Left for Dead by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page A

something metal or maybe glass being beaten to pieces.
    What the hell is she doing? he wondered. Wrecking my car?
    He tried to sort out whether she was alone or if someone else had driven up to help her. Or maybe an accomplice of some kind had been hiding in the backseat. If there was someone with her, neither of them spoke, but Jose didn’t need to hear any words to understand the gravity of his situation. It was no accident that the woman had pulled off on the deserted road. He’d been deliberately lured into a trap. But why? Were they after his patrol car or something in it? Did someone want him dead?
    Far above, a car door slammed shut. The night went totally quiet as the insistent beeping of the ignition alarm was silenced. Footsteps rustled through dried weeds and grass on the shoulder above him, then the blinding light from a flashlight cut through the night. Jose knew that whoever was up there was looking down at him, getting ready to finish the job.
    Injured and helpless, Jose could do nothing except lie there waiting for the kill shot he knew was coming, It was only in that final extremity that Jose Reyes remembered Miss Swift, the drama teacher in his senior year at Nogales High School. She had been new to town, a first-year teacher who was also surprisingly good-looking. Jose, along with half the guys in his senior class, had a crush on her.
    Wanting to make a good impression on the townsfolk, Miss Swift had decided to bring some culture to town by staging a production of Hamlet. Jose had been chosen to play the part of the doomed Ophelia’s brother, Laertes. At the very end of the drama, after a fierce sword fight between Laertes and Hamlet, the stage was littered with the supposedly dead bodies of several characters, including Queen Gertrude, the king of Denmark, Hamlet, and Laertes.
    During rehearsals, Miss Swift had gotten down on the floor with the actors and coached them on how to slow their breathing and maintain the pose in which they had fallen. All those years later, lying at the foot of the steep bank, that was what Jose did. He stifled the urge to groan in agony. He forced his breathing to slow. He lay still. This time it wasn’t make-believe. This time Jose’s very life depended on it.
    Above, the rustling footsteps came as far as the edge of the ravine and then stopped. The beam from the flashlight circled around and around until it landed on him, catching him and pinning him in an eerie orange glow. When the beam stopped moving, time stopped, too. Jose had no idea how long the killer stood there, peering down into the darkness with the flashlight raking back and forth across his fallen body.
    “All right, then,” a raspy voice said aloud. “That’s that.”
    Jose couldn’t tell if the speaker was talking to herself or someone else. If so, they seemed satisfied by what they saw. The flashlight clicked off. Darkness returned. Another car door slammed. An engine turned over. Headlights came on. Jose waited until the sounds of the retreating vehicle—a single one, it seemed—faded into the night. Only when the insect-humming silence of the desert night reasserted itself did Jose allow himself to take a full breath. And only then, with one danger gone, did he realize the full gravity of his situation.
    Jose understood that his life’s blood was gradually seeping into the thirsty sandy bottom of the wash that had cushioned his fall. Even if people came searching for him, they weren’t likely to spot him lying here in the dark. Jose could tell that with fear-fueled adrenaline no longer pumping into his system, he was in danger of drifting into shock. He fought it, tried to focus. Far away in the distance, he could hear the busy chatter of the police band radio coming from his own vehicle.
    The overworked dispatcher must have realized that Jose's radio had gone silent, but how long would it take for her to understand that the situation was serious enough to send people looking for him? And