"

"I don't remember," he said hollowly. "I remember everything right up until that point. How the stripes on Kirsten's suit were this iridescent green, almost neon. How my leg muscles ached, but it was a good ache, the kind you get from exercise, the kind full of pride and accomplishment. I remember how hungry I was and how much I was looking forward to stopping for the night. Then there was the rock, and the ice, and darkness."

"What about Kevin and Kirsten?"

"They heard me go over. They told me later that my bike flipped, then slid, and went into a ravine. I hit at least three trees, and the last one kept me from going over a forty-foot drop. The bike did go over. I saw it later and it looked like a metal rag some giant had wrung out."

"Oh, my God," Allison murmured. To think that he could have died … long before she even had the chance to meet him …

"I was in a coma for nineteen days," Jamie said. "Kevin and Kirsten got down to me, called for help, and waited with me. They had me airlifted out by helicopter. I'd broken both legs – the left in two places, the right in four. Crushed three vertebrae. Broken one arm and dislocated the shoulder. Nine ribs, one of which punctured a lung. And to top it all off, I fractured my skull. My helmet was cracked clean in two."

She put her arms around him, and though she knew those injuries had been years ago, and had long since healed as much as they were going to, she did so carefully. As if she would hurt him. Her eyes were wide and her chin was quivering with retroactive fear and shock for what had happened to him.

"The doctors didn't think I would ever come out of the coma, or that if I did, I'd be so brain damaged that I would have been better off dead. They got in touch with my closest relative, an aunt on my father's side, and started sounding her out about organ donation."

"You're kidding!" Allison gasped.

"Hey, they move fast when they've got a live one," Jamie said. "So to speak."

"They would've …"

"Harvested me," he said. "Heart, kidneys, corneas –"

"That's revolting!"

"I was a young guy, prime of health except for being a human jigsaw puzzle. No sense letting all that good material go to waste, if it could have helped some other people live a better life."

"It's so … vulturish. Were they trying to get your aunt to pull the plug?"

He went grim. "Kirsten told me later that they were leaning on her pretty heavily. Poor Aunt Sarah had only met me three times, one of them at my parents' funeral, and she didn't know what I would have wanted. She took so long to make up her mind that I came out of the coma and ruined the harvesting team's hopes."

"Good!" Allison said vehemently.

"I spent another month in the hospital, had a bunch of surgeries. Then eight months of rehab and physical therapy." He spoke lightly, glossing it over, but Allison was sure that those had been months and months of raw torture and sheerest living hell.

"Jamie, I'm so sorry."

"It could have been worse. I lived. I surprised everyone by not being a vegetable, by not showing any lingering signs of brain damage at all. But they told me I'd never walk on my own again. In a way, it would have been better to be brain damaged, because I wouldn't have known what I was losing."

"Don't say that," she said, holding him tighter, as if she could somehow undo his pain with her embrace.

"The kid I was then thought so, anyway," he said. "For that Jamie, it was the end of everything. No more races. Stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Not even able to stand upright without help. It was worse than being dead. I came pretty close to suicide a few times."

She squeezed her eyes shut, hardly able to bear thinking about it. "And … and Kirsten?"

"Kirsten couldn't handle it," he said, and she heard the buried heartache beneath his mild tone. "She stuck with me until I got out of the hospital, but the more people kept telling her how brave and devoted she was, sticking with me despite the fact that I'd be a cripple for the rest of my life, the more it got to her. So she left me. I hated her for it at the time, but I understand now. If it had been me, the Jamie I was then, if our situations had been reversed, I probably would have done the same thing."

"So she just … just dumped you? What did you do?"

"There wasn't much I could do. I survived. I went through those months of physical therapy. Everyone kept saying how lucky I was to be alive, and eventually I came around to believing them. I thought I'd take the miracle a step further, and prove the doctors wrong by regaining full use of my legs. That didn't work out. I did get back more use than they thought. I'm not totally dead from the waist down, thank God."

"Thank God," she echoed, and blushed again.

He paused and gave her a raised eyebrow and an evaluating look.

"Um. You were saying?" she asked.

"The hospital bills ate up most of what I had left from my parents," Jamie said. "Aunt Sarah invited me to come and live with her, but I felt like I'd been too much of a burden on her anyway, and I wasn't up to getting to know a bunch of cousins when I was still so mad at the world. I'd done a lot of reading, and discovered I could escape from things through books. So, with the money I had left, I bought the bookstore. Three years later, I'm still here. And there you have it. The story of Jamie Alan Tremayne, in a nutshell."

"Your middle name's Alan?"

"Yes. What's yours?"

"Danielle. For my father."

"Allison Danielle. That's pretty. Are you all right?"

"Why?"

"You're so pale," he said.

She placed her hands along the sides of his face, brought his head down, and kissed him, a light, brushing kiss that hurt with bittersweet tenderness on her bruised lips.

"I'm glad that you survived," she murmured. "I'm glad you're here."

"And I'm glad you're here," he said. "I'm overdue for some good things in my life."

They kissed again, him being careful and her striving against him, throwing pain to the winds. What was her pain compared to what he'd suffered? She clung to him and turned it into a deep and searching kiss that left them both breathless. When it was done, she leaned her forehead against his and shut her eyes. A familiar sensation of excitement and adrenaline was tingling through her. Here was a risk she hadn't taken in a long time, a thrill that wasn't going to get her killed or land her in jail.

"So," Jamie said, sounding a little unsteady himself. "Now you know all about me."

"Not quite," she said. "You promised …" She reached behind his head and undid the black velvet ribbon.

His hair fell loose, framing his face in honey-gold waves, and the tingle shot through her again – excitement colored with smoking lust. She almost threw herself on top of him. Never mind anything else.

He must have seen it in her eyes, because he drew back from her with what looked like true regret. "As great as this is, Allison, there's still Jade to think about. She's expecting to talk to Scoot when?"

"Seven o'clock tonight."

"And it's after six now."

"Is it?" she asked, shocked. Her gaze followed his to a clock on the wall, and sure enough, the hands stood at ten after six.

"We need to decide what we're going to do."

**