Black Moon Rising Page 2

  When she woke next, Sunny found herself in a hospital, handcuffed to the bed rail. She might not have even noticed the restraint, with every inch of her body screaming out in pain, except that she tried to use her left hand to maneuver herself out of the bed.

  Only by the darkened window did she know it was night. She never got up in the middle of the night to pee, but when you had to go, you had to go. It was just damned hard to get out of a bed when you were attached to it.

  She didn’t have the wherewithal or the strength to find the call button she knew must be attached to or near the bed. Tears fell freely from her eyes, their salty tracks burning the abrasions on the side of her face. I will not wet the bed, she chanted over and over to herself in silence. I haven’t wet the bed since I was a baby.

  With that comforting thought planted firmly in her mind, Sunny raised herself up as far as she comfortably could and began to scream.

  The first person in was Cop Two.

  The second person in was a nurse.

  Sunny tried to make some sense as she sobbed and expressed her urgent need to use the bathroom, while mingling words of concern over her mother and her children. Even to her own ears, it all came out garbled and nonsensical, not to mention crazy.

  Finally, the nurse got through to her. “You’ve got a catheter. Just go ahead and pee when you need to.”

  Mortified, Sunny began to cry even harder. She’d been a normal human being that morning when boarding a plane to come home and now she was some kind of hardened criminal, forced to pee into a goddamned tube!

  What the hell was going on? Why were these people torturing her like this?

  . . .

  Dawn peeked in through the window when Sunny awoke next. She had to pee again, so she let go of her bladder with another bout of tears. Her face felt like someone had smashed it in with a sledgehammer—perhaps Cop One had hit her after all and she just couldn’t remember—and her chest complained vehemently with every breath she drew. The back of her head…well, she didn’t have to probe with her fingers to know there was a dinosaur-sized egg there. Every time she moved, she felt it.

  Groggy from pain and probably pain meds, she closed her eyes, praying for death. Then she remembered she had two small children and recanted the prayer. She heard the door open and grimaced at the squeaky sound of rubber soles as a nurse approached. She’d grown accustomed to that sound throughout the night. She’d ignored it, and the voice that accompanied it, each and every time it spoke. This time though, the door opened again immediately after the nurse left.

  With her eyes still closed, Sunny identified the footfalls of two different people.

  “Jesus! What happened to her?” asked a whiskey-smooth voice. The kind you wanted to hear whispering in your ear after hours of amazing sex.

  “The bitch tripped getting out of her vehicle, Detective” said the second voice she immediately identified as Cop One.

  Sunny would never forget that bastard’s voice, not as long as she lived. She silently cursed him to hell, then prayed fervently that he be attacked by poisonous snakes on the way, eaten by piranhas after that, and stung my a million scorpions for a grand finale.

  Whiskey-smooth voice grunted, as if in disbelief. “Tripped getting out, my ass. She had the handcuffs on before she left her vehicle?”

  Cop One volleyed back with, “The bitch deserves whatever she gets.”

  “I’ll take it from here, Boyson.”

  Sunny waited until she heard the door open and close again. She eased her eyelids up, half-staff, inspecting the person who remained. He was nothing like the nasty, repulsive bully-prick who’d hurt her. Her mind, more than her eyes, was a little muzzy, but she could make out about six-foot-two of pure male. Although his features blurred in the fog of her drugged-up vision, she registered dark, dark hair, and intense brown eyes. They reminded her of someone, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think who.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep shuddering breath and moaned when violated nerves sent a fierce message to her brain. Stop moving!

  Forgetting again that her hand was still cuffed to the bed rail, she lifted it, intending to rub away the pain between her eyes. The clink and the discomfort in her wrist reminded her quickly enough. Her eyelids worked themselves all the way up.

  Detective Pure Male had moved over to stand at the foot of her bed. His eyes were narrowed on her, his perfect lips formed in a curl that might have been disgust.

  “I need to use the phone,” she said, cursing the plea in her croaky voice.

  “Prisoners do not have phone rights,” he shot back.

  “I don’t understand why I’m under arrest,” she replied, unable to stop the tears dripping like a damned faucet from her eyes. Again. Crap, but they burned the abrasions on her face and her poor injured nose was all stuffed up, and she definitely was having a hard time breathing.

  The detective unexpectedly grabbed the foot rail and shook the bed with a fervor that rattled the handcuff and her brains. “You can lay off the poor-me-I-didn’t-do-it routine, lady. We have a witness who saw the incident and who can identify you as the driver.”

  Sunny re-evaluated her earlier dream comparison and upgraded her good-Samaritan effort to a full-fledged, zombies-eating-you-alive nightmare. They shouldn’t be after Sunny Fyfe. She hadn’t done anything bad!

  Her breaths began to seriously rattle in her chest. She recognized that her asthma was rearing its ugly head, but she ignored it. “Ask the bicyclist, she’ll tell you it wasn’t me.”

  The detective leaned over the end of the bed. She pressed herself back against the mattress, grateful that he wasn’t Mr. Fantastic, with the elasticity and malleability to reach all the way up her length to stick his nose in her face. “The bicyclist has a name and she’s in a coma, so she can’t say a damned thing!”

  “Della’s in a coma?” Sunny asked, confusion and fear making her head pound worse, her breathing more erratic. “But she only passed out….”

  “How the hell do you know her name?” he demanded.

  “I asked her…when I stopped…to help.” Air, she needed air.

  He reared back, laughing, but it wasn’t a sound of amusement. “That’s a unique way to refer to a hit-and-run.”

  “I’m not the one who hit her,” Sunny said, gasping. “Need…my…purse….” Somewhere in the dark recesses of her muzzy brain, she remembered her purse wouldn’t do her any good. Her phone had been run over in traffic and she hadn’t carried a rescue inhaler for asthma for over a year.

  “People in hell need ice water, too, lady. Doesn’t mean they’re going to get it.”

  “Please…can’t…breathe.”

  He studied her, one dark eyebrow arched as if in amazement. “Man, what an actress!”

  Sunny began to struggle in earnest. Detective Pure Male thought she was play-acting, but she wasn’t. She desperately needed help. She looked wildly around the room. If she could get a nurse in, the nurse would take her seriously. The only thing she could think to do with her oxygen-deprived brain was to pull on the cord attached to the blood pressure cuff on her arm, which was attached to a blood pressure monitor beside the bed. She reached across with her right hand and gave a yank.

  Equipment went crashing to the floor, but Sunny never heard it.

  She had stopped breathing.

  Chapter 3

  . . .

  Luca Amorosi stared in disbelief at the woman in the hospital bed, thinking she must be a violent person, maybe one in need of a psych evaluation. His perception altered drastically when she slumped against the bed rail, her eyes bugged out, her skin completely purple.

  He flew to the door to summon help and almost got creamed by the nurse who shoved it open.

  “What’s going on—?” she began, hustling to pick up the monitoring equipment, looking at the patient as she did so. “Ohmygod! How long has she been like that?”

  “Just now,” Luca said. “She was rasping. Seemed like she couldn’t get her brea
th. She pulled that over, then….” He shrugged helplessly. “I honestly thought she was play-acting.”

  The nurse slammed her palm against a button on the wall, kicked the monitor out of the way, lowered the rail and the head of the bed, and shouted for Luca to get the hell out of the room, even as a Code Blue blasted over the PA system.

  Luca raked a hand through his hair, inanely thinking he needed to find time for a haircut.

  Jesus, she’d quit breathing, just like that. He’d never seen anyone…. What? Die?

  “Unlock these damned handcuffs before you go,” the nurse ordered, bringing him out of his stupor.

  He jammed his hand into his pocket and withdrew his keyring. Surely he had a cuff key on there somewhere. But he didn’t, so he stuck his head out the door and searched the hall for Boyson. He found him sound asleep in the waiting area. He walked over and shook the dipshit’s shoulder. True to his Fighting Irish heritage, Boyson came up in a pugilistic stance. No wonder the woman in the hospital bed looked like someone had beat the crap out of her. Boyson was easily twice her size. Maybe more.

  Luca fisted his hand, wanting to put the guy’s lights out. “I need your cuff key.”

  “What for? That bitch will run when she gets the chance,” he said, his tone defiant.

  “Give me the fucking key!” Luca said, working to keep his voice at a normal level.

  Grumbling, Boyson dug into his pocket and produced the key. “Don’t blame me when she takes off on you.”

  “At the moment, she’s not breathing, so I doubt I have to worry about it.” He spun on his heel and ran back to the prisoner’s room.

  Shit, she might die, and he hadn’t even bothered to find out her name.

  . . .

  Della Amorosi woke up feeling nauseous. Her head also hurt and her leg…something was wrong with her leg. She forced her eyes open, squinting at the brilliant morning sunlight streaming into the room. She identified her surroundings right away. She was in a hospital, and she was in a hospital because….

  Oh, dear God, she’d been hit by a car while riding her bike down College Avenue.

  For a moment after that realization, she freaked, then quickly took stock of her limbs. Almost everything worked, but she couldn’t feel her right leg.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, became her silent mantra. It’s there. It has to be there. Luca wouldn’t let them take her leg….

  As she forced herself to calm down, she closed her eyes, taking deep, even breaths. Once, twice, ten times. She’d never been in a hospital before, at least not as a patient, but she knew that the beds had buttons that raised and lowered the head and foot of the mattress. She opened her eyes and turned her head carefully to the right, then to the left. A gadget hung over the top of the bed rail that looked like it might do the trick.

  She experimented with the buttons, first lowering the head, then raising the foot, and finally raising the head to a comfortable position. She was hooked up to wires and patches and IVs and a blood pressure cuff and they all seemed to be feeding information to a boatload of monitors, judging by the gentle ticks, hisses, and beeps. At least she was still alive.

  And, she thought, awash with relief as she looked under the sheet, she still had her right leg, though the area from just above to just below the knee was wrapped in a considerable amount of gauze.

  Della concentrated on her right leg, toes first, and wiggled them. The sheet moved where her toes tented the fabric at the foot of the bed. Next, she moved her foot from side to side. Again, the sheet moved. Finally, she focused on raising her leg. It came up off the mattress about an inch, gauging by how far the sheet covering her toe moved.

  Completely exhausted after that minor workout, she closed her eyes and sent a prayer to God, thanking him for saving her leg and for keeping her alive. She also asked Him to take special care of Sunny whoever-she-was for stopping to help her when no one else in the dozens of cars that had passed her by so much as slowed. The drivers had all been quick to gawk and point, though. Talk about a-holes!

  Della drifted off to sleep, not knowing she’d been in a coma, and wondering how she’d go about tracking down the woman named Sunny to thank her personally.

  . . .

  The doctors and nurses worked over the hit-and-run driver for seventeen minutes before they brought her back.

  Asthmatic Luca had overheard at least a dozen times. The pulmonary hospitalist lambasted everyone when he stormed into the room, having already heard by the grapevine that the patient had been gasping for air. “What kind of hospital do we run here, where we don’t know the history of our patients?”

  On his instructions, this particular patient was being moved up to the ICU for monitoring, in case she had another episode. Luca didn’t know how he felt about the woman who had nearly killed his sister being on the same floor with Della. Certainly, it was unprecedented, but as she seemed unlikely to make a run for it in her current condition, he said, “Okay, but only with the restraint back on.”

  “You, Detective, do not have a say in my treatment of this patient and this is not the psych ward—she will not be restrained!” Dr. Danush Madani looked down his nose the entire time he spoke to Luca, which was no mean feat, since he was easily three or four inches shorter.

  Luca held up his hands in mock defeat. By the frown on the doc’s face, Luca figured he must have suspected that his capitulation wasn’t genuine.

  Madani swung his arm toward the door. “Get out while we check the woman’s vitals. Don’t come back in unless or until we call you.”

  Luca felt like he’d been sent to the principal’s office, in reverse.

  At the nurse’s station, one of the RNs said to him, “Why don’t you go back up to your sister’s room. Your prisoner won’t be moved for probably another thirty minutes. I’ll have the charge nurse up there let you know when the transfer is complete.”

  Luca nodded curtly and remembered to say, “Thanks.”

  He took the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. God, he was totally wrung out. First his sister lapsing into a coma, then the woman who hit her…dying right in front of him. Shit, what a rotten time for his parents to be out of the country, and he hadn’t been able to reach all of his siblings yet, either.

  Maria would be down from Laramie as soon as she finished her last final. Frannie had gone to visit her boyfriend in California, and Lore, as usual, ignored his calls. An artist, his oldest sister clung to using the dumbest of dumb phones, which meant she couldn’t receive text messages. And when the muse was with her, she took herself off to some secret location to paint that only she and God knew about. Nico and Tony had gone backpacking. Who even knew when they’d be close to a cell tower again.

  That left Luca, the responsible one, to see to this year’s family crisis. Last year, it had been Nico’s broken leg, and the year before that, Maria’s boyfriend deciding it was okay to pop her one if she “misbehaved.” There were times when he wanted nothing more than to run away and leave someone else in charge of the Amorosi family when the folks were off gallivanting around the world. Of all the siblings who could be laid up in the hospital, Della, the youngest, seemed the frailest of them all, though in reality, she was probably the strongest, at least after him. Just out of high school, she had opted out of traveling to Italy with his parents for the summer.

  Della had her first real job—in other words, not working fast-food—and it actually paid good money. Enough that she gotten her own studio apartment and with the help of her sibs, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, had it furnished lickety-split. The artistic bent had skipped him, but his brothers and sisters all seemed to have it, though only Lore and Della were inclined to pursue it. Della had scored a job designing window dressings for a retailer downtown. She loved her work and the store loved her. According to Della, she’d gotten a raise after one month on the job because her window displays had resulted in increased sales in the two departments she’d featured during that time.

/>   Luca was proud of the kid. She was going somewhere, not that the rest of the sibs weren’t, but they just didn’t rely on him like Della did.

  He was the oldest at thirty-three and Della was the baby of the family at eighteen. Surprisingly, they were close. Sometimes, he almost felt like her father, the way she came to him with her problems, they way she sought his advice, the way she bragged about him to her friends.

  Before he pulled open the door to the ICU, he thought about slamming his fist against the wall. He was pissed, but he wasn’t sure who to direct his anger toward—God, for allowing Della to be hurt; Della, for riding her bike on Car Dealer Row every day, when everybody knew it was hell at rush hour; the reckless driver for hitting Della and running; or himself, for not agreeing to co-sign when Della had pleaded with him to help her buy a car.

  Luca resisted taking his frustration out on the wall and entered the ICU lobby. He signed in and got a visitor badge. On the way to Della’s room, one of the nurses asked if he’d like a cup of coffee. Luca thanked her and said yes, but as soon as she batted her eyelashes at him, he wished he’d detoured to the lounge to get his own damned coffee. It was going to be a long night and he wasn’t in the mood for any damned flirtations.

  He stopped and answered a text from Maria in the hall outside Della’s room, then snuck a look a Della’s chart. Assured her vitals were good, he quietly stepped inside the room and moved toward a chair over by the window. He didn’t know how much time had passed when he heard a whispered, “Luca?”

  Roused from a light nap, he snapped to when he realized Della had spoken. He popped up out of his chair like he’d been given an electric shock. “Della! Thank God!”

  He towered over her small form and put a gentle hand against her cheek.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he denied, even though his fingers came away wet when he brushed them against his cheek. “I’m just glad you’re awake.”