Just go.

It wasn’t your fault, my interior voice-over continued. You were trying not to hit the dog. There was nothing you could do. Besides, no one saw. Take your foot off the brake and move it onto the gas. Don’t look back. Don’t be stupid. Just go.

It was true that no one had seen it, I realized with a swallow. I was on an empty stretch of road near the airport with nothing but the deserted beach on the right. The only structure was an abandoned-looking concrete industrial building a couple of hundred feet up on the left.

The only witnesses to the incident were a silent armada of yellow school buses parked behind a chain-link fence across the street. Their dead eyelike headlights seemed to stare at me as if wondering what I was going to do.

I looked around for the biker’s dog. It was gone.

It was as if I came back online then. Having thought the unthinkable, the spell was broken, and I could once again focus.

I slid the car into park and turned it off.

I had to help this poor man. I needed to do what my father would have done. Start CPR, stop his bleeding, find a phone.

Go? I thought, disgusted, as I fumbled with the door latch. How could I have even considered such a thing? I was a good person. I’d been a lifeguard, a candy striper. That’s my good girl, my daddy used to say as I’d help him off with his high-gloss police oxfords.

I was getting out of the car when I noticed a pair of headlights approaching in the distance behind the injured man. Before I could breathe, an unexpected and dazzling flash of brilliant color crowned the headlights.

I stared, paralyzed, mesmerized, as the night suddenly blazed with a fireworks burst of police lights, blinding bubbles of blood red and vivid sapphire blue.

Chapter 6

THE FLASHING POLICE CRUISER was strangely silent as it rolled to a slanting stop halfway between me and the fallen biker. As the metallic squawk and chitter of its police radio reached my ears, my chin dropped to my chest like a condemned prisoner’s, waiting for the ax.