“We really should get some X-rays,” the EMT said to Uncle Bob as I lounged on the stretcher.

Ambulances were cool. “You just want to fondle my extraneous body parts,” I said to the EMT as I picked up a silver gadget that looked disturbingly like an alien orifice probe, broke it, then promptly put it back, hoping it wouldn’t leave someone’s life hanging in the balance because the EMT couldn’t alien-probe his orifices.

EMT Guy chuckled and checked my blood pressure for the gazillionth time.

“Really, Uncle Bob, I’m fine. Who owns this warehouse?”

Uncle Bob closed his phone and looked at me through the open doors of the ambulance. “Well, if you’re hoping for a neon sign above his head that flashes Bad Guy, you’re going to be very disappointed.”

“Don’t tell me. The guy’s a canonized saint?”

“Close. His name is Father Federico Díaz.”

Wow. Why would a Catholic priest own a warehouse in the middle of nowhere? Why would a Catholic priest own a warehouse, period? This case was getting more bizarre by the minute.

“No one,” Garrett said, jogging up to us. “I don’t understand it. If there were two guys inside and one on the roof, where’d they go?”

“The van was the only vehicle on the premises. They had to leave on foot,” Uncle Bob said, scanning the area with a quizzical look on his face.

“Or not leave at all,” I added. “Where are the boxes?”

They both turned around and surveyed the empty warehouse.

“What boxes?” Uncle Bob asked.

“Exactly.” I eased off the stretcher, picked up and handed the broken probe to the EMT, who reattached the alien part and put it back with a grin, then stepped to the ground with far more wincing than was socially acceptable.

“I have three words for you,” EMT Guy said. “Possible internal bleeding.”

I turned back to him. “Don’t you think if I was bleeding internally, I’d know somewhere deep inside? Like, internally?”

“One X-ray,” he bargained. When I winced again, he added, “Maybe two.”

Uncle Bob wrapped a beefy arm around me. I was a nanosecond away from arguing with EMT Guy when he said, “Charley, we have men all over the place. I promise we’ll look for your missing boxes.”

“But—”

“You’re going to the hospital if I have to handcuff you to that stretcher,” Garrett said, stepping in front of me as if to block my only escape route.

With an annoyed sigh, I folded my arms and glared at him. “Stop trying to get me into your handcuffs. I want to be there when you talk to Father Federico,” I said to Uncle Bob, ignoring Garrett’s surprised expression. Would he never learn?

“Deal,” Uncle Bob agreed before I could change my mind. “I’ll call you tomorrow with a time.”

“You’ll need a ride home from the hospital,” Garrett reminded me.

“You just want to try out those handcuffs. I’ll call Cookie. Go figure out where those boxes went.”

“Do you want to look at mug shots tomorrow, as well?” Uncle Bob asked. “Can you ID the guy who hit you?”

“Well…” My nose scrunched as I considered the possibility of positively identifying my assailant based on the knuckle sandwich he gave me. “I got an almost clear peripheral look at the guy’s left fist. I might could recognize his pinkie.”

* * *

For some bizarre reason that baffled the heck out of me, Cookie seemed none too happy about being called out at one in the morning to extract me from the hospital.

“What did you do now?” she asked, walking into the examining room. Still in her pajama bottoms with a massive robelike sweater thrown over a tee, she looked a tad postapocalyptic. And she had a wicked case of bedhead. It was funny.

I eased off the examining table, moving as if there were a bomb in the room set to go off with a motion-detecting sensor. She rushed to my side to help. Had there actually been a bomb set to go off with a motion-detecting sensor, we’d have been blown to bits.

“Why are you assuming it was my fault?” I asked when my feet were firmly planted.

Her lips thinned into a grim reprimand. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to get a call from the hospital in the middle of the night? I jump into panic mode. I can barely put two words together.”

“I’m sorry.” After limping to my jacket, I shrugged into it, amazed at how much effort it took not to pass out. “You probably thought something happened to Amber.”

“Are you kidding? Amber’s an angel compared to you. Having you around makes me appreciate her pubescent, hormone-induced ways. Honestly, I don’t know how your stepmother did it.”

A lightbulb went off in my head when she said that. Not a particularly bright one—maybe a 12-watter—but it did make me reassess my stepmother’s lack of interest in my well-being. Perhaps our rocky relationship was partially my fault.

Not.

Cookie lectured me all the way home. Thankfully, I’d had the ambulance take me to Pres, so it was a short drive. Her concern was sweet and, at the same time, oddly annoying. My concern, however, was leaning toward homicidal. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t help but get a little hot under my seven-dollar thrift-store Gucci collar. Someone hit me. Someone tried to kill me. Had he succeeded, I could have died.

Then, as if my perpetual state of sunshine couldn’t allow such a negative thought to infect my mind—I’m pretty sure I was a flower child in a past life—I just had to see the cup half full. Hopefully of Jack Daniel’s. I’d learned something tonight, besides the legitimacy of the sudden-stop thing. I’d learned that somehow, in some bizarre coincidence of fate, Reyes and the Big Bad were connected. But how? Reyes couldn’t have been more than three when I was born. How did Bad know he would call me Dutch fifteen years later?