alien part and put it back with a grin, then stepped to the ground with far more wincing than was socially acceptable.

“I have three words for you,” EMT Guy said. “Possible internal bleeding.”

I turned back to him. “Don’t you think if I was bleeding internally, I’d know somewhere deep inside? Like, internally?”

“One X-ray,” he bargained. When I winced again, he added, “Maybe two.”

Uncle Bob wrapped a beefy arm around me. I was a nanosecond away from arguing with EMT Guy when he said, “Charley, we have men all over the place. I promise we’ll look for your missing boxes.”

“But—”

“You’re going to the hospital if I have to handcuff you to that stretcher,” Garrett said, stepping in front of me as if to block my only escape route.

With an annoyed sigh, I folded my arms and glared at him. “Stop trying to get me into your handcuffs. I want to be there when you talk to Father Federico,” I said to Uncle Bob, ignoring Garrett’s surprised expression. Would he never learn?

“Deal,” Uncle Bob agreed before I could change my mind. “I’ll call you tomorrow with a time.”

“You’ll need a ride home from the hospital,” Garrett reminded me.

“You just want to try out those handcuffs. I’ll call Cookie. Go figure out where those boxes went.”

“Do you want to look at mug shots tomorrow, as well?” Uncle Bob asked. “Can you ID the guy who hit you?”

“Well…” My nose scrunched as I considered the possibility of positively identifying my assailant based on the knuckle sandwich he gave me. “I got an almost clear peripheral look at the guy’s left fist. I might could recognize his pinkie.”

* * *

For some bizarre reason that baffled the heck out of me, Cookie seemed none too happy about being called out at one in the morning to extract me from the hospital.

“What did you do now?” she asked, walking into the examining room. Still in her pajama bottoms with a massive robelike sweater thrown over a tee, she looked a tad postapocalyptic. And she had a wicked case of bedhead. It was funny.

I eased off the examining table, moving as if there were a bomb in the room set to go off with a motion- detecting sensor. She rushed to my side to help. Had there actually been a bomb set to go off with a motion- detecting sensor, we’d have been blown to bits.

“Why are you assuming it was my fault?” I asked when my feet were firmly planted.

Her lips thinned into a grim reprimand. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to get a call from the hospital in the middle of the night? I jump into panic mode. I can barely put two words together.”

“I’m sorry.” After limping to my jacket, I shrugged into it, amazed at how much effort it took not to pass out. “You probably thought something happened to Amber.”

“Are you kidding? Amber’s an angel compared to you. Having you around makes me appreciate her pubescent, hormone-induced ways. Honestly, I don’t know how your stepmother did it.”

A lightbulb went off in my head when she said that. Not a particularly bright one — maybe a 12-watter — but it did make me reassess my stepmother’s lack of interest in my well-being. Perhaps our rocky relationship was partially my fault.

Not.

Cookie lectured me all the way home. Thankfully, I’d had the ambulance take me to Pres, so it was a short drive. Her concern was sweet and, at the same time, oddly annoying. My concern, however, was leaning toward homicidal. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t help but get a little hot under my seven-dollar thrift-store Gucci collar. Someone hit me. Someone tried to kill me. Had he succeeded, I could have died.

Then, as if my perpetual state of sunshine couldn’t allow such a negative thought to infect my mind — I’m pretty sure I was a flower child in a past life — I just had to see the cup half full. Hopefully of Jack Daniel’s. I’d learned something tonight, besides the legitimacy of the sudden-stop thing. I’d learned that somehow, in some bizarre coincidence of fate, Reyes and the Big Bad were connected. But how? Reyes couldn’t have been more than three when I was born. How did Bad know he would call me Dutch fifteen years later?

I couldn’t have been imagining it. I remembered it so clearly. Dutch. Whispery and soft, deep and mesmerizing. Rather like Reyes himself. And the similarities didn’t stop there. My mind started registering all kinds of likenesses between the two. The heat and energy that radiated off them both. The way they moved — a blur — very unlike the departed. The paralyzing power of their touches, their stares. The way my knees almost gave beneath my weight with the appearance of either one.

Maybe I was losing it. Either that or Reyes and Bad were the same kind of being. But how was that even possible? I needed a second opinion. As Cookie pulled her Taurus into the parking lot, I said, “I saw him again.”

She braked short and looked at me.

“When I fell through the skylight,” I added.

“Reyes?” she asked in disbelief.

“No. I don’t know.” Fatigue seeped into my voice. “I’m beginning to wonder. I’m beginning to wonder about a lot of things.”

She nodded her head in understanding, eased up to the curb, and turned off the engine. “I’ve been doing some research. It’s late, but I have a feeling you won’t be able to sleep until some of your questions are answered.”

* * *

After Cookie more or less carried me into my apartment, she went to check on Amber. I shouted out a hey to Mr. Wong then put on a pot of coffee in my brand-new coffeepot that, according to the card and bow attached, had been provided by the good people at AAA Electric for the investigation I did on the missing switchgears — whatever the heck a switchgear was and why ever the heck anyone would steal one. It was red. The coffeepot, not the switchgear. I had no idea what color switchgears were, as I’d discovered the thief long before it came to that. Still, I doubted they were red.

I poured a small glass of milk and downed it so I could take four ibuprofen at once without tearing up the lining of my stomach. I’d refused the prescription painkillers the doctor in the ER had offered. Scripts and I didn’t generally get along. But the soreness was already infiltrating my muscles, stiffening them until I thought they would break with each move I made. That fall may not have done any permanent damage, but the temporary crap was going to suck. I could barely breathe.

Still, even a slight ability to breathe was better than a nonexistent one.

Between visiting Mark Weir in jail, chasing Rocket around the asylum, breaking into the law offices, and falling through the skylight at the warehouse, I had yet to get my hands on a computer long enough to search the prison database for more information on Reyes. As I eased into the chair at my computer, Cookie strode in with an armful of notes and printouts. Knowing her, she’d already researched Reyes’s life down to his shoe size and blood type. I logged on to the New Mexico Department of Corrections Web site while she poured us some coffee. Ten seconds later, thanks to fiber optics, Reyes’s mug shot shone brightly on the screen.

“My god,” Cookie said from behind me, apparently experiencing the same visceral reaction to Reyes that I did every time I looked at him.

She set a cup beside me.

“Thank you,” I said, “and I’m sorry I had to call you out in the middle of the night.”

She pulled up a chair, sat down, and put a hand over mine. “Charley, do you honestly think it bothers me one iota that you called me?”

Was that a trick question? “Well, yes, with a sprinkle of duh on top. Who wouldn’t be upset?”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, taken aback, as if I’d hurt her feelings for even suggesting such a thing. “I would have been furious had you not called me. I know you’re special and you have an extraordinary gift that I’ll never fully understand, but you’re still human, and you’re still my best friend.” Her face transformed into a map of worry lines. “I wasn’t upset that you called me. I was upset because you think you’re indestructible.

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