“Well, I could probably get a lot more information if I hired on to do one of the movies,” Sandy said musingly. “The talk is they’re paying mucho bucks.”

“Just call me if you hear anything,” Rebecca ordered as she stood, suddenly feeling like she needed some fresh air. “Don’t go playing games.”

“You know, you are a real pain in… Frye?… Hey!”

Rebecca was aware of Sandy’s voice, but she couldn’t make out the words over the roaring in her head. She could just barely hear someone saying fuck…it might have been her…she thought she was speaking. Mostly all she wanted to do was get one clean, deep breath and she’d be fine. Man, it hurt to breathe, and it kept on hurting until finally, she just closed her eyes and stopped struggling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CATHERINE KNOCKED SHARPLY on the door to apartment 3 B. Although socioeconomically the residential area immediately surrounding University City where she lived in a historically renovated Victorian was light years away from the apartments bordering the Tenderloin, they were separated in distance only by the river that bisected the city and twenty city blocks. It had taken her less than six minutes to arrive after she had gotten the phone call. The door opened and a young Annie Lennox look-alike in a tight, midriff baring T-shirt and hip hugger jeans slung so low they barely covered the essentials greeted her with a distinct disregard for social amenities.

“Are you Catherine? Fuck, you better be.”

Catherine merely nodded and stepped hurriedly inside. “Where is she?”

“Over there. Goddamned stubborn cop moron.”

Sandy jerked her head in the direction of the couch, but she needn’t have bothered. Catherine could hear the labored breathing from across the small apartment. Two steps further into the room and she saw Rebecca lying on the sofa, her shoulders propped against the arm with a pillow behind her head. The top three buttons on her shirt were open and her chest heaved spasmodically with each struggling attempt to get air. Sweat poured from her face, and her skin had a faint bluish tint. Catherine’s heart seized with fear. God, what was this? Hemorrhage? Embolus? It looked terrifyingly like an MI.

“Call 911.”

“No,” Rebecca gasped, opening her eyes.

When she turned to Catherine, her eyes were swimming with pain and something else, something Catherine didn’t think she had ever seen in them before. Fear.

“See what I mean?” Sandy muttered. “You think I didn’t want to? She threatened to shoot the phone if I did. I’m lucky she gave me your number. Fucking rock head.”

Catherine knelt by the sofa, noting the remains of a takeout meal and Rebecca’s jacket thrown over a nearby chair. Anger was an excellent antidote to fear, but she had time for neither, so she pushed the quick surge of jealousy and confused disappointment aside. Pulling open a worn satchel that she hadn’t used in more than a decade, she extracted a stethoscope, which she swung around her neck with one hand while reaching for a blood pressure cuff with the other. As she wrapped the cuff around Rebecca’s arm, she said steadily, “I need to get you to a hospital.”

“I… know.” Rebecca made an effort to sit up, but any exertion made her lightheaded. “I’ll go. Just not…in an…ambulance.”

Catherine tried not to think about what might be going inside Rebecca’s body as she concentrated on the physical facts. Although her pressure was low, it wasn’t critical yet. Slipping her hand under Rebecca’s shirt, Catherine moved the stethoscope back and forth over her chest. Frowning, she listened for a few seconds to the right and then the left, then she glanced quickly at the distended veins in Rebecca’s neck. “Your left lung is collapsed. We need to get you out of here.” Looking over her shoulder, she said again, forcefully, “Call 911.”

“Uh, it will probably take them a few minutes to get here. This area doesn’t get the fastest service. Maybe it would be quicker if you drove her?” Sandy stood close behind Catherine’s shoulder, watching Rebecca’s face. “She didn’t look this bad when I called you.”

Listening to Rebecca fight for air, Catherine had to agree. “Can you stand?” she asked, pulling the blood pressure monitor from the detective’s arm and stuffing it into her bag. “We’ll help you.”

“Yes.”

Sandy and Catherine steadied Rebecca from either side with an arm around her waist and half-carried her down the three flights of stairs to Catherine’s car, which she had left in front of a hydrant a few doors down from the once elegant brownstone that now had been subdivided into apartments. By the time they got her into the front seat, and Catherine had fumbled the seat belt around her, she was barely conscious and her stridor had worsened.

“Rebecca,” Catherine said sharply, grasping her chin, turning her lover’s face up toward her. “Rebecca, don’t struggle. Breathe as slowly as you can. Do you understand?”

She couldn’t get enough air to speak, but she nodded.

Sandy bent down and whispered something to Rebecca that Catherine couldn’t hear as she ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side. She had the key in the ignition before she was completely settled behind the wheel, and she careened away from the curb without even a backward glance at the young woman who stood on the sidewalk watching the taillights disappear into the dark.

Thankfully, at that time of night there was almost no traffic in University City. Within a matter of minutes, she was screeching to a halt outside the emergency room at University Hospital. She ran through the double doors into the harshly lit admitting area and shouted, “I’m Dr. Catherine Rawlings. I have a critically ill patient in my car. Someone bring a gurney.”

Catherine glanced at the clock in the small doctor’s lounge adjacent to the emergency room. Midnight. The waiting created a painful sense of déjà vu, and as the minutes dragged on, it was harder and harder for her not to think about the night that Raymond Blake had taken her and nearly taken Rebecca’s life. Forcing her thoughts from that horror, she reminded herself that Rebecca was not dying, not tonight. But being separated from her, not knowing precisely what was happening, frayed the last remnants of her nerves, and she was losing the battle to stay calm. She had too many recollections, some of them too terrifying to erase even from her dreams. Now she had another unwelcome memory—the image of Rebecca suffering, struggling in agony for each insufficient breath. It was tearing her apart.

“Catherine?”

She spun around, grateful for the sound of another human voice to distract her from her pain.

“Jim! How is she?”

“She’s stable…”

“Where is she? Can I see her? What—”

The emergency room physician smiled, raising a hand to stem the flow of words. “In a minute. She’s on her way back from CAT scan.”

“How serious is it?” Catherine managed to ask in a more controlled fashion. The panic that had simmered just beneath the surface of her soul was beginning to abate.

“Well,” the treating physician replied, motioning to a chair beside him as he sank heavily into a seat at the small table. “If you were looking for a new job, I’m fairly certain we can find you one down here. Your exam on the scene saved us a lot of time, and her a lot of pain. She had a pneumothorax, just as you suspected. Probably an area of scar tissue had adhered to the inner surface of one of her ribs, and it tore lose tonight, collapsing her lung.”

“Are they going to need to operate?” These things happened; she knew that as well as anyone. Then why did she feel like screaming?

“A little too soon to tell.” He gave her a satisfied smile. “I put a needle in, aspirated the air, and the lung came back up. The CAT scan looks good right now. We’ll have to see if the lung stays up or not.”

“Thank you, Jim.”

“Don’t mention it. She should be back by now. Cubicle seven.”

She murmured her thanks once again and hurried away. To her great relief, when she opened the door to the small private treatment room, she found Rebecca sitting up on a stretcher, looking drawn but breathing easily. The relief was so intense, for a second she feared she might cry.

“How do you feel?” Catherine managed, struggling to keep her voice from quivering. Something of her fragile emotional state must have shown in her face, because Rebecca’s welcoming smile immediately turned to a look of concern.

“I’m okay.” Reaching out a hand, the one that was not tethered to an intravenous line, she drew Catherine closer. “If I understood what he was telling me, it was a fluke—a little bit of scar tissue acting up. Not a big deal.”

Catherine was tired. Tired and still reeling from worry and her own terrifying memories. If she hadn’t been so shaken, she probably would have been more circumspect, but she just didn’t have enough strength to control her response. “Rebecca, you could have died. If you weren’t as physically fit as you are, you probably would have. It could happen again—in fact it often does. This was a warning, and you were lucky that your young friend was quick-witted enough to realize how ill you were.”

“She’s not a friend. She’s a source.”

“What she may be to you, I don’t know,” she said more sharply than she intended. “But she’s fond of you, I’ll tell you that.”

Rebecca had never seen Catherine quite like this before. When she had first walked into the room, it’d looked like she was going to break down. That in itself was frightening, because during all the long weeks of Rebecca’s convalescence, Catherine had been nothing but upbeat and positive. If she had cried, she had done it alone. And then tonight, anger had followed so closely on the heels of her concern that Rebecca was stunned. The problem was, she wasn’t quite certain what Catherine was angry about. It seemed as if Sandy was part of it, but that didn’t make any sense—Catherine didn’t know anything about Sandy.