Chasing Shadows. Karen Harper

when he wasn’t in LA or making a quick trip home to see Lexi. Smooth flight as usual with a pilot he liked, but, as first officer, he was always itching to get into the captain’s seat.

      He glanced down at the three stripes circling the sleeves of his uniform jacket on the seat beside him, and thought about Claire. When he’d gotten this promotion, the two of them had celebrated at Stoney’s Restaurant, and the next day at McDonald’s with Lexi. Slender, like her mother, that little kid could put food away but never seemed to gain weight. He hoped like hell that was all his girl had inherited from Claire.

      He tried to put his past life—and past wife—out of his thoughts. She’d betrayed him, though not by being unfaithful. A woman with a career exposing liars had lied to him, hid things, and he couldn’t take that. Absolutely unacceptable. He’d have tried to take Lexi if the child hadn’t been so close to her mother and her aunt Darcy, if he hadn’t always had wanderlust for exotic places and Claire had argued that Singapore or even LA wasn’t the place to rear a child. Hell, Singapore was just a foreign version of Naples: heat and humidity, tourism, traffic, beaches, great restaurants, crocs instead of gators—that’s all, if you ignored the mosques and Buddhist temples.

      “Very nice day,” his taxi driver said. “No monsoons yet in ‘Garden City.’”

      “I like the nickname ‘fine city’ for this place,” Jace told him, partly to head off the next punch line he figured was coming. “A six-hundred-dollar fine for littering, a twelve-hundred-dollar fine for speeding.”

      “I not speeding. No, sir.”

      So much for that conversation. English might be the main language here, but the place was a real scramble of people, just like the mix of skyscrapers and sampans they drove past right now.

      At his favorite, familiar hotel on busy Orchard Road, he paid his fare, hefted his small bag and walked past the gorgeous garden with flowers and a fountain. Under the spray of water was a statue of the so-called merlion, the mythical beast that was the symbol of the tourism industry here. Its top half was a lion and the bottom half a fish. A couple of years ago, when he’d taken a stuffed merlion home to Lexi, she’d insisted on calling it Lion King Little Mermaid from her two favorite Disney movies at that time.

      Ginger at the desk saw him coming, smiled and winked, then handed him a key card and a note. Call Darcy, it read.

      His stomach flip-flopped, especially when he remembered he hadn’t even taken his phone out of airplane mode after the flight. What if something was wrong—really wrong?

      He hurried to his usual room and linked into the hotel Wi-Fi. He looked at his list of numbers, Claire’s at the top. Once a week, he Skyped with Lexi and Claire just to keep in touch with Lexi. He hit the line with his former sister-in-law’s cell number. Darcy answered right away.

      “Darcy, it’s Jace in Singapore. What’s up? Everyone okay?”

      “I thought you should know Claire had an accident so they won’t be Skyping with you tonight.”

      His voice rose with his pulse rate. “An accident with Lexi in the car?”

      “No, not exactly an accident. Someone shot her in the arm, coming out of the courthouse after that trial which she—they—won. I still have Lexi, so don’t worry. It’s just that it got a lot of publicity here, and I thought you might stumble on it in the news somehow.”

      Claire hurt. That hit him so hard it scared him.

      “In the arm. Is she okay? How bad is it?”

      “I don’t really know yet, but not life-threatening. Just a day or two in Naples Hospital. They want to be sure infection doesn’t set in. And they haven’t found the shooter, who killed her boss—you know, from that insurance company—and they aren’t yet sure who was the intended victim.”

      Jace swore under his breath. Just like Darcy to hold back the worst news. Claire’s boss was shot to death? Why did Claire insist on being in this type of business? Why didn’t she just stick to online consulting? She was just looking for trouble, hanging around shady characters like frauds and liars. Damn, it took one to know one, so no wonder she was good at that.

      “Jace, are you there?”

      “Yeah. So they didn’t get the shooter?”

      “Escaped. The theory is it was a member of that Italian Sorento family that won’t be getting the millions in death benefits. They’re thick as thieves.”

      “Did Claire ask you to call me?”

      “Yes. Yes, she did. And I told Lexi a version of events. Steve took her and our two to get ice cream so she’s not here right now.”

      “I’m not scheduled to fly back to LA for two days this time. I’ll check in, though, try to change off. Maybe I can get a jump seat back sooner.”

      “I’ll take good care of Lexi. It’s not a crisis. Claire’s done with that case. Nothing dangerous on the horizon, and this was just that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

      “Yeah,” he said, fighting to keep his voice level. “Tell the little mermaid I love her, okay?”

      “Sure. She misses you, Jace, wants you back.”

      “Thanks for letting me know,” he said and ended the call. Though he fought it hard, as hurt and angry as he still was, he wished she’d said that about Claire.

       2

      Claire’s wounded arm hardly hurt at all, that is, until she tried to move it or her shoulder. Then, too, she was on pain pills. Despite this accident—this assault—she was blessed it wasn’t worse.

      They had her sitting up in the hospital bed. No cast, since the bullet had missed her bone. Only one of the three major upper arm muscles had been impacted. In the ER while she was sedated, they’d given her a transfusion, probed for and extracted the bullet, irrigated the wound and put her back together with some sort of blue adhesive and a bandage, all supported by a pink sling, no less. The doctor had said her skin would get sticky and itchy but should heal well.

      “I see you’ve finished your breakfast. Feeling reasonably okay?” the nurse named Mandy said as she swung the tray table aside and took Claire’s temperature again with an electronic thermometer. Why did doctors, nurses and dentists always start to chat or ask a question when they had something in your mouth?

      “Mm-mm,” Claire said.

      “Good. We gave you a tetanus booster in your right arm if that’s a bit sore. Sometimes in the panic and pain in the ER, memories can be strange and I know you missed your dosages of meds before we realized you were narcoleptic. You really should wear a bracelet with that info. Your sister had to tell us, you know.”

      “Mm-mm.”

      Actually, that was a good suggestion, so maybe something positive would come from this mess. She’d been so sedated that she didn’t recall much either from the ER or last night. But she didn’t want to be explaining to people what a NARC bracelet around her wrist meant. The fewer people who knew she was narcoleptic, the better. Thank heavens, she hadn’t had one of her terrible dreams from being even slightly off her meds but she just bet it was the hospital sedation that had saved her from that. Regularity of her meds, her naps and daily stimulants were essential.

      Taking the thermometer out of her mouth and squinting at it, Mandy said, “Good, no fever. Now, before we release you later today, I want to warn you not to be upset by major bruising. Your skin will be black and blue like crazy, following lymphatic channels under the skin, maybe looking like a series of stripes.”

      Claire heaved a huge sigh. “A small price to pay, considering my client was killed. He’s Jewish, so his wife will want to bury him soon. He has two adult children. I’m so sorry for all of them.”

      “They won’t be