Cowboy Incognito. Alice Sharpe

than a taste of speculation, his sensual lips twitched into a smile as he returned her appraisal. Dazzled and a bit embarrassed to have been caught staring, Kinsey immediately looked away.

      And that’s how she came to be facing the bicyclist speeding down the middle of the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians like a stiff wind blowing through fallen leaves. She hastily stepped out of the way as he whizzed past, the yellow vest the company’s pedaling messengers wore flying out behind him. The matching helmet obscured his features. Kinsey twirled to face the corner and shout a warning, but it seemed everyone had already sensed something amiss. Someone dropped a shopping bag and someone else screamed. The woman with the children grabbed each girl by a hand and dragged them to the shelter of a recessed doorway, but one of them pulled free. Laughing as though caught up in a game, she shot out onto the sidewalk.

      The weirdest mixture of slow motion and fast-forward came over Kinsey as she soundlessly watched events unfold. The child suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, struck now by the approaching danger but obviously afraid to move. The cowboy dashed to sweep the girl out of harm’s way. The cyclist veered closer to them and then like a flash, unexpected and unreal, he let go of the right grip and shoved the still-moving cowboy, connecting with his shoulder, upsetting his precarious balance. The push propelled man and child toward the street at the same instant a cab cut the corner too close and the cowboy stumbled into its path. The cab stopped abruptly, the driver’s face through the windshield one of abject terror.

      The screech of brakes and blare of horns masked the collective gasp of the onlookers. The cyclist had gone down, too, but he’d rolled to his feet and now went to the aid of the fallen. As he hovered over them, the momentum created by the flow of traffic speeding by in the other direction caused his yellow vest to whip around his torso like the wings of a wounded butterfly.

      The crowd began moving again. Kinsey hesitated just a second, then dashed into the street, heedless now of her aching muscles and sweating brow. As she closed the distance, the cyclist hopped up, ran to his bike, somehow managed to mount it and pedal away down the sidewalk like nobody’s business.

      The child, still caught in the cowboy’s slack embrace, whimpered. The man lay still as death. Kinsey leaned over them as the woman in pink appeared, screaming something in what sounded like Swedish, while the little girl who hadn’t been injured sobbed uncontrollably by her side. Kinsey set her fingers against the man’s throat and felt the flutter of his heartbeat, saw the flickering of his lashes. The child’s eyes were open, but her skin was pale and she looked dazed. Someone touched Kinsey’s shoulder.

      “I’m a doctor,” a middle-aged woman said. “Please, move aside, let me see them.” Kinsey stood and backed out of the way, one hand covering her mouth, unaware of the bloodstains on her white jeans.

      * * *

      AMBULANCES SHOWED UP and soon after, the police. The taxi driver had finally emerged, white faced and shaken. One policeman led him away from everyone else for an interview. Kinsey was questioned along with the other onlookers. Of course, officials were very anxious to hear about the cyclist, and Kinsey discovered she was one of only two people who’d actually seen the shove. Attention of the others seemed to have been focused on the child or even the taxi. Kinsey could offer very little description of the aggressor as it had all happened in such a blur and the helmet had hidden his features.

      They wanted to know if it looked as if the cowboy and the cyclist knew each other, or if the child had been the target. They wanted to know if she could recall anything that implied malice. As she watched the ambulance crew load the child and man into separate vehicles and drive away, she blinked rapidly. “Nothing,” she admitted. “Except the shove, of course.”

      By luck, someone had been using their phone to record the twin girls and had caught the incident. Hopefully, the video would reveal things that had happened too fast for the human eye to spot.

      “We’re going to go to the hospital now to find out more about the victims,” one of the officers told Kinsey as he wrote down her name and number in his notebook. “If you think of anything, anything at all, call me.”

      “What about the company the messenger worked for?” she asked. “Speedy Courier, isn’t that the name? Maybe they can identify which of their messengers were on this street today.”

      “We’re checking into that,” the officer assured her. He handed her his card and she scanned it quickly. His name was Edward Woods. He nodded at her and walked away toward his car. A second later, Kinsey called out to him.

      “Detective Woods? There is something,” she said. “Your footsteps just now...” Her voice trailed off as she fought to organize her thoughts. “When the courier ran off, I heard the slap of his shoes.”

      The detective’s shoulders shrugged with uncertainty as to her point.

      “I see these messengers all the time,” she explained. “My mother lives in one of those beautiful old houses a couple of miles farther up the avenue and the gallery I work at is only two blocks from here. I shop at the little grocery right up the street... Anyway, all the couriers around here dress the same. Their vests are always zipped. This one wasn’t. Plus, they all wear black formfitting bike pants and specialty sports shoes, you know?”

      Light began to dawn in Woods’s eyes. “Sports shoes,” he repeated. “With rubber soles.”

      “Yes. I think this guy was wearing loafers. His feet made a sound just like yours did. He might have been in slacks, too, maybe tucked into dark socks. I can’t quite recall.”

      “You still can’t remember anything about his face?”

      “No.”

      The detective sighed.

      As she headed home, Kinsey used her cell to arrange backup for the gallery show. The time when she should have returned had come and gone, and once again, a sense of urgency propelled her toward her apartment. The door closing behind her gave a fleeting sense of security and the desire to sit in front of a fan and catch her breath almost overwhelmed her. Instead of giving in to it, she took a hurried shower, pulled on a black dress, pinned up her damp hair and returned to the gallery.

      The opening party was in full swing by the time Kinsey found a parking spot and walked through the door. Her boss, Marc Costello, caught her eye and gestured for her to join him. Together, they moved to a private alcove, greeting guests before bending their heads to speak.

      “I heard about what happened out on the street,” Marc said. He was about fifty with a shock of silver hair and looked the part of a gallery owner right down to his black turtleneck worn under a stylish black silk jacket. Not exactly summery New Orleans attire, but that wasn’t what he was interested in anyway. “Are you all right?”

      “I’m fine,” she assured him.

      “I have to tell you something. Right about the time of that accident, your boyfriend, Ryan Jones, was in here. He was asking a whole lot of questions.”

      Kinsey instantly conjured an image of Ryan: curly blond hair, bittersweet-chocolate eyes, a nice smile. She’d met him several weeks earlier when he came into the gallery to buy a painting for his office and wound up taking Kinsey to dinner instead. Since then, she saw him whenever his New York engineering firm sent him to New Orleans to work on a levee project they’d contracted. “What kind of questions?” she asked.

      “Stuff about your background, where you’d grown up, things like that.”

      Kinsey’s brow wrinkled. “What did you tell him?”

      “Nothing. You haven’t exactly told me a whole lot, you know. I just said something about what a hard worker you are. He said he knew that. Then he started asking questions about your family, specifically, your mother.”

      Kinsey swallowed hard. “My mother? What did he want to know?”

      “Let’s see. How old she was and how long had she lived here and where exactly did she live and work...stuff like that. I told him the truth, that I’d never met her, that she was kind of a recluse. He