saw lighter material covering his nose and mouth. Then he shifted his weight, pinning her fully with his legs so he could grab her upper arm and hold it steady.
Without a word, he swung the syringe sharply downward, plunging the needle through her parka, but missing her arm.
Mandy screamed as her attacker cursed and withdrew the needle, then aimed it at the meat of her arm. Just as the syringe descended a second time, a dark blur erupted from the shadows and slammed into him, jolting him off to one side.
She lay dazed for a moment, hearing grunts and the sounds of a struggle. Then a familiar voice snapped, “For the love of—Run!”
Radcliff? The shock of hearing—and recognizing—his voice sent a new burst of adrenaline through Mandy’s system. Before she was even aware of moving, she’d scrambled to her feet and staggered back several paces. Then she stood, swaying, while the world spun around her.
In the dimness, she could make out the shapes of two men squared off opposite each other. The stranger wore a hooded sweatshirt and a light-colored mask beneath, along with what looked—oddly enough—like surgical gloves. Radcliff, on the other hand, wore dark jeans and a heavy leather jacket, and had a knit cap pulled over his ears.
The oddness of seeing him in street clothes rather than a lab coat created a disconnect in Mandy’s brain, one that had her hesitating for a second. Then the hooded man growled something and lunged at Parker, swinging the syringe in a deadly arc.
Mandy screamed, “No!”
“Get out of here!” Radcliff bellowed. He ducked low and caught his assailant in the gut with his shoulder, folding the guy and deflecting his aim. Then he twisted and sidestepped, and grabbed the other man’s wrist, fighting for control of the syringe.
Mandy wavered for a second, poised between running away from the fight and running toward it. Radcliff had ordered her to go, but as she watched, she saw his braced arm give under the other man’s weight, saw the syringe drop a few inches closer to its target.
Don’t be a fool, the cautious side of her inner self said. Go get help. Call nine-one-one.
But her cell was in her purse, which lay on the pavement just behind the combatants. There was no way she could reach it, no way she could get to her phone, and by the time she found help it might be too late.
Before she was aware of making the decision, the other side of her inner self—the one that was always making mistakes and getting her into trouble—had her launching into action. She lunged, not for the fight, but for the nearby Dumpster. Stretching her arm beneath it, she felt around in the frozen clutter, grimacing until her fingers found the tiny bottle of pepper spray. Heart pounding, she scooped it up and scrambled to her feet.
As she turned toward the combatants, Radcliff gave a low, bitter curse. The syringe hovered bare inches above his throat.
Before she could talk herself out of the mad plan, Mandy flipped the tiny safety off the spray and lunged, aiming the jet full in the other man’s face, above what she now saw was a surgical mask to match the gloves.
The stranger looked at her, his pale eyes locking on hers for a split second as the spray triggered.
At the last possible moment, the hooded man stepped back, relaxed his grip and yanked the syringe away. Radcliff staggered forward, twisting as he fell under his own momentum.
“Watch out!” Mandy cried as he sidestepped and righted himself right into the cloud of pepper spray.
Radcliff howled and reflexively grabbed for his face before redirecting and lunging for his opponent once again, but it was already too late. The masked and gloved man spun away, bent down to grab Mandy’s fallen purse and keys and bolted from the alley.
Streetlights silhouetted him briefly against the mouth of the alley as he skidded, hooked a right and disappeared.
Swearing, Radcliff lunged in pursuit, caromed off the Dumpster and spun into the opposite alley wall, where he doubled over, braced his elbows on his knees, and coughed through a string of bitter curses.
Mandy took two steps toward Radcliff and reached out a hand to help him, then froze again when she saw the spent pepper spray still clutched in her fingers.
His head came up. His watering eyes fixed first on the spray, then traveled up to lock on her. She expected him to bark at her, to snarl bloody murder as he might have done in the hospital.
Instead he exhaled in disgust. “Why am I not surprised?”
He shifted, leaned back against the wall, and reached inside his heavy leather jacket to pull out a cell phone. A single button connected him with whoever he was calling and his watery eyes remained fixed on Mandy as he said, “Stank? We’ve got a situation. Good news is that I’ve got some DNA for you. Bad news is, I’m not alone.”
THE NEXT HOUR or so was pretty much a blur to Mandy. The cops arrived a few minutes after Radcliff’s call, led by Detective James Stankowski, a handsome, dark-haired man whose youthful looks contrasted with his eyes, which were world-weary and cynical.
When Radcliff introduced them, the detective held her hand a moment longer than necessary and asked if she was okay, but before she was able to dredge up a coherent answer, Radcliff hustled her over to a team of paramedics and told her to stay put until he came back for her.
An hour, an ice pack for the bump on her head and a couple of ibuprofen later, she was feeling almost normal—except for the fact that she was surrounded by cops and flashing lights. She’d called Kim on a borrowed cell phone and halfway explained the situation. Only halfway, though, because she wasn’t entirely sure yet what exactly had happened. Who was that man? Why had Radcliff been there?
A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered near the mouth of the alley, and they peered in past a string of police tape. A crime scene team had set up powerful lights—the kind the road crews used for night work on the expressway—to illuminate the alley, which looked far smaller and seedier, somehow, than it had in the darkness.
Seated on the edge of an ambulance gurney she didn’t really need, Mandy watched the crime scene techs quarter and photograph the area. One stern-faced woman marked the position where the little canister of pepper spray had fallen when she dropped it. The woman picked it up and slipped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, and suddenly the entire scene took on a completely unreal shine.
“I’m dreaming,” Mandy said to herself. “I’m really back at work, crashed on one of the couches, dreaming about being in an episode of CSI: New York. This isn’t real.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but this is as real as it gets,” Radcliff’s voice said from behind the gurney, startling her.
Mandy turned, then winced and touched her temple when the motion made the world spin. The weakness and the strangeness of it all must’ve made her more vulnerable than she’d thought, because when she saw him in the light, all she could think was hel-lo.
Over the past month, she’d seen him more than she’d wanted to, catching glimpses as he’d gone from meeting to meeting, or when he’d swung by the front desk of the E.R. to leave annoying notes about productivity and cycle time. She’d told herself she shouldn’t even notice him, that he was nothing to her now. And, after having only seen him in his starched white coat with The Boss written across the
