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Gabe positioned himself at Blake’s injured left side, Page on Blake’s right Swaying between them, he somehow made his feet cooperate as they moved slowly toward Gabe’s truck.
A couple of bored-looking teenagers, cigarettes dangling from their slack lips, watched idly from outside the used comic book store. Another stringy-haired young man shuffled haltingly toward the pair, his attention focused on the cigarettes rather than the injured man being half carried across the parking lot.
Wondering what kind of neighborhood they were in where bullet wounds roused so little interest, Gabe opened the passenger door of his truck and managed to stuff Blake carefully inside.
“I’ll bleed on your upholstery,” Blake warned with a sorry attempt at a smile. “Don’t you have a towel or something to put behind me?”
“Screw the upholstery,” Gabe said succinctly. “Page, help him with the seat belt”
She nodded and cooperated, positioning herself in the center of the seat between the men as Gabe climbed behind the wheel.
“Did you get a look at the guy who shot you?” Gabe asked as he started the engine. “Was it Wingate?”
“I didn’t see him,” Blake admitted reluctantly. “The guys at the garage said the photograph I showed them didn’t look much like the man who’d been asking questions about Page’s car, but that doesn’t mean much. It’s an old photo of a clean-cut kid. The guy who hung around the garage this morning had long hair, a scraggly b
eard and dark glasses.”
“What happened, Blake?” Page asked.
Blake exhaled deeply. “I was stupid. I fell neatly into a trap he’d set for me.”
“How?”
“Joe—the mechanic at the garage—said the guy had slipped him a twenty and asked him to call if anyone else showed up asking about the car. I pulled a few strings and managed to trace the number Joe had been given to a pay phone in the neighborhood we just left.”
Gabe didn’t even ask what “strings” Blake had pulled in a town he’d supposedly never even visited before. Page was right, he decided. Blake was spooky. And damned lucky.
“The phone,” Blake continued, “was sitting outside a dump of a restaurant that’s closed Mondays, so the place was deserted. I drove around a few times, then pulled into the lot when I didn’t see anyone. Something was taped to the phone. I got out to see what it was. I thought I was being careful, but...” His voice trailed into a snort of self-disgust.
“What was taped to the phone?” Page wanted to know.
“Yellow paper, black ink. Two words—‘big mistake.’ I started to turn to run for my van, and that’s when he shot me. The shrapnel to the head dazed me enough that I went down. I lay there, playing dead, waiting for him to finish me off or get close enough to give me a chance to take him on, but the bastard just got into my van and drove away. My own van, damn it.”
“We’ll call the police when we get to the cabin,” Gabe said, his foot pressed heavily to the accelerator, one eye on the rearview mirror. “We’ll report your van as stolen, give them the license number and description, tell them the thief tried to kill you. At least they’ll be looking for him. We might have had trouble getting help with a stalker, but carjackers get attention these days.”
Slumped against the back of the seat, his eyes closed, Blake murmured, “Good idea.”
“Why didn’t you call us from the phone where you were hit?” Page asked, sounding puzzled.
“He’d disconnected it. I had to walk half a mile to the one where you found me.”
“Bleeding? And no one tried to help you?” Page sounded disgusted, but not entirely surprised. After hearing what she’d been through in the past couple of years, Gabe could understand her reaction.
“I didn’t ask for help,” Blake murmured.
Page set a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Blake. You were trying to help me. You didn’t deserve to be hurt.”
Blake shook his head. “Don’t apologize. You aren’t to blame. Wingate—or whoever pulled the trigger—is the only one at fault here, discounting my own stupidity for getting out of my van in the first place.”
Gabe thought it would be a while before Blake stopped berating himself for that mistake. He was pleased, though, that Blake had unconsciously echoed Gabe’s own assurances that Page could not hold herself accountable for anything this madman did.
Gabe made sure that no one followed them to the cabin.
They got Blake inside and deposited him facedown on the bed. More experienced than Gabe with first aid, Page sent him to report the stolen van and then prepare a meal while she cleaned and bandaged Blake’s wounds.
She was fussing at Blake before Gabe left the room.
“The cut on your head probably needs stitches,” she said. “You’ll have a scar.”
