Partner In Crime Read Free Page B

words, her body, in absolute betrayal, longed for nothing so much as to have LaMar Jenkins take her into his strong, capable arms and hold her tightly against his chest. Afraid she might yield to that temptation, she added quickly, “You’d better go.”
    “Why? Don’t you trust me?”
    I don’t trust myself , she thought. “Something like that.”
    Taking a long drink from his beer, LaMar Jenkins showed no sign of leaving. “You never talk about the past,” he said. “Why is that?”
    “The past doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing to talk about.” She tried to sound cold—as though she didn’t care—but, like her body, her voice betrayed her. The past mattered far too much.
    “Somebody hurt you, Shelley.” LaMar’s voice was suddenly kind, concerned. “Whoever it was and whatever they did to you, it wasn’t me. Let me help fix it. Talk to me.”
    “You can’t fix it,” Rochelle said, shaking her head and fighting back tears. “Just go, please.”
    Without another word, LaMar Jenkins carefully put down his beer bottle and stood up. He walked as far as the first wooden screen before he turned back to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “At the show. And afterward, we’re having dinner. No excuses.”
    She capitulated. “All right,” she said. “We’ll have dinner.”
    “Promise?”
    She nodded. “Yes.”
    He left then. She followed him as far as the door, made sure the dead bolt was locked, and double-checked the alarm system. Then she returned to the kitchen table. For the next half hour, Rochelle Baxter sat at the gray Formica tabletop and thoughtfully sipped her iced tea while rehashing every word that had been said. She didn’t bother making herself a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry. Instead, she sat and wondered whether or not she would really go to dinner with LaMar after the show. Maybe by then she’d be able to find the resolve to tell him once and for all that she had to break it off.
    When her tea was almost gone, Rochelle left the nearly empty glass and half-finished beer bottle sitting on the kitchen table and returned to her eerily denuded studio.
    To combat the loneliness left by all the bare walls, Rochelle wrestled a new canvas out of storage and put it on her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.
    In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil-smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.
    “Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
    By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.
    “Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”
    There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded