Remembering Red Thunder. Sylvie Kurtz

welfare is our number one priority.”

      Two nurses came in. One plunged something into Chance’s IV line as the other pinned him down. A rasp between anger and fear grated from his throat.

      “Chance!” She reached for him, but Dr. Benton blocked her way. Tears streamed down her cheeks as Chance’s face contorted into a mask of sheer terror. “Chance!”

      “He needs help, Mrs. Conover,” Dr. Benton said, shaking her slightly to get her attention. “Now would be an excellent time to have me admit him to my ward.”

      Chance’s eyes closed. Slowly the beeps and lines on the machinery calmed. And once again, he looked no more than a corpse.

      “Chance,” she whispered, half in prayer, half in entreaty.

      “With therapy,” Dr. Benton insisted, “I can bring your husband back. Sign the transfer.”

      “I have to stay with him.”

      “To heal, to come back to you, he needs therapy.”

      “He needs me.” Not these white-coated people who didn’t care about him.

      “He’s going to be sleeping for a while now, Mrs. Conover,” Dr. Benton said. “Why don’t you go home and get some rest? I’ll put my therapy proposal together and we can go over it tomorrow.”

      “I want to stay.”

      “That’s not in his best interest right now.” Dr. Benton nodded to one of the nurses. “Call security.”

      Soon two uniformed guards were leading her against her will to the elevator.

      Angus, who’d been in the waiting room, joined her. “What’s going on?”

      With his graying brown hair, his patrician features just now starting to droop with age and his ever-present camel-colored blazer and matching Stetson, he was a welcome sight. His questioning glance searched the guards’ faces, then hers. “You all right?”

      “No,” she managed to choke out. She wouldn’t be until Chance came back to her. “They’re making me go home.”

      Angus wrapped one of his strong arms around her shoulders. “Chance probably needs his rest, sweetheart.”

      “He doesn’t know who I am.” She leaned into Angus’s barrel chest and the tears flowed harder, numbing her to anything but her own loss.

      “I’ll take you home, sweetheart.”

      She could not have said how she got home. Seeing the house all dark and empty was another blow that added a layer of numbness. Angus offered to sit with her. She refused. Like a robot on automatic, she went straight to the bedroom she shared with Chance. Still dressed in the shorts and T-shirt she’d put on after her shower, she slid into bed. She drew the sheet over her head, curled up knees to chin and withdrew into the hard shell she’d escaped to so often as a little girl.

      She’d thought having Chance die would be the absolute worst thing that could happen to her. She’d been wrong. Having him alive and looking at her as if she was nothing but a stranger was a thousand times worse.

      But as she spent a sleepless night in the dark, alone in her bed, she knew she could not give up. For her baby’s sake, she couldn’t let go of what had taken her so long to earn.

      She’d help him, just as he’d helped her find her way home again ten years ago. “Together, we’ll find you again.”

      CHANCE CAME TO in a sweat, breath all but choked out of him and coming short and sharp as if he’d been running for hours. His head pounded to a frantic beat. His skin crawled with the need to keep bolting. He tried to blink away the horror flashing behind his lids, but with each flicker, the red haze spread, the blond hair writhed, the hands choked.

      Grasping the sheets on the side of the bed into fists, he forced his eyes to stay open until he saw nothing but the white ceiling. And as his breath slowed, as the beating of his heart moderated, he became aware of the anger roiling through him like Class VI rapids. All of his thoughts converged to one overwhelming desire—escape.

      “You’re awake.”

      The voice jolted him into hyperarousal, sending the pulse monitor at his side into another wild jangle of beeps. He dragged in a long draw of breath and looked at the man beside his bed. “Who the hell are you?”

      He was tall and thin. His features were long and pointed and reminded Chance of an egret. A pink skull showed through the man’s close-cropped blond hair. He wore a beige uniform shirt with a gold star above the left pocket and held his hat before him with both hands in a way that struck Chance as a supplication.

      “Tad Pruitt.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Your deputy.”

      Chance looked away, closed his eyes, then jerked them open when the red haze threatened him again.

      Tad Pruitt. His deputy.

      The name, the man, didn’t ring a bell. He almost laughed out loud. Nothing was real anymore. His brain seemed to have been wiped clean of everything except the snapshots of the muddy images running through his mind. His emotions seemed to be able to handle nothing more than the fear running rampant through his body or the anger stirring a fevered need for action.

      He fixed his gaze on the acoustic tiles on the ceiling and started counting the holes. One. Two. Three. He was riding a thin line between two nightmares. Any minute now the thread would break and sling him straight into insanity. Four. Five. Six.

      “I’ve got to ask you some questions, Chance.” Tad gave a rough attempt at a laugh. “Paperwork’s a bitch, but you’ll have my head if I don’t do it right.”

      Chance. They kept calling him that, but the name fit about as well as a boot two sizes too small. He sure didn’t feel lucky—blistered and bloody was more like it. “The answer to all of them is ‘I don’t know.’”

      “Why don’t we give it a try anyway?”

      “Why don’t you go to hell?”

      Tad cleared his throat. “Well, now, I wish I could, but while you’re down, I’ve got an obligation to the town to fulfill.”

      “You’ve been here. You’ve seen me. Your obligation has been fulfilled. Now leave.”

      “It’s not that easy, Chance. Sam Wentworth said he saw you coming down the ramp. Halfway down you accelerated and kept going until you hit the water. They found no mechanical reason for what happened.”

      No, the dysfunction had been one of his own doing. He knew that on a level as primal as the fear running through his veins. One hundred seventy-one. One hundred seventy-two.

      “That leaves two options, Chance. Did you mistake the accelerator for the brake?”

      “I don’t know.”

      The heels of Tad’s boots squeaked as he shifted his weight from left to right. “Is there some other reason you’d want to drive into that river?”

      “I don’t know.” Three hundred and one. Three hundred and two. And that was just one corner of one tile. Counting all those holes on the ceiling would surely keep him too busy to think.

      “You’re an expert diver, but Sam said you didn’t even try to get out of the car. You just sat there, staring at the sun while water was pouring in all around you.” Tad paused and Chance heard the sound of felt slipping round and round through fingers. The deputy was nervous. “What did you see?”

      Blood. Death. Whose? Why? Were they even real? Five hundred and nine. Five hundred and ten. “I don’t know.”

      “You were lucky your rear bumper caught the bank. If it hadn’t, the current would have swept you away. Sam got on the horn to RoAnn and got help.”

      Chance didn’t feel particularly grateful for Sam’s Good Samaritan act