Free Locked In by Marcia Muller

was—barefoot and unarmed. Unarmed because after all the violence she’d seen growing up on the streets of the Mission
     district, she hated guns and had opted out of getting firearms-qualified. And suddenly scared. What had she been thinking
     of, coming out here like this?
    Movement by the stables—slow, stealthy. A bulky shape slipping off to the left. Unarmed or not, Julia took off running in
     pursuit.
    The person—she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—plunged into the vineyard that bordered the stables, heading toward
     the road. Feet pounded the dirt between the plants, branches snapped and rustled. Julia followed through the rows of gnarled
     old vines.
    After a moment she stopped to get her bearings. The person she was following must’ve stopped too: there was no noise except
     for the distant cry of the rooster. Then another bird joined the chorus. No one moved among the vines.
    Julia wiped beads of sweat from her forehead, looked around. Blackness, crouching shadows. Narrow paths stretching in all
     directions. Then, off to her left, a faint rustling. The intruder was on the move again.
    She went toward the sound, took a path, and ran down it, kicking up clods of dirt. The intruder’s footsteps now sounded uneven,
     labored.
    Julia was gaining, gaining—
    Then in the darkness something slammed into her. An upright grape stake. Pain erupted on the bridge of her nose, and she fell
     to the ground, the gnarled vines scratching on her way down. She lay there stunned for a few seconds. By the time she regained
     her senses and her feet, a car’s engine had started up in the distance.
    Lost them, whoever he—or she—was.
    Mierda.
    She put her hand to her nose, felt blood welling. Injury to insult. This was a great beginning to her day.

SHARON McCONE
    P
ale pinkish light seeping around the drawn blinds. Must be very early in the morning. There’s been a shift in the weather,
     I can feel it. Today will be beautiful.
    But not for me.
    I lay there, depression gathering again. After the nightmare flashback to when I’d been shot, I’d had a peculiar dream in
     which Hy was looking into my eyes, but he couldn’t speak any more than I could. Then others appeared—Mick, Rae, Ted, Ma—and
     they couldn’t speak either. And finally I realized it wasn’t that they couldn’t—they wouldn’t. Keeping something from me.
    I thought back to Hy’s behavior the day before. At first he’d been elated to connect with me. Then they’d done a CT scan and
     some other tests, and he was a little subdued but still upbeat. But later he’d been quiet, wrapped up in his own thoughts,
     and his smile was slightly off.
    Definitely holding something back. Something those tests had revealed.
    Dammit, if that was the case, I deserved to know. When he came in today, I’d ask him—
    Right. I couldn’t ask him anything. All I could do was respond to questions.
    All I could do was lie here. Silent. Motionless. Afraid.

CRAIG MORLAND
    T he sky was glowing over the eastern hills when he awoke, cramped and cold, in his SUV at a pullout on Highway 1 near Big Sur.
     He’d driven almost to the Spindrift Lodge, where San Francisco’s president of the board of supervisors and the state representative
     had arranged their secret meeting, then parked about ten miles north. No reason to arrive in the middle of the night and roust
     the innkeeper from his or her bed; no need to attract attention to himself. Amanda Teller and Paul Janssen would probably
     check in in the afternoon, and by then he’d be tucked away, hopefully in an adjoining unit.
    He ran his hands over his face and hair, then got out of the car and breathed in the crisp salt air. Fog misted the gray sea;
     its waves smacked onto the rocks some thousand feet below. But the pink light to the east indicated the day would clear. He
     turned that way and looked up: towering pine-covered slopes, through which a waterfall had cut a channel. Now, because of
     the dry