than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told her something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.
She could see her son slumped inside his car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his back resting against the driver’s door. His head was lolling on his chest.
Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver’s door handle.
Locked!
She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son’s name.
Nothing!
Wait!
Had something moved inside the car?
She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.
His chest was moving! He was still breathing!
Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. “My son!” she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. “Oh, God, I need an ambulance!”
A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.
Her address!
Her mind was suddenly blank. “I can’t—oh, God! It’s—” Then it came back to her and she blurted out a number. “On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God, hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage and—”
“It’s all right, ma’am,” the calm voice broke in. “An aid car is already on its way.”
Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car open—she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench! Squeezing between the front of her son’s car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent prayer that her ex-husband hadn’t simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn’t—it was right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up, then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son’s car. The safety glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and the woman dropped the hammer to the floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across her son’s body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away, only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her son’s ankles and tried to pull him out of the car, but before she’d managed to haul him even halfway through the door, two white-clad medics were taking over, gently easing her aside, pulling the boy out of the car and clamping an oxygen mask over his face. As he stirred, her panic at last began to ease its grip.
“He’s coming around,” one of the medics assured her as they carried him out of the garage and put him on a stretcher. “Looks like he’s going to make it okay.”
Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its rear door.
“I want to come,” the woman begged. “For God’s sake! He’s my son!”
The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled inside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.
The ride seemed to take forever, and the woman watched helplessly as her son struggled against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son’s hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But just as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital’s emergency entrance, she felt his hand suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.
She heard one of the medics curse softly.
Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out of the ambulance slowly, as if she’d fallen into a trance.
The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take over for the medics.
She followed the stretcher into the hospital.
Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.
And in the end, she heard the same words she’d heard first from her son’s doctor, then from the ambulance crew: “I don’t understand—he should be doing fine!”
But her son—her sweet, handsome only son—wasn’t doing fine.
Her son was dead.
CHAPTER
1
NEW YORK CITY
“Whatcha tryin’ ta do, Sundquist? Kill ya’self?”
A harsh laugh followed the mocking words, ricocheting off the