Sandra Brown: Low Pressure

Olivia nodded. “I’m not afraid anymore. I’ve lost Howard. Now Steven. Nothing worse can happen to me.”

Bellamy suddenly realized that, except for her head, Olivia hadn’t moved. Her face was wet with tears, yet she hadn’t pulled a tissue from the box on the bedside table.

“Olivia?”

Her eyes had closed, and she didn’t respond.

“Olivia!”

Bellamy whipped back the covers, and, although she’d never been a screamer, she screamed now. Olivia was drenched in blood. Both wrists had been slashed.

Bellamy frantically slapped her cheeks, but her only responses were faint murmurs of protest.

Bellamy snatched the cordless phone from its charger on the nightstand, punched in 911, and began babbling as soon as the operator answered. She shouted the address. “She’s bleeding to death! Send an ambulance. Hurry, hurry!”

The operator launched into a series of questions, but when Bellamy saw headlights cut an arc across the ceiling she dropped the phone, rushed to the window, and flung back the curtains.

Despite the downpour, she recognized the Vette’s low profile as it came speeding through the open gate. She cried out in relief.

She returned to the bed, touched Olivia’s cheek, and was startled by how cool it was. “Don’t die,” she whispered fiercely, then left the room at a run.

The hall was darker than before, but she didn’t slow down even when she reached the stairs. She practically flew down them, tripping on the last tread and barely catching herself on the newel post before she fell.

She reached the front door just as the Corvette rolled to a stop. “Dent! Help me!”

Heedless of the downpour and the lightning that filled the sky with a blue-white glare, she ran across the porch and down the steps. She rounded the hood of the car just as he was alighting.

She launched herself at him. “Dent, thank God! It’s Olivia. She’s—”

Strong arms went around her, but they weren’t Dent’s.

“ ’Bout time we met.”

She looked up through the rain into Ray Strickland’s leering face.

When Dent reached the parking space where he’d left his Corvette and found it empty, he made a three-sixty turn, thinking that the cloudburst had thrown him off and that he’d gone to the wrong space. And then for several seconds more he stood there, confounded, while rain beat down on him.

The possibility that his car had been stolen from the parking lot made him gnash his teeth. But then his heart stuttered when it occurred to him who the thief might be. Could it be a coincidence that his car had been stolen while Ray Strickland was at large? Strickland was a mechanic. He would know how to break in, hot-wire, and do anything else necessary to steal any vehicle.

All this ran through Dent’s mind in a millisecond, and he acted on his fear instantly. Ducking beneath the narrow overhang of the building, he pulled out his phone to call Bellamy and warn her. He punched in her number before remembering that Nagle and Abbott had confiscated her phone to hold as evidence in Moody’s murder. No one answered it.

Dent burst into the Starbucks looking like a man deranged, startling the customers and staff. Heedless of the fact that he was soaked to the skin, that his hair was plastered flat to his head, and that his eyes looked feral, he shouted, “Gall, your truck. Where’s it parked?”

Gall, who was still in conversation with the senator, gaped at Dent. “Where’s your car?”

“Not where I left it. Give me the keys to your truck. Call nine-one-one and tell them to send police to the Lystons’ house. The cops at the gate need to be alerted that Ray Strickland may try to get onto the property by driving my car. Bellamy hasn’t got her phone, so I can’t call her directly, and I don’t know the land line number. Now for godsake, pitch me your keys.”

Gall did as told, and Dent snatched them from the air. “West side of the building,” Gall yelled at Dent’s back as he plunged back into the thunderstorm.

He ran to the parking lot and spotted Gall’s relic of a pickup. He climbed into the cab and cranked it on, then, pushing it as fast as it would go, jumped a curb and bounced into the street.

As he drove with one hand, he dialed 911 with his other. By now Gall would have called the emergency number, but it wouldn’t hurt to put in a second call.

He gave the answering operator his name and the address of the Lystons’ house. “Bellamy Lyston Price is in danger of her life.”

“What’s the nature of the problem, sir?”

“Too long to tell. But there are a pair of cops stationed at her front gate. They should be notified to be on the lookout for a red Corvette. They shouldn’t open the gate because Ray Strickland might be driving it. And call Nagle and Abbott. They’re homicide detectives. They’ll know what this is about.” He was out of breath by the time he finished.

“Your name again, sir?”

“What?”

“Your name again?”

“Are you fucking kidding?”

With infuriating calm, she began again with the question about his name. Cursing, he tossed his phone onto the seat of the pickup so he could use both hands to steer around a slow-moving minivan. He blasted through a red light, blaring the pickup’s horn.

Ray’s luck had changed, and it was on account of him killing Moody.

There had to be a correlation, because that was when things had started going good for him.

First, he’d escaped the two cops who’d showed up at his place. One’s blood was still on his clothes, along with the splotches Moody had sprayed on him. He didn’t think he’d killed the cop, but he hadn’t hung around to find out.

Dodging the second cop’s bullet—another stroke of luck—he’d barreled his way through his duplex and out the back even as other squad cars were squealing to a halt in front.

He’d lived in the neighborhood for a long time, so he knew the twisty streets well, knew which ones were dead ends and which provided a quick way out of the maze, even for someone traveling on foot.

Yes sirree. Luck had definitely been on his side. Running between houses and going over fences, he’d made it to the back of a strip center where there was a doc-in-the-box.

Knowing that the staffs of these minor emergency clinics usually worked long shifts and figuring that this early in the morning one would be starting, he deduced that a stolen car wouldn’t be missed for hours. He’d waited behind a Dumpster until a young woman dressed in scrubs parked in the employee lot and entered through a back door. Breaking into her car had been a piece of cake.

Was he one lucky bastard, or what? Within minutes of leaving his duplex, he’d been miles away from it. Pumped. Exhilarated. Wanting to spill more blood. Bellamy Price’s blood.

Ever since her old man’s death, she’d been staying with her stepmother in the family mansion. Ray made that his destination, reasoning that she would eventually turn up there. Driving past it throughout the day also gave him an opportunity to plan how he might get through the gate and onto the property.

It was going to be doubly difficult now that a patrol car was posted outside the gate.

But, again, luck smiled on him.

He just happened to be on one of his reconnaissance drive-bys when he saw Dent’s red Corvette leaving through the gate. He was alone, meaning that Bellamy was inside and, for the time being, inaccessible.

Ray decided to follow Dent. And when he parked his car and went into a Starbucks, Ray realized that he wasn’t just lucky, he was brilliant, because he saw the answer to the problem of how to get past that damn gate.