She waved to the television camera and to the circle of people who wanted to see her for themselves. “Thank you!” she called. “Thanks for helping. I really appreciate it.”
Underwood had a feeling she would have gone over to shake every hand there and thank each volunteer searcher individually if the EMT team hadn’t persuaded her to let them take her on down to the hospital.
CHAPTER 31
“I’m fine,” I kept telling them. “You probably are,” the medical technician agreed, “but until you get checked out thoroughly, you can’t be sure. You’ve got a contusion on the side of your head. There may be chipped bones. That arm could be fractured.”
“George!” I entreated.
He gave a heartless smile. “I’ll follow you down and see you at the hospital.”
Resigned, I lay back on the stretcher and let them strap me in.
“There’s a pair of scissors in that locker beside your head,” said one of the medics with a chuckle.
“You laugh,” I said darkly, “but I’d like to see you get out of a jammed seat belt without some.”
At the hospital, they made me strip off into one of those godawful gowns, and a doctor went over all my extremities, pushing and flexing and “This hurt? How about here?”
I was advised to put ice on my temple and left arm for the next seventy-two hours. They gave me an ointment for the belt burn on my neck and they bandaged the raw place on my finger where the key had rubbed it, otherwise, it was exactly as I’d thought: I was bruised and battered but unbroken.
“How long before this one goes away?” I asked, looking in the mirror at the side of my face. Every time I took the ice pack away and checked, the bruise seemed to be darker and was passing from purple to black even as we spoke.
“About three weeks,” said the doctor.
“With a little luck, regular makeup will cover up the worst in about a week,” chirped the nurse.
Damn that Barringer! I could just imagine some of the things those courthouse smartmouths down in Dobbs were going to say when they saw me next.
Glumly, I went back to my cubicle and was half-dressed when I heard the nurse say, “Sir? Sir! You can’t come in here.”
“The hell I can’t,” someone snarled. “Deb’rah? You back there?”
I zipped up my slacks and poked my head out of the curtain.
He strode down to my cubicle. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, stunned to see him here.
He gently turned my face and looked at the bruise. His own face was grim.
I pushed his hand away because I couldn’t meet his eyes. Not when I was feeling so uncertain about our future together, not when it was possible we would have no future. “It looks worse than it is.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said with the first trace of normality, “’cause it sure does look like hell.”
“I’m happy to see you, too,” I said tartly as I pulled on my jersey and slipped my feet into my sneakers. My voice sounded shrewish, even to me, with none of the easy banter that usually flowed between us. “What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t due up in Virginia till Saturday.”
“Underwood called me.”
“He did? When?”
“I don’t know. Around five-thirty?”
I looked at my watch. It was only a little after ten now. Amazing.
This wasn’t Jeff Gordon or Dale Jarrett. This was Dwight Bryant, a man who drives so slow that everyone says he’s going to get T-boned by a turtle someday, yet he had made the trip in less than five hours. “How many times did you get pulled?”
He gave a sheepish grin. “Only once. He was cool about it.”
I.e., no ticket.
He held my jacket for me and we walked out into the waiting room. To my surprise, George Underwood was still there.
“I need food and drink,” I told them both. “And not necessarily in that order.”
Five minutes later, we were in a booth in a little Mexican place on the far side of the hospital.
I was running on adrenaline between my harrowing evening, Dwight’s sudden appearance, and the conclusions I’d reached about Ledwig’s death. Most of all, though, I was still furious about my own near death. George kept putting me off whenever I asked, but as soon as we were seated, I said, “So what about Barringer? Did you arrest him yet?”
George looked at Dwight, who put his hand on mine and said gently, “He’s dead, shug.”
“
The bottom fell out of my stomach as George told me about the dead buck they’d found and how it must have happened right after he ran me off the road. I felt my eyes fill up with tears. The waste of it. Yes, he had been full
