I woke up pissed. After he’d left I had to convince my mother I was all right, that the hospital had released me, not seeing fit to give me a bed for the night. Thank God I didn’t have to see Sarah—or, more to the point, Sarah didn’t have to see me—right away. When I woke I went into the bathroom to look at myself. What I saw made my mood worse. I was angry as hell at whoever had been in that truck. Neither Jakes nor I had asked the obvious question last night—why me? It was obviously because I was nosing around in these murders. The question I had was, why me and not Jakes? He was the danger. He was a detective, for Pete’s sake. Jakes had been right about the black eye not showing up. But my head was sore. I took the bandage off to see how it looked. Three stitches is really nothing, not in the scheme of things. Fifty stitches—now that would have been something. I put a fresh Band-Aid on the eye—the small cut bisected my eyebrow. I’d worry about that later. Maybe I’d have to switch my career path and start being a character actress.
