Surrogate (2 page)

Chapter Two

     Why couldn't the call had come yesterday during someone else's shift? Dallas Stanton wondered as he drove the ambulance toward his next call as he turned onto a dirt road just ahead.  Although he tried to relax against the seat, his back was tied up in knots and he felt like he couldn't breathe.  He kept thinking about the last time he saw a wreck this bad had been his wife's--Debra's.

     Dallas hated car wrecks with a passion. As an EMT who had worked in Rochester, New York for two years before moving to Kilbrough a year ago, Dallas Stanton had sworn he'd seen everything, yet nothing ever got to him the way car wrecks did, and that was what made him leave the fast lane behind.  That and the death of his pregnant wife.

     He'd transferred to Kilbrough because it was a little town where the worst thing that happened was the town folk sleeping in and sometimes missing Reverend McMichael's sermon.  Now according to small-town life, that was bad, but not like the gang warfare and drivebys of New York. And certainly not the drunk drivers who killed people.  People like his wife.

     Those thoughts might have gone on forever had Jose, his partner, not pointed to the battered red Toyota which had obviously flipped many times before slamming into a tree and crunching the front of the car into the body. 

     Dallas parked the ambulance and the two EMTs got out and rushed toward it.

     "Hell, I know that car," Dallas murmured, trying to remember why the vehicle was so familiar and who owned it.  It didn't help it was beyond totaled, and the driver's door had been ripped away, rather like the Jaws Of Life had already been employed to free the driver. The seat was empty.

     "Where's the driver?" Jose asked.

     Dallas shook his head and tried to wrap his thoughts around what he was seeing.  "Maybe if we canvas the grounds, we'll find the body."

     Dallas clenched his jaw shut and stared at the bloody seat, still wet enough so that he knew the accident hadn't happened long ago, and whomever'd been driving was, more than likely, a DOA.  Still, what had happened to the door?  He looked around for a fire truck, but the ambulance was the only vehicle besides the battered car.

     "What the hell happened?" Jose asked, his voice flavored with a light Spanish accent, and he followed his partner, who stooped to the passenger side, where he found that door was still operational, even though he had to tug a little harder than usual to open it.  Frowning, Dallas started to reach for the glove box when he saw a woman's purse amid the blood.  There was her wallet.  Looked like he could forget searching for registration.

     Dallas pulled a rubber glove--there was blood everywhere on that side--grabbed the wallet, and flipped it open, steeling himself against what he would find--whomever the driver had been, he or she was most likely dead; he simply couldn't fathom one surviving this kind of a wreck involving such substantial blood loss.  Survival would've taken a miracle, and he didn't  believe in those.

     The driver's license featured a strawberry-blonde woman, and for just an instant, his vision glazed over, making him see someone else.  The face was close, just a little longer.  The hair was closer to auburn.  And her smile was burned into his memory.

     "Hey, Dallas.  You okay?" Jose asked, prompting him back to the present.

     When he looked at the picture again, this time he saw the real person, someone he recognized well enough: Carrie Williams.  Of course, in a town this small, everybody knew everybody, so that was no stretch.   Carrie had been a sweet girl everyone liked, and knowing that hers was the body he would be searching for made his gut tighten and his shoulders ache.

     An image of Carrie as he'd last seen her flashed into his head, reminding him of one more thing that only added to the horror: she'd been in the last trimester of what had been a difficult pregnancy, so he'd be finding not one dead person but two.

     "Who is she?" Jose asked, still looking at the car.

     "Carrie Williams."  Dallas snapped the wallet shut and lightly tossed it back on the passenger seat where no blood had soiled the fabric.   "When I saw her last week, she was pregnant.  Very pregnant." He gritted his teeth, more troubled than ever as he closed the passenger door.

     "I can't believe she would have been able to get out of the car by herself; somebody had to have dragged her or something.  Let's check for blood trails." 

     The two men walked around the car, and Jose pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket.  As he scanned the ground for signs of blood, he slipped his hands into the gloves.

     "I don't see a damned thing," Jose said and shook his head.  "You?"

     "No."  Dallas looked back at the car door barely clinging to the wreckage, and no matter how he tried to add things up, he couldn't.  There should have been a body or signs of the first responders, whomever they had been, yet when he peered down, there were no tire tracks, no nothing, even though the ground was still moist from yesterday's torrential rain.  Could Carrie have just walked away?

     He looked back at the crumpled front end of the car, and he was pretty certain it had crushed her legs.  She wouldn't have been walking anywhere.  That would have taken a miracle and two hours to pry her from the wreckage, and two hours hadn't passed since the call came.

     "You see any tire tracks or footprints?"  Dallas started around the car, inspecting the ground more closely.  Jose went the opposite direction, searching.

     "No."

     "Damn it.  What happened?"  A mosquito buzzed near Dallas's head, and he swatted at the air to drive the bug away.

     "Maybe we should get in the ambulance and drive--see if somehow she made it out of the car alive and took off walking or something."  Jose wouldn't meet his gaze, and that was one way Dallas knew his partner didn't believe her survival was possible, either and was just as troubled as he was by how weird this whole thing was turning out to be.  Still, Jose couldn't think of a better idea so he pointed back to the ambulance.

     "Okay.  Radio Memorial and see if anyone else has brought her in."  He stood for a moment longer, trying to piece together what had happened, but nothing made sense.

     Jose was just getting off the radio when Dallas plunked into the driver's seat.  "Any luck?"

     "Nope."

     Those words sent mixed feelings through Dallas as he started the vehicle.  A belt squealed, and he made a mental note to get that checked out.  Granted, his supervisor had been complaining about the budget and all, but it wasn't going to do the citizens of Kilbrough much good if the ambulance ended up on the side of the road when a 911 call came in.

     No, in some ways he was grateful Carrie hadn't been brought in because maybe this meant she was still alive somewhere unlike his wife had been.  After all the runs Dallas had been on, he was still superstitious.  Nobody was dead until an official call had been made, so maybe Carrie was still out there, waiting for him to find her, and maybe there was still something he could do for her and the baby.

     Dallas started driving down the gravel road.  "Keep your eyes open," he said, gripping the wheel tightly.  "She could be walking or lying somewhere."

     "I got it covered," Jose said, nodding as he stared out the window.  "I still don't see how she would've made it even this far, considering what that car looked like."

     "Yeah, well, this job is all about strange things.  You know how that goes."  Dallas rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the tension.  It had been a while since things had been this stressful.

     "Wait!" Jose suddenly said, sitting up straight.  "Do you see that?"

     Dallas's gaze followed Jose's to a woman in a dress walking not far down the road.  Although the dress had been white at one time, now most of it was red, depending on how much blood had seeped into the fabric.

     "What the hell?"  The words slurred into a single obscenity, and Dallas blinked, just to make sure he was actually seeing her, very pregnant, walking barefoot down a country road.

     Dallas slammed on the brakes.  "Get the back board!" he yelled even as he threw the gearshift into park and shoved open the door.  As soon as his boots hit the ground, he was off and running.

     "Ms. Williams!" Dallas yelled, hoping to stop her, yet she either hadn't heard him or hadn't known her own name.  She neither turned nor gave any response, which troubled him. 

     She wasn't moving particularly fast, so it didn't take much for him to lunge in front of her, halting her progress.  Dallas didn't have a clue what he'd been expecting, but her undamaged face wasn't it.  She looked as she always had, with brown eyes, almost too big for her face, and hair the sun had set fire to, burning this moment in his memory.  The only obvious wound was laceration on her head.

     "Ms. Williams?  Carrie?" he finally managed in a raspy, broken voice that sounded deeper than usual.

     Carrie just kept looking at him, and the only movement she made was to blink now and again as though she were in a trance and nothing could shake her from it.  What was going on?  Was she in shock?

     "Where's the blood coming from?" Dallas asked, looking down at her ruined dress.  He thought back to the destroyed car and knew he should see some kind of trauma.  This wasn't natural.  Still, he waited, giving her a chance to answer.  Not surprisingly, however, she merely regarded him dully with those bottomless eyes and tried to step around him as Jose arrived with the backboard.

     "Can you speak?" Dallas prompted.  Even though he kept looking at her face, his peripheral vision strayed to the blood, and considering just how much she'd lost, it was a miracle she was even conscious.

     It took a moment before she tried to even make a sound, and as she started to speak, Dallas thought of the diabetic he'd treated with sugar so far over the top he'd been barely still here.  The guy's mouth had been so dry; it had taken everything he'd had to form words, and even then they hadn't sounded much like a words at all, just noise.

     Still, there was a distinct sound she made, rather like she was deaf, and Dallas struggled to find meaning in it.  Finally, he deciphered it: "Tired."

     He waited for more, something more to tell him she knew what had happened to her and how close to death she was, but nothing came.  

     "Carrie?"  He started to say something else when she passed out.

     "Hell," Dallas snapped and reached to catch her.

* * *

     Robbie Williams paced the foyer of Clementine's, the same restaurant where he'd proposed to Carrie eight years ago.  Yeah, the server wanted to seat him, but Robbie couldn't quite go for that, not until Carrie arrived.

     Three hours had passed since he'd left her the message to meet, and while he knew it wasn't out of Carrie's character for her to be late or to forget to call and check in, he hated it.  And she'd
never
been this late.  He'd given her the lecture about driving off into a ditch so many times they both had it memorized, and when all was said and done, she'd just offer a sweet smile that he wouldn't be able to resist.

     So where the hell
was
she?

     He paced the room again and caught sight of his reflection in one of the decorative mirrors hanging on the wall.  His dark hair was shoulder-length and wavy.  Its deep brown matched his eyes, and a few fine wrinkles had settled around them, tempering his good looks into something more trusting.  Carrie called it looking distinguished.  He called it getting old.

     Robbie reached into his pocket and dialed her cell again, knowing she probably wouldn't answer, and he debated whether he should just forgo the whole dinner thing and head back to the house to wait.  Still, something felt off about this, but he couldn't put his finger on what.

     He was right.  Her phone went straight to message, and he shoved his cell back into his pocket.

     "Did you reach your wife, Robbie?"

     It was Rusty Hallaran, the owner.  Rusty and Robbie went back as far as high school, and while these days their association was based on the new house Robbie's construction company was building for Rusty, that didn't mean the old friendship wasn't still buried under there somewhere.

     "No, I didn't."

     Rusty nodded and looked at his watch.

     "Look," Robbie said, "I don't want to keep a table you could use for someone else. I'll just get out of your hair."   Robbie flashed Rusty an agreeable smile he didn't feel and sauntered toward the door.

     On the way to his truck, Robbie spotted a young couple, two kids probably just out of college who had their whole lives before them.  He smiled while watching the guy wrap his arm around the girl and silently prayed good things for them like what he'd had with Carrie.  Aside from the difficulties of getting pregnant, their life together had been incredible, and the future only promised to get better.

     He watched them go inside and realized they had probably been lucky enough to get the table he'd just relinquished, considering how full the restaurant had been.  Oh, well--what was Clementine's without Carrie? Robbie got in, turned on the radio, and coasted through town before getting on the highway that would take him the ten miles to a house Carrie had wanted more than he had, probably because of the rocky shoreline just behind.  Hell, she'd spent hours out there, just watching the water break across the rocks.  It was her favorite place in all the world.