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Teddy heard the sirens and, looking back down Jungle Trail, saw flashing lights coming. He dove into the underbrush and began making his way back down the trail through the palmettos as fast as he could. He had gone perhaps fifty yards when the two police cars and the van blew noisily past him. As soon as they had passed, he moved back into the road and began running down the trail. A moment later, using the red setting on the flashlight, he found his car, got it started and was driving back up Jungle Trail. He avoided using the brakes and didn’t switch the lights on until he thought he was near the turn back to A-1A. Above him, he saw the spotlight of a helicopter come on, but it was pointing behind him.
He slowed down when he reached A-1A, and drove toward home, keeping to the speed limit. A police car and an ambulance drove past him fast, in the opposite direction.
Lauren might be hurt, he thought, but she was in safe hands now.
61
Holly sat with Lauren in the back of the ambulance, mop-ping Jimmy’s blood from her breasts with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. At first, she was hysterical, but soon she calmed down.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she said.
“You need to be checked out, Lauren,” Holly said.
“I’m not hurt, I’m not raped, and I want to go back to the office, where my clothes are.” She was naked now, since Jimmy had ripped off her pants and panties, and the EMT had cut off her tank top.
“Are you sure, Lauren?”
“Damn it, I’m sure!”
Holly got on the radio. “Hurd, Holly isn’t hurt, and she insists on going back to the office for her clothes instead of to the hospital.”
Lauren took the radio from Holly’s hand. “Hurd, I am perfectly all right; all I need is my clothes.”
“Roger, Lauren,” Hurd said. “We’ll see you at the office for debriefing.”
Lauren, dressed now, sat at the conference table, holding an ice pack to her face where Jimmy had slugged her, and gave a vivid account into a tape recorder of everything that had happened.
“You’ll have to testify at the inquest,” somebody said.
“There doesn’t need to be an inquest,” Lauren replied. “I shot a man who was attacking me. Didn’t you hear everything?”
“We lost audio transmission,” Mike Green said, “but I had a tape recorder planted in the dash that kept running.”
“Is there any inconsistency in my story?” she asked.
“No,” Hurd said, then he switched off the tape recorder. “This is off the record, everybody. Lauren, there are two things I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“One, the flash of white light.”
“I think it must have been the muzzle flash in the darkness,” she said.
“All right. I buy that,” Hurd replied. “But there’s one other thing: the driver’s side window was smashed, but I understand that one of your shots must have gone through him and hit the window. What I don’t understand is that the passenger’s side window was smashed, too.”
“Maybe one round went through the passenger window,” Lauren said, “or richocheted.”
“From what I could see, the window was broken from the outside; nearly all of the glass was in the car. It was all over you when we got there.”
“Okay, Hurd, you’ve got me there; I have no explanation for that. All I’ve got is what I’ve told you. I think I was unconscious for a moment after Jimmy hit me, and I was semiconscious for another moment. Maybe something happened then that I don’t understand.”
“It’s just a loose end,” Hurd said, “and I don’t like loose ends.”
“Well, Hurd,” Lauren said with some heat, “I was pretty busy in that car, and I’m sorry I didn’t have time to tie up your loose end.”
Hurd held up a hand. “It’s all right, Lauren, I’m not going to make an issue of it. Anybody here have any problem with neglecting to notice the passenger window?”
