Page 113 of Shielding Instinct

“Hey, Herb, it’s me from the tidepool. Hey, got a sec?” Cool as a cucumber. “I won’t interrupt what you’ve got going on. But your daughter is in the hospital, and the doctors need toknow what’s happening with her health because she’s not doing well. Is she on seizure meds?”

“I don’t know what to do here,” Herb said in a voice that sounded like perspiration.

“Who is she?”

“An author,” Herb said. “She was in the car with me when we went to the tidepool.”

“How did she know you’d be here?”

“She took a wild guess,” Petra called in a singsong. “Just the medical info, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Amanda, my daughter Amanda, she had measles when she was an infant.”

“What’s happening right now?” the kidnapper asked.

Shock and awe is happening.

As a breeze picked up and the branches swayed, Petra saw a gun pointing at Herb.

“Measles,” Petra repeated. “What did that do to her? They said she had a seizure?”

“Uhm. Yeah. She’s—” Herb had to stop and pant. And when he did, the gun inched closer and waggled to get him talking. “She’s Deaf,” he stammered, “and has a learning disability that makes her about the mental age of a three-year-old, and she has epilepsy. But that wasn’t a problem when she took her medicine.”

“Move on now. You need to go and tell the doctor. Go on,” the kidnapper called.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, two seconds more. I need the doctors to know because if she were to die, the authorities would want to know who to blame. Better to keep her alive, right, Herb?” Petra came very close to threatening a guy with a gun.Shit.

“My wife said that she thought Amanda would be fine with a natural syrup that she was making. It takes her all day to make it. It’s got lots of steps and lots of ingredients. I don’t knowwhat to tell you other than we needed some medicine that would work if a pharmacy was too far away.”

“Shut up,” the man hollered. “Actually, you, in the car. You come and talk to me.”

“No need. I’m leaving now.” Petra shifted her foot from the brake to the gas pedal, draped her arm over the seat and looked over her shoulder as she pressed the pedal down to back out of the lot.

“I said, come talk to me.” The bang was as unexpected as the pop that followed.

Petra jumped as high as her seatbelt would allow, her shoulders came up protectively around her ears and stuck there, her elbows tight against her body.

The SUV’s steering wheel pulled hard to the right. The guy had taken out her front tire.

Petra worked to organize her body into following her plan, peel out, screech off into the distance, circle back to collect Hawkeye and Cooper.

But Cooper was having none of that.

A streak of black against black pulled her attention around. Cooper bunched his haunches underneath him and leaped.

The shrill of Petra’s scream filled the air.

She supposed her limbic produced the sound in service of Cooper by pulling attention her way.

Petra hated when she was both living the emergency and also, somehow, an onlooker sitting on a stool in the corner, calling out her observations.

That’s what was happening to her now.

Cooper flew over the top of Herb and locked onto the kidnapper’s gun arm.

Petra had her belt unlatched, her door open, and was rolling away from the SUV.

Herb was racing across the parking lot.

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