Free Shadow Woman: A Novel by Linda Howard

tell exactly where she went. So would Forge’s people, but with luck, they wouldn’t bother putting extra eyes on her. They knew where she was, what she was doing, and why. Besides, right about now Forge had his hands full trying to figure out how Xavier had gotten so much information on Forge’s people, and plugging the hole in his security. That should keep them busy for a while.
    In the meantime, he had things to do.
    When she stopped at the first red traffic light, Lizette leaned over and opened the glove compartment to pull out the registration papers and the original sale papers. She’d known they were there, but she’d never read them before—again, therewas that lack of curiosity that now seemed so foreign to her. The traffic light turned green almost right away; before, Lizette would have either laid the papers on the seat beside her and waited until she stopped the next time or pulled into a parking lot to read them, but now she swiftly unfolded the papers and held them against the steering wheel, flipping through them, checking the date.
    Three years. Everything went back three years, as if the person she’d been had ceased to exist five years ago, then after a gap of two years she’d come back to life as this new cautious, unexciting, routine-bound woman who hadn’t even had a real date that she could remember during those three years.
    Maybe the reason was nothing more sinister than some sort of accident, which would explain the cosmetic surgery on her face and the gap in her memories. What it
wouldn’t
explain was the fact that she’d evidently been functional enough to buy a house and a car and get a job, which didn’t jibe with the whole not-remembering thing. People with brain injuries severe enough to cause that kind of amnesia didn’t just go forth again as a fully functional person; there would be all kinds of intense therapies that she’d remember, because as far as she knew amnesia happened from the time of injury backward, not the time of injury
forward
. Operating on sheer logic, the reason for all this couldn’t be a physical injury.
    Mental illness, paranoia—that was more likely than an accident, which was a bummer because she didn’t want to be paranoid. But did mentally ill people ever consider that possibility, or did they simply assume the opposite?
    She was doubting herself again, after deciding to go with her instincts.
    The navigation screen in the dashboard caught her eye. The car had a GPS. That meant it was possible to monitor the position of her car, wherever she went. This was a car she didn’t remember buying, and it didn’t feel as if it were a car she
would
buy. Maybe it had been picked out for her, and came to her with all sorts of bugs and tracking devices installed. She didn’t know how to check for anything like that, but she knew it was possible.
    Act normal
. She just had to act normal.
    She pulled into the parking lot of the Walgreens pharmacy closest to her house. There was an open parking slot right beside the door, the premium spot, the one everyone wanted. She started to wheel into it, then abruptly changed direction and circled around the interior parking spaces until she found two end-to-end empty ones. She pulled in and through, so she was facing out of the parking slot and could simply pull out and drive away. If she had to leave suddenly, not having to back out of the parking space would save precious seconds, and maybe her life.
    A chill went down her back, prickled over her skull. Her instincts were suddenly shouting at her, and she didn’t like what they were saying.
    They’re watching
.
    They’re listening
.
    They know where you are
.

Chapter Seven
    Xavier eyed the screen of the laptop that was sitting beside him in his truck. Her car was indicated by a blinking chevron, and the chevron had stopped moving. The map overlay told him she was in a Walgreens parking lot, which was good, because she’d said she was going to a pharmacy and that was