arched her back. The only thing moving did was remind her that her swollen belly dwarfed the rest of her slender body. It didn’t ease her discomfort. Still, she considered herself fortunate. Even if it was out here with no neighbors, at least they had a roof over their heads, and it was warm and dry and there weren’t any crawly things in it, like that one apartment in Kansas City.
A sharp wave of pain across her belly brought Lori back to the present. Yes, this time a little miracle would do just fine. Like the time the lady from the next farm over, where they had a telephone, stopped by the way she did that once before Gary told her to leave them alone. Right now she’d even take Gary’s old boss coming out to ask his aggravating, enigmatic questions.
“Anybody,” Lori said aloud through dry lips. “Anybody at all would be a miracle.” And she needed that miracle soon. Because this time Lori Harper had to admit something to herself. Unlike the time with the peanut butter, when she and Tyler would have been hungry and uncomfortable, she was in real trouble now.
This time it looked as though she was going to give birth in a trailer with no phone, miles from anyone except her five-year-old son. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy, and if she was reading the signs right, she had maybe an hour until the baby arrived. This time, Lori admitted, if she didn’t get her miracle she could very well die.
“I hate my job.” Mike Martin didn’t answer his friend Carrie Collins because he knew she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to Dogg, who took up most of the bench seat of the pickup between them. The big black-and-tan shepherd thumped his tail and moaned softly at the attention from Carrie. “I hate my job, I hate my life, I hate…”
“Aw, knock it off, Carrie,” Mike told her. “You don’t hate your job. You’re one of the best fire-and-rescue officers in the county, maybe even in the state of Missouri. You only hate the fact that it’s winter, it’s cold and you’ve got to go out in the middle of nowhere and remind some woman she’s a widow.”
“Like it’s going to surprise her, I’ll bet,” Carrie said glumly, still holding Dogg’s massive tawny head in her hands. “But still, why do I have to do this?”
“Because it’s your job,” Mike reminded her, looking over at the slim redhead. “And despite saying you hate it, you’re very good at it. Besides, you took the original call on this one. And you insisted that Ms. Harper be the one that the department took up their collection for. And let’s add the fact that the captain knew that being a woman, you’d give this part of the job the right kind of sympathy.” What Mike didn’t add was that nobody else wanted to touch the assignment with a ten-foot pole, so naturally it fell to the junior member of the team.
That part was unspoken but agreed. “You gonna help out?” Carrie asked him.
Mike snorted. He might be built like a brick wall, but he was more intelligent than one. “Lady, this is your job. I just drive the truck, remember?”
“Drive the truck, dive for things in the pond, do search and rescue with Mister Big here—the whole nine yards,” Carrie said. “You should be doing my job, you know.”
Mike felt a column of ice replace his spine. He looked straight ahead to where the wipers scraped snow off the windshield. His dark hair was still damp from his shower, and the cold made him shiver. At least he would say it was the cold, and not the thought of doing Carrie’s job. “Never in a million years. You do your job, I’ll do mine. I can handle driving, diving and spending most of my time waiting between volunteer calls back at the real-estate office. But regular patrol work? No, ma’am. Not in this lifetime.”
“Suit yourself. I still say you’d be good at it. How about being backup anyway out here?” Carrie wheedled. “I mean, since my partner deserted me and everything…”
“Bart didn’t desert you. He was listening for the dispatcher.”
“Yeah, well, only because he’d rather spend the morning waiting for a call that might not come than do what I’m doing.” Carrie wore the ghost of a pout on her snub-nosed face.
“Oh, get real,” Mike told her. “Anybody would rather do that than go out to a spot ten miles from anyplace and tell some girl her Christmas is going to come from the fire department because she’s the most pathetic case they had all year.”
Anybody sane, Mike added silently. He’d long ago counted himself among the other part of the population because he would have given his well-muscled right arm to be able to do what the woman sitting next to him did. But like he told her, it wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime. This was the closest he was going to get to her kind of work, with good reason. There was enough trouble in his past to convince Mike he wasn’t capable of the kind of strength this took.
“You’ve got a point,” Carrie admitted. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Are you going to be my backup here?”
Even in the cold Mike could feel himself break out in a sweat. “I hadn’t planned on it. I mean, you’ve got the training in this. I’m just a guy with a truck, the guy who’s dumb enough to drive you out here, remember?”
“All too well,” Carrie said. “You won’t even put on the red suit. Could we at least try the antlers on Dogg?”
“If you want to try antlers on Dogg, go ahead. I am not helping, unless he bites you. Can’t let the old EMT training go to waste,” Mike said, wondering why he’d even agreed to get out of the truck.
His part of this job had been done in August. He’d taken a johnboat across that pond to where Dogg unmistakably told them there was a body somewhere under the surface. He’d put on his wet suit and probed the murky water until they’d found the battered car that yielded Gary Harper’s body still behind the wheel. Facing his widow, even this many months later, was beyond him.
Granted, she might not be that brokenhearted to be a widow. Everybody in the department pegged Gary Harper for a small-time drug runner, out on parole this time for less than a year. The car had yielded evidence that he’d moved here to Franklin County to set up his old trade of running a meth lab. He probably hadn’t been any prize to live with.
A battered mailbox alerted Mike that the turnoff to the trailer was ahead. “Hold on to your hat. Things are about to get bumpier.”
“Like that’s possible.” Their heads nearly hit the ceiling of the big truck. Even Dogg gave a deep “woof” of discomfort when they settled back into the ruts of the nearly nonexistent lane to the house.
They jounced down the ruts for almost a half mile. At the end of the ruts was a single-wide mobile home in poor condition. There were lights on behind two of the windows. At least that was encouraging.
Looking at the mobile home, anger rose in Mike. He wondered how anybody, even a thug like Gary Harper, could let his family live out here. Couldn’t he have provided something better when he was alive? The aluminum siding of the trailer was gray and dented. Two cracked concrete blocks served as the only stoop at the front door. The whole place had such an air of neglect, Mike wondered if anyone would answer the door, even with the lights on.
Carrie got out of the truck cab and coaxed Dogg to stand up. The big German shepherd looked back at Mike with a questioning look. He didn’t shake off the fabric antlers, but he seemed to beg Mike to do it for him.
“Sorry, buddy. You let Carrie do that. Now go to the door with her.”
The dog leapt down with a resigned
