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ONE
Exit 38S, The Northway (I-87)
Plattsburgh, New York
HIS DOCTOR, THEone who’d been keeping him alive, was dead.
As Daniel Joseph gunned his Harley up the Northway, he swerved around a semi, played hopscotch with a pair of sedans, and then eyed an upcoming break in the woods in the median and prayed there wasn’t a cop hiding in the pine trees. He had bigger problems to worry about than speeding tickets and hey-where’s-your-helmet citations: No weapon. No backup. No intel.
But hey, at least the woman he loved more than anything else on the planet was with him. Which was the precise offensive strategy you wanted when you were rushing into a crime scene that hadn’t been cleared, that no one in conventional law enforcement could know about, and that you were bringing no weapons, no backup, and no intel to.
And it had started to fucking snow.
The shit that had begun to fall halfway through the rocket ship ride was only a non-issue,mid-November squall in the morning—but that was if you were in a car or had a visor. As the flakes hit his face, they were shards of glass, on his cheeks, in his eyes, up his nose—
Thank God, he thought as their exit appeared and he pared off at the same speed he’d been going.
At the top of the ramp, he didn’t slow down for the stop sign before merging onto NY 22S, and as he and the bike zoomed into the turn, Lydia Susi tightened her arms around his waist and ducked her head into his back. During the twenty-minute, breakneck roar from that apple orchard in Walters to this road leading into Plattsburgh, he had taken the brunt of the cold air, and he was feeling it. She was warmer, though.
He hoped she was warmer.
Goddamn it, he wished she weren’t with him—
“We need Route Twenty-six,” Lydia shouted in his ear over the din. “Toward the bay.”
“Roger that.” He turned his head to the side. “You okay?”
She gave him a squeeze. “Yes.”
As he looked ahead of them again, all he could think was,Don’t do it. Don’t ask back.
She didn’t.
Lydia was a master navigator, not that finding the condo development in question was all that hard, and once they were inside the ring-around offifty or so white-sided, black-shuttered, Lego-like two-stories, the unit they were gunning for was easy to locate on the far side.
Pulling into the shallow driveway, he opened his mouth to tell her they had to stick together—
His woman ejected herself off the back of the Harley, landed on a lithe run, and raced up the front walk.
“Wait! Stop—” He tried to catch his breath. “Lydia—”
She all but attacked the door, twisting the knob, jerking, yanking. “Gus!”
Back at the bike, Daniel put his hand on his chest and tried to inflate his lungs, but for some reason, they weren’t responding to the command. It was like he was suddenly breathing water—
“Around back,” he wheezed as she pounded on the panels. “Go ’round…”
While an old guy from the unit next door stopped in the process of checking his mailbox, she took off again, jumping over some short-stack bushes, sprinting past the garage door, and disappearing around the far corner. The idea that she might find some bad news in the rear gave Daniel the energy he needed to dismount, but as he stumbled, he couldn’t feel the asphalt beneath his boots.
“Everything okay?” the neighbor with the envelopes and the flyers in his hand called out.
Daniel coughed into a fist. “Oh, yeah.” He cleared his throat so he could get more volume in his voice. “Cat on the loose.”
“Dr. St. Claire doesn’t have a cat.”
Great. Just what he needed. “He was cat-sitting ours.”
“Then why’d you come on a bike?”
