The Awakening of Dr. Brown

about that right now, to tell the truth. For now he wasn’t First Son Ethan Brown, anyway, just some guy named Leroy Brown, out for the evening with a girl named Joanna Dunn.

“There-that must be it.” Pointing, she gave his arm an excited little squeeze as they hurried down the concrete steps that led from the loading docks to the parking lot. “Here-you have to press the button on that little key chain thingy. It’ll squeak if it’s the right one.”

Ethan pressed the button. A brown sport-utility vehicle parked with its nose against the dock not only chirped a response, but obligingly unlocked its doors and turned on its interior lights as well. Leroy and Joanna grinned delightedly at each other.

While Leroy was still wondering whether or not he should open the door for her, Joanna ran around to the passenger side of the SUV and hopped in. Leroy opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel. He felt like a kid, holding back nervous laughter while the nerves in his belly jumped and twitched with a glorious excitement.

It took him a minute to find where the key went, but he finally got it inserted. “Well,” he said, “here goes.”

She gave a low chuckle. “You sure you know how to drive?”

“I did once.” He was trying to think how long it had been since he’d driven himself anywhere. Roughly seven years, he imagined. He fastened his seat belt, then turned the key. He felt unbelievably pleased when the engine fired. Throwing Joanna a triumphant look, he ran his window down and shifted into reverse. “Buckle up,” he said confidently.

The night was warm and muggy, the way it can be on the east coast in June. Humidity not yet thick enough to be called fog made halos around the streetlights, and the air felt soft on the skin. While Leroy backed the SUV out of its parking space, Joanna ran her window down all the way and propped her elbow on the sill. They went bumping off across the potholed parking lot and into a deserted street, and the wind reached in through the open windows and grabbed playfully at her hair. Instead of rolling up the window, she caught her hair back with her hand and, eyes closed, lifted her face to the wind.

Glancing at her, Ethan felt a clutching at his throat and a burning in his eyes, the way it did sometimes, once in a great, great while, when something overwhelmingly beautiful caught him by surprise. He drew a careful breath and looked away again. I wonder what she’s thinking…

I’m having fun, Joanna thought. It was so much easier than she’d expected, being Joanna Dunn. Why had she been so frightened by the prospect?

I haven’t been that person for so long, I don’t even know who she is… She’d said that to Doveman, and it was true. But if she didn’t know who Joanna was, then she could be anything she wanted her to be, couldn’t she? The thought made her feel almost giddy-carefree and young and slightly naughty, like a child playing hooky from school.

The car had stopped moving. Opening her eyes, she saw that they’d come to an intersection policed by a flashing red light. Instead of moving on again, for some reason her “date” was sitting motionless, frowning at the windshield in front of him.

“What’s happening?” she asked, her heart quickening. Was he having second thoughts already? Oh, but she didn’t want the game to be over! She didn’t want the evening to end.

Still frowning, he glanced her way but past her, looking up the street, then down the other way. “I’m not sure. Which way’s the river?”

She burst out laughing, half with relief. “I don’t believe it-a guy who asks directions!”

He waited a moment, then prompted with a touch of impatience, “Well?”

She raised both hands and shoulders in an exaggerated I don’t know. “You’ve been here twice, which way did you come?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t driving. When you aren’t driving you don’t pay attention.” He was obviously vexed by his ignorance-typical male. Oh, she liked this Leroy Brown. He was so much easier to understand than Ethan.

She nodded and murmured, “I suppose that’s true.”

He glanced at her. “How long has it been since you drove yourself anywhere?”

She didn’t have to think about it. “That would be…never.”

“Never? You mean you don’t-”

“Nope-never learned to drive. Don’t know how.” She stared defiantly into the intensity of his gaze, refusing to yield to the unspoken pressure to explain.

She could have told him that on her sixteenth birthday, the milestone that would have made her eligible for a driver’s license in California, the state she’d been living in at the time, Phoenix had performed before a sell-out crowd at The Forum, and that under the circumstances, learning how to drive a car had seemed pretty irrelevant.

But that had been Phoenix. Tonight she was Joanna, and didn’t want to think about Phoenix at all.

“What the hell, Leroy,” she cried, “let’s take a chance. Hey, we have a fifty-fifty shot at being right.” Clamping one hand over her eyes, she stuck her other arm out the open window and pointed. “That way!”

“That way it is,” Ethan said, and felt himself begin to smile as he pulled forward and made a hard right. Her laughter was impossible to resist.

He wasn’t really all that lost. Once he located the river he knew he could find his way back to his own neighborhood, and from there to the shopping center where there was a nice little Chinese restaurant both he and the Secret Service knew well.

“Water dead ahead!” she crowed. “Am I a good navigator, or what?”

“Best I ever had,” said Ethan. But he knew exactly where he was, now, and the knowledge was a heaviness inside him. Guilt sat in his chest like a lump of clay.

They were coming to the traffic light at the intersection with the busy boulevard that ran along the riverfront. If he turned left there, they would come very shortly to the shopping center and the restaurant; from there it was a few blocks up the hill to his apartment on the second floor-the Secret Service occupied the first-of a modest row house in a moderately run-down middle-class neighborhood. But if he turned right…in an equally short time they would come to Church Street. Another right, then a few more blocks and they would be at the clinic. And beyond that, just a stone’s throw away from St. Jude’s Church, lay the boundaries of the urban jungle known as The Gardens.

It would be so easy. Phoenix wouldn’t even know where he was taking her until it was too late, and even if she did, what could she do? She couldn’t drive herself, and only a woman bent on suicide-or a raving lunatic-would dare venture out alone on those streets at night.

He’d wanted to get her down there to The Gardens to see the buildings she owned with her own eyes, and this was his chance. He might never have another one like it.

Not only his chance, he reminded himself. It was his duty.

Chapter 8

S o easy.

The silence in the car felt viscous. Ethan moved in the silence as if through heavy mud, or in the kind of nightmare where the arms and legs felt like lead and the heart pounded and lungs burned with futile efforts to make them do his bidding. In that same silence he watched his hand swim through the unforgiving substance that had taken the place of air and grasp the turn indicator lever.

He watched the arrow slowly blink: left…left…left…left.

“You know where you’re going?” Her voice sounded hollow to him, as if it came from a great distance.

Grimly, he nodded. The light changed, and he pulled out into the intersection. “I promised you Chinese,” he said as he made the turn. “The only place I know of is right down here a ways. It’s not far from where I live, so I eat there quite a bit.”