Death Angel

A chill that had nothing to do with the weather ran down her back. The uneasy feeling that had chased her from Denver told her someone was on her trail. But who, and why? She had died. Short of actually staying dead and being buried, wasn’t that enough to shake him off her tail?

What if it wasn’t him, though? Who else could it be?

Someone knew who she was and where she was.

Chapter Twenty-three

"YOU’RE RUNNING FROM SOMEONE, AREN’T YOU?" CASSIE asked as they reached the Explorer. "You know who this guy is?"

"God, I hope not," Andie muttered, unlocking and opening the door. The interior light came on and they both checked the backseat as well as the luggage compartment in back. Both were empty. "I thought I’d lost him."

"In this day and age, honey, it’s tough to shake someone who’s hell-bent on finding you. If he’s got your Social Security number, he can find you anywhere."

"He doesn’t," Andie said, certain of that. He might have her old Social Security number, but there was no way he could have the new one. Besides, Glenn didn’t report her earnings to the IRS, so even if she had been using the old number nothing would be reported on it. She began walking around the Explorer, looking for footprints in the snow that would tell her if anyone had been around or under her vehicle.

"Don’t forget about phone records," Cassie continued. "When you call home, he can access your folks’ phone records and track you that way."

"I don’t have any family. I haven’t called any old friends." Not that she had any, unless she reached way back to middle school. Once she’d lost the baby, she’d turned her back on every emotional connection she’d ever had, not wanting to feel anything ever again. All she’d wanted to do was forget, to walk away and never look back, because to look back was to remember the crippling pain. She couldn’t go through that again, not ever.

She finished her circuit of the Ford-the snow was undisturbed. As she got behind the steering wheel, Cassie tromped around to climb into the passenger seat. "So maybe you have an admirer," she said to Andie. "Has anyone been flirting with you?"

"Who has time to notice? We’re run off our feet in there. Unless someone pinches me, or pats my ass, I don’t even look at their faces."

"Yeah, I’ve seen you ‘look at their faces’ a time or two. I thought one asshole was going to faint. What did you say to him?"

She knew exactly the incident Cassie was referring to, because her eyes and voice must have telegraphed her absolute sincerity to the driver, and he’d turned dead white. "I told him if he touched me again I’d stick a fork through his nuts."

The old Andie-Drea-Andrea…hell, she didn’t know who she was anymore…would have pretended not to notice the pinch or the pat. She’d have been sweet and slightly vacant, not causing any problems, but inside she’d have been sick with anger and contemptuous that no one realized she was faking everything. Being dead had changed her in more ways than one, because she couldn’t act sweet and vacant now. She had buried her temper years ago, but in the past few months it had clawed its way to the surface and seemed determined to stay there.

Cassie threw back her head and laughed in appreciation. "I’m surprised he didn’t tell Glenn."

"He did. Glenn told him to keep his fucking hands off the waitresses if he didn’t want his balls ventilated." Andie smiled in memory. That was what she liked best about Glenn. Some guys would have been jerks and told the waitresses to put up with it, that he didn’t want to lose any customers, but not Glenn. One of his daughters had helped pay her way through college by working in a restaurant, so he had a different view of what waitresses sometimes endured.

As Andie carefully steered the Ford through the long lines of rumbling trucks toward Cassie’s rig, Cassie cleared her throat, then said hesitantly, "That thing you said about better decisions, what did you mean?"

"Little things. Like, maybe, instead of buying a flashy bracelet you like, you put that money in an interest-bearing savings account or a CD." Cassie liked jewelry. None of it was expensive-probably the most she’d paid for anything was a couple of hundred dollars-but she liked a lot of jewelry.

"I don’t spend that much…" Cassie began.

Andie reached the rig and put the car in park. "It adds up." She ran an expert eye over what jewelry she could see: earrings, several cocktail rings, four or five bracelets. "What you have on cost you roughly three thousand dollars, total. That’s three thousand dollars that could be in a bank. What you should be doing is saving up enough to invest in a good mutual fund."

Cassie wrinkled her nose. "God, that sounds so boring."

"Yeah, it does," Andie agreed. "Boring and hard are usually good signs that’s what you should be doing."

"I’ll be okay. I make good money."

Cassie was shrugging off what Andie had told her. Normally Andie would have done her own shrugging and let it be, but Cassie had gone out of her way tonight to help her so that favor got turned around.

"One wreck will wipe you out," she said, her voice going kind of distant the way it sometimes did. "You’ll be hurt, out of commission for about six months. You have insurance on your rig, but you won’t be able to work and you’ll lose your house. It’s all downhill after that. I wasn’t kidding about the cat food."

Cassie froze with her hand on the door handle. In the glow of the dash lights, her face suddenly showed her age, and more; it showed fear. "You see something. You really do see something, don’t you?"

Andie wasn’t about to get into whether or not she "saw" things, so she waved the question away. What she’d just said was common sense. "Another thing: you should start respecting yourself more and stop hooking up with losers. One of them’s going to give you an STD." She turned to face the woman. "You’re smart, you’re successful. You should act like it, because doing stupid things will stop you from being more successful. Trust me, I’m an expert on doing stupid things."