Free Trial by Fire by J. A. Jance Page A

Sometimes the room was familiar, sometimes not; but in each dream, one thing was the same: someone—some unseen person—was coming after her, intent on doing her harm. In each instance she knew her attacker was armed and dangerous. She also knew there was no escape.

CHAPTER 5
    The ICU nurse picked up the phone and called out to the nurses’ station. “The patient seems to be stirring,” she said in a voice inaudible to the woman lying in the bed on the far side of the room. “Let Sister Anselm know.”
    The patient struggled awake, emerging from the horrible nightmare of being caught in a fire, but found that even though the dream was gone, the heat was still there. She was drifting in a cocoon of pure pain. Excruciating pain. Agonizing pain.
    She tried to move her head but could not. She tried to move her lips to cry out, but she couldn’t do that, either. She was unable to speak or move, but she could see, and she tried desperately to make sense of what she was seeing.
    Gradually she became aware that there were people moving around her—people who spoke in hushed voices, with the sounds of their words barely audible above the steady beep, beep, beep of some kind of machine that was just outside her line of vision. The sound resembled the warning backup beep on a piece of heavy equipment, but that made no sense. How could there be something backing up in here? It was clear thatshe was inside a building somewhere—inside a brightly lit room.
    She strained to hear and understand what the voices were saying. A man’s voice said something about damage to lungs and something about keeping up the … something that seemed to start with an O . Osmosis, maybe. And something else that sounded like a ringer, or maybe a wringer. What was that? Someone else spoke about keeping the morphine levels high enough to keep her from going into shock.
    “We’ll do all we can, all that’s reasonable.” It was the man’s voice again. “The problem is, without a next of kin or a durable power of attorney, we can’t pull the plug.”
    Who are these people, she wondered, and who are they talking about? Do they mean me? Are they talking about pulling my plug?
    She tried again, desperately trying to move her lips, but no sound came out.
    Someone else in the room spoke, and her welcome words were far more easily understood.
    “Looks like it’s time for another dose.”
    A woman—a nurse, most likely—dressed in a brightly colored flowered tunic appeared briefly in her line of vision and began working with something beside the bed. Because it was a bed, she realized, but a strange kind of bed. She was in it and the nurse was doing something to an IV tree that stood next to the bed. She seemed to be adding something to the IV drip. Maybe what the man had said at first was a lie. Maybe they were about to pull the plug and she was going to die.
    Don’t, she wanted to scream aloud. Please don’t. I’m here. I’m alive and awake. Please don’t.
    But she couldn’t say any of those things. She could hearherself screaming the desperate words in her head, but her lips still wouldn’t move. Her voice was lodged somewhere deep in her chest.
    Gradually, the appalling pain seemed to lessen. The brightly lit room dissolved around her, and so did the voices. As she drifted away into nothingness, she hoped the dream wouldn’t come again, but she knew it would.
    She understood that the moment she closed her eyes, the flames would be there again, waiting to consume her.

    By the time Ali made it to Prescott the next morning, Gurley Street, from the sheriff’s department to Whiskey Row, was full of news-media vehicles. The arson story, confirmed or not, complete with suspected ELF-involvement (officially unconfirmed ELF-involvement), was evidently out in the world in a big way. News outlets from all over the state, and some national outlets as well, were apparently paying attention and in attendance.
    Welcome to the three-ring circus, Ali