Carolyn Keene - Hit and Run Holiday

Nancy didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, and she waited impatiently for Kim to finish talking so she could find out.

“Don’t say that, you’re scaring me,” Kim protested. She waited, then sighed. “All right, okay. I’ll meet you at your perch in ten minutes.”

Perch? Nancy almost smiled. Was Ricardo a boy or a bird? When she heard Kim say goodbye, she started to knock again. But the door was flung open before she had a chance, and a very startled Kim Baylor was staring at her.

“Nancy!” Kim’s brown eyes widened in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you I might come down, remember?” Nancy said. “Besides, your—”

“Oh, that’s right,” Kim interrupted. “So much has been going on, I guess I forgot.” She was already out the door and hurrying down the hall toward the elevator. “Listen, I can’t talk now, I’m in a rush. But I really do want to see you. Maybe when I—”

“Hey, where’s the fire?” Nancy joked as Kim kept jabbing at the elevator button. “Let’s take the stairs, and then I’ll walk you wherever you’re going. We can talk on the way.” She hurried to keep up with her friend, who was already at the stairs. “Kim, what’s going on? You look freaked, to say the least.”

Kim hurried down the stairs, her rubber beach sandals slapping on the cement. “I am freaked,” she called over her shoulder. “You just won’t believe what’s been happening!”

“Try me,” Nancy suggested.

“I will, I will, but, Nancy, it’s just too complicated to get into right now. I’ve got something really important to do, but I promise I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can.”

Frustrated, Nancy followed Kim through the hotel’s small, deserted lobby toward the street door. Kim dashed outside. Nancy ran after her, but her sandal chose that moment to slip off her foot. She bent over, put it back on, and hurried after her friend.

Kim was standing impatiently on the curb, her long brown hair blowing in the sea breeze. She reached up, pulled a strand of hair out of her eyes, and stepped into the street.

Nancy was just leaving the hotel when she heard the sound of a car’s engine firing and the squeal of tires as the car peeled away. She saw that Kim had reached the middle of the street. Nancy started after her, but it was at that second that she noticed the dark blue car racing toward Kim.

Nancy yelled but it was too late. The car was barreling down the street at a crazy speed. Kim opened her mouth to scream, but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the impact.

The car never slowed down. Its tires squealed again as it sped around the corner and out of sight.

Chapter Two

In a second, Nancy was at Kim’s side. It was impossible to tell how badly her friend was hurt. All Nancy could see were cuts and scrapes, but she didn’t dare move her. She wasn’t even going to take the chance of putting her friend’s head in her lap. She knelt down, took Kim’s hand, and leaned close to her.

“Kim?” Nancy tried to keep her voice from shaking. “It’s going to be okay. Just don’t move.”

Gripping Nancy’s hand, Kim licked her lips and tried to say something. Her voice was so weak that Nancy could barely hear her.

“ Rosita ,” Kim whispered. “ The . . . it was . . . Rosita.” She took another breath and started to say something more, but then her eyelids fluttered closed and she was silent.

Nancy looked up and was surprised to see that a crowd of ten or fifteen people had gathered. She’d been concentrating so hard on Kim that she hadn’t even noticed them.

“Could someone call an ambulance, please?” Nancy asked.

An elderly man nodded his head. “Of course,” he said, and hurried away.

A voice close to Nancy asked, “Is she dead?”

The person who’d asked about Kim was a young woman, wearing the uniform of a hotel maid.

Nancy swallowed hard and shook her head. “No, she’s not dead,” she told her. “She’s breathing. But she passed out.”

The woman nodded and started to leave.

“Wait!” Nancy called. “Did you see what happened?”

“No, I didn’t,” the woman said. “I was inside. I heard a scream, but that’s all. I came out to see, and on the way, I told my boss to call the police. It sounded like a bad accident.”

“It was bad,” Nancy agreed grimly. “But it wasn’t an accident.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, miss,” the woman said, backing away. “I have to go to work now.”

In the distance, Nancy could hear the wail of a siren, and she knew help was on the way. Still holding Kim’s hand, she glanced up at the other people. “Did anyone see it happen?” she asked. “Did anyone see who was driving the car?”

A few people shook their heads, but no one said anything.

I couldn’t have been the only one on the sidewalk, Nancy thought in frustration. Somebody must have seen something.

She knew they couldn’t have gotten the license plate number, though. In those few awful seconds before the car hit Kim, Nancy had noticed that it didn’t have a front plate, and as it tore off down the street, she realized that the back plate was missing too. But she’d been in such a hurry to get to Kim that she hadn’t taken the time to look for anything else.

“How about the make of car or the year?” Nancy asked the onlookers. “Or whether it had two doors or four doors?”

A few more heads were shaken.

“Anything?” Nancy asked desperately. “This is important. Didn’t anyone see anything ?”

Nancy scanned the crowd, trying to catch a sympathetic eye. At the edge of the group she noticed a young guy, about nineteen or twenty, wearing a black swimsuit. He was one of the handsomest boys Nancy had ever seen, with black hair and eyes and smooth, dark gold skin. But it wasn’t his looks that caught her attention—it was the expression in his eyes. He’d been staring at Kim, but as Nancy watched he raised his head and glanced down the street, in the direction the car had gone. His eyes glittered, and his lips curled into a tight smile.

What kind of smile? Nancy wondered. An angry smile? A satisfied one?

But Nancy didn’t have time to do more than wonder. Its siren shrill and piercing, a police car rounded the corner, followed by an ambulance. The moment they came into sight, the crowd scattered, leaving Nancy alone with Kim.

“It was a hit and run,” she told the officer who hurried over to her. “The car didn’t bother to slow down for a second.”

The policeman nodded and began firing questions at Nancy. What was Kim’s name, where was she staying, where was she from? Nancy answered and then told him all she could about the accident, which wasn’t much. “There were a lot of people around,” she finished, “but they all split the minute they saw your car.”

Closing his pad, the policeman nodded again. “Illegals, probably,” he said. “Afraid to get involved.”

Nancy suddenly understood. If people were in the country illegally, they’d rather keep their mouths shut than come forward and tell what they saw. Because if they had to testify in court, they’d be discovered, and then it would be goodbye, U.S.A.

Nancy looked over at Kim, who was being lifted gently onto a stretcher. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, feeling both sorry for the illegals and frustrated with them. “My friend gets run down in front of half a dozen witnesses, but I’m the only one who sees anything.”

“Yeah, it’s tough,” the officer agreed. “There’s a lot of ugly business going on down here in paradise.”

Kim was being loaded into the ambulance by then. One of the medics jumped in after her.