"Just a... minute," she called out, which made her head hurt.
He didn't wait. He punched out her rear window. Timmie couldn't see him. She couldn't get her head around. But she heard the distinctive pop and crunch and tinkle of glass tumbling onto her backseat. She felt sick. She smelled gas and remembered how to feel afraid.
"I need a little help getting out," she ventured, trying again to reach her seat belt. Failing.
"Where the fuck is it?" he said, a baritone with a south St. Louis accent.
Not the farmer, then. Timmie finally remembered the reason she'd been sailing over farm silos and fought a new rush of fear. The smell of gas was even stronger, and the man who'd broken into her car wasn't there to get her out.
"If you get me unlatched I'm sure I can help you look," she tried.
Timmie could hear him rifling through the backseat, and then the front. She actually caught sight of a head of hair. Dark. Thick. Oily. No face to go with it, though. Kind of like talking to a badly groomed Cousin Itt.
"You took it with you this morning. That's what they said."
"Who said?" she asked. "And if you knew I had it this long, why the hell didn't you just break into my car when it was sitting on the street? You didn't have to chase me through two counties."
"Shut up."
"And I expect you to pay for that window," she said. "Not to mention the rest of my car. Asshole. You ran me off the road."
He laughed. "You misjudged the turn."
"I did not. I hit ice."
Timmie did give a passing thought to how ridiculous the conversation was. Better than screaming for mercy, she guessed.
"What'd you do with it?" he demanded, shaking her by the shoulder this time. Like that would help. All it did was dislodge a few more brain cells so they probably scattered over her seat like broken glass.
"Find it yourself."
She didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
"Hey!" an old voice yelled nearby. "You all right there?"
Timmie could hear the guy moving toward the back of the car. "Call 911!" he yelled. "A drunk ran off the road!"
That was what cleared Timmie's head. "Drunk?" she demanded. "I'm not drunk. I am not drunk!" she yelled for whoever was outside, as if that would make a difference.
"Do yourself a favor," the guy said almost in her ear. "Ditch that piece of paper. And forget I was ever here."
She would have if she hadn't caught sight of his hand scrabbling through the nursing bag she'd left on the passenger seat. If she hadn't seen the gold-and-cat's-eye ring on its pinkie. Its bent pinkie. Its square, pale, scraped pinkie. Timmie took one look out of the corner of her eye and knew she could identify that fifth digit anywhere. She didn't say anything to the guy, though. She didn't even say anything to the farmer when he finally returned leading a parade of fire engines and police cars. She waited until she was in her own ER, strapped to a backboard like a bagged deer and blinking in the overhead lights.
"The printout!" she gasped, coming to her senses.
Of course. The carefully guarded, top-secret, all-revealing Morbidity and Mortality printout they'd been tossing back and forth for the last week or so like a hockey puck in overtime. It was the only thing Timmie had been carrying in that nursing bag except an extra pair of nylons, and if that guy had run her off the road just for used panty hose, she had more problems than she'd thought.
"Pardon?" Dr. Chang asked as she bent over her upside down, her face as round as a moon. The Halloween moon, except this one was frowning and kind and much, much younger. And the goblins chasing Timmie weren't pretend.
Timmie began to shake. "Nothing. Isn't Barb on?"
"You don't like me?"
"I love you, Chang. Really. I just need to ask Barb something."
"She busy. And you need c-spine films."
"My c spines are fine. I need to get up."
"No. No, you stay. We get films. Behave."
Great. A third-year resident from Beijing sounding just like her mother.
Other people came in. A couple of day-shift people and the portable X-ray tech and one of the other day docs. A couple of local cops in jackboots who tried not to laugh when Timmie told them a guy in a Bonneville and a pinkie ring had tried to run her off Highway 94. Timmie lay on the board getting stiffer by the minute and trying her damnedest to pretend she wasn't affected by what had just happened.
Maybe the guy who'd done this had just been stupid. Or maybe he hadn't cared whether she'd lived or died. Or maybe she would have been dead no matter what if that farmer hadn't shown up.
Definitely not things to consider when tied down so a person couldn't walk off the news. Which meant Timmie lay there shaking hard from adrenaline and a delayed terror she refused to admit, and focused everything she had on eavesdropping on the hallway. Which really didn't make her feel much better, either.
"Well, it's not really such a surprise," somebody said upon being informed of the identity of their newest patient. "She drives anything like she walks, she should be crippled."
"I should have known," Ellen all but wailed when she arrived for work to hear the news. Timmie wondered if Ellen thought she walked too fast, too.
And then, at least to amuse Timmie, Cindy's reaction.
"She's luckier than I was when it happened to me," she informed the person who'd told her, even as Ellen walked into Timmie's room in high-comfort mode.
"Are you all right?" Ellen demanded, patting the first available arm she could find.
"Although, of course, if it hadn't been for the accident," Cindy was going on, "I never would have met Fireman Dan."
Fireman Dan?
"Timmie?" Ellen said, patting harder. "Who did this? Is Meghan okay?"
"Ah, Fireman Dan," Cindy was saying outside the door. "Finest turnout gear in the city..."
Timmie's first reaction was to yell. That was her life Cindy had absconded with out there. Aw, what the hell. She laughed instead, which just made Ellen frown.
"I'm fine," Timmie said. "Meghan's fine. She wasn't there."
"You have to be more careful," Ellen insisted, still upset.
Cindy called greetings from the door on her way by.
Ellen headed off to be Restcrest's relief, and Timmie was left behind with the boring ceiling, the boring light fixtures, and the boring wait for negative films. And, of course, the boring fact that she was getting more frightened by the minute now that the real danger was over. Good trauma nurse that she was.
"Timmie! My God, Timmie, is that you?"
Timmie still couldn't move her head. There was surgical tape stretched across her forehead and chin to stabilize her to the c-collar and board. She could tell that voice, though, and wondered what the hell he was doing down here.
"You didn't have another graduation ceremony, did you?" she asked, swiveling her eyes as far as she could to catch the golden head just inside the door, conferring with the black one.
"What?"
She sighed, teeth chattering. "Nothing, Alex. I'm fine, really. Convince Chang, will you?"
Alex floated into her vision like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. "The ambulance crew said your car was totaled. He said something about alcohol. Honey, what happened?"
"There was no alcohol, Alex," she said simply. "You know that. I hit a patch of black ice on 94 and did a Bullitt over some guy's cow pasture. That's all."