Page 7 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Something else to worry about: being backed over by someone like me.

Was there any sort of record on how long someone could lie in the middle of a parking lot and no one notice? And—yuck—what if ants and things crawled on me? I was bleeding. Probably all sorts of little critters were crawling at top speed toward me, eager to feast.

This thought was so disgusting that if my head hadn’t been aching so badly I probably would have bolted upright. No, I don’t like bugs. I’m not afraid of them, but I think they’re nasty and icky, and I don’t want them anywhere near me.

Come to think of it, the parking lot itself was nasty and icky. Tacky, classless people spit on the pavement, and sometimes they spit more than just spit. All sorts of crap landed on pavements, including, well, crap.

Oh, God, I had to get up before I died from an overdose of the nasties. No one was coming to my aid, at least not on my timetable, which pretty much meantNOW.I’d have to do this myself. I’d have to find my purse, dig out my cell phone—I hoped the damn thing still worked, that the battery hadn’t been knocked out or something, because finding a battery and replacing it was beyond me at the moment—and call 911. I also had to sit up, to get most of my body off the nasty pavement, or my mental state would soon match my physical one.

On the count of three, I thought, I would sit up.One. Two. Three.Nothing happened. My mind knew what I wanted to do, but my body said uh-uh. It had already tried that sitting-up stuff.

That pissed me off, almost as much as did the lying-there-unnoticed. Okay, I’m lying about that. Lying-there-unnoticed came close to the top of the list. If I had to rate the things that pissed me off right then, someone trying to kill me—again!—would have to rate a ten. No one paying any attention to me was a nine. A disobedient body was a distant third, coming in at maybe a five.

Still, I’d been a cheerleader for years, all the way from junior high through college. I’d told my body to do painful things lots of times, and for the most part it had obeyed. It just didn’t make sense that it wouldn’t obey me now when the stakes were a lot higher than turning a cartwheel or something. My life could hang in the balance here! Not only that, it felt as if something was crawling on my face. No doubt about it, I had to get up. I had to get help.

Maybe I was trying to do too much. Sitting up all in one motion, without the spur of panic to push me, was more than I could manage. Maybe I should try moving my arm again.

That worked out pretty well. My right arm hurt, but it did just what my brain told it to do, which was laboriously (I didn’t tell it that part, that was just the way it worked) bring my hand up so I could swipe at whatever was crawling across my face.

I expected to feel a bug. I was braced to feel a giant bug. What I felt, instead, was wet and sticky.

Okay, I was bleeding. I was vaguely surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t that I was surprised I was bleeding, but that I was bleeding from my head or face, or both. I knew I’d hit my head, hence the headache and nausea that likely meant a concussion, but the situation was getting worser and worser, as someone once said. If I’d cut my face, would that mean stitches? The way this was going, I would look like the Bride of Frankenstein by the time Wyatt and I got married.

That realization shot up to a seven on my Piss-O-Meter. Maybe an eight. My plans for Wyatt were totally screwed if my face was scarred and I was covered in peeling road rash, because how could he possibly go blind with lust looking at that?

At least he wasn’t with me this time. He’d been right there both of the other times when someone tried to kill me, and it had played hell with him on all sorts of levels. As a cop, he’d been infuriated. As a man, he’d been outraged. As the man who loved me, he’d been terrified. Naturally, he had shown all this by becoming even more arrogant and overbearing, and considering what his base level was for both those characteristics, you can imagine how unbearable he became. It’s a good thing I already loved him, or I’d have had to kill him.

Thinking about Wyatt wasn’t going to get help to me any faster. I was really good at putting off unpleasant stuff, but I couldn’t put this off any longer. It was going to hurt, but I had to force myself to move.

I was lying on my left side, with my left arm pinned beneath me. I planted my right hand about even with my shoulder and awkwardly levered myself up until I managed to get propped on my left elbow. Then I paused, fighting nausea, fighting the horrible pounding in my head, waiting until the worst of it passed before I struggled into an upright position.

Okay. Nothing was broken. Having had experience with broken bones, I could tell that much. Scraped, bruised, jarred, and concussed, but not broken. Probably if I’d been in fear of my life I could have jumped up and run like hell, but the bitch who had almost run me down had evidently taken her road rage to, well, the road. Not having that pressing need, I sat there and used the hem of my blouse to wipe the blood from my eyes so I could see. I also used that time to reassure myself that my head wasn’t going to explode or fall off, though it felt as if it might do both.

With my vision less blurry, I found my purse. It was hanging from the bend of my right arm, and it was tangled with some of the plastic bags that I likewise hadn’t dropped. The tangled straps had been hampering my efforts to move my arm, and the bags themselves were woven around and under my legs. How about that? My purchases might have provided my skin with a little extra protection. I took this as a sign that God wanted me to shop.

Buoyed by this spiritual support, I clumsily fished in my purse for my cell phone and flipped it open. The blessed little screen lit up, so I punched in 911. I’ve called 911 before, when Nicole Goodwin was murdered and I thought the shots were being fired at me, so I knew the drill. When the dispassionate voice asked the nature of my emergency, I was prepared.

“I’ve been injured. I’m in the mall parking lot—” I told them which mall, which store, and which entrance I was lying outside of, though technically I was now sitting outside of it.

“What is the nature of your injury?” the voice inquired, without the least bit of urgency or even concern. I guess the 911 operator figured that if I were calling, I couldn’t be hurt that much, and I guess she was right.

“Head injury; I think I have a concussion. Bruises, scrapes, general battering. Someone tried to run me down, but she’s gone now.”

“Is this a domestic dispute?”

“No, I’m heterosexual.”

“Ma’am?” For the first time, the operator’s voice had some expression in it. Unfortunately, that expression was confusion.

“I said, ‘she’s gone,’ and you asked if it was a domestic dispute, so I said no, I’m heterosexual,” I explained patiently, which, considering I was sitting on the nasty pavement bleeding, was an example of my self-control. I really try not to piss off people who might be coming to my rescue. I say “might” because so far the rescuing hadn’t happened.

“I see. Do you know the identity of this person?”

“No.” All I knew was that she was a psycho bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to steer a wheelbarrow, much less a Buick.

“I’ll dispatch a patrol car and medics to your location,” the operator said, having regained her professional distance. “I need more information, so please stay on the line.”

I stayed. When asked, I provided my name and address, my home phone number, and my cell number, which I think maybe she already had, because of enhanced 911, plus my cell phone is one of those with a GPS locator in it. I had probably been triangulated, located, and verified. Inwardly I winced. My name was already going across police radios, which meant one Lieutenant J. W. Bloodsworth would hear it and was probably already leaping into his car and turning on his blue lights. I really hoped the medics could get here before he arrived, and clean some of the blood off my face. He’s seen me bloody before, but still…it’s a vanity thing.

---