Gone Missing by Camy Tang

there for a moment. Her counselor said she was making progress, but it still hurt like a physical pain.
    Her shoulders tingled again. Was this the same thing, paranoia because of all the stress of the morning? It wasn’t every day she was almost killed by a bomb. She knew she had compartmentalized it—her counselor would use the term
coping mechanism
—but she’d have to come to terms with it.
    Later. Not right now.
    â€œHello, sweetheart.” She didn’t recognize the gravelly voice, but she recognized the man’s face from the glimpses of him in the passenger seat of the car that had been following them this morning—his curly dark hair and sunglasses. He stood in front of her, blocking her way.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid!
If she’d been paying attention instead of taking a mental coffee break, she wouldn’t have been surprised by him.
    By
them
. The second man stood just behind his left shoulder.
    Maybe she should have paid attention to the feeling she was being hunted.
    She reacted quickly, instinctively. She shoved hard at the man and sent out a high-pitched scream. “Get away from me! Help! Officer Winchester!”
    The policeman had been behind her when she left the store, but he’d turned left when she’d turned right. Was he still within hearing range?
    People around them stopped to stare. When she shoved the man, he’d stumbled backward into a young man, who looked like a college student, leaning against the wall of a store. “Hey, man, watch it!” the student said.
    The second man had sidestepped to avoid his partner’s fall, and he moved in quickly to grab her elbow in a painful grip. “Let’s go,” he hissed.
    She jabbed her fist into his throat.
    He coughed, his grip loosened. She wrenched her arm away and ran back the way she’d come.
    She wove through the crowd, her breath harsh in her ears. Was the man following her? Were they both following her?
    Two firm hands grabbed her shoulders and stopped her. She was about to scream again when she looked up into Officer Winchester’s stern face.
    â€œBehind me,” she said. “Two men.”
    He pushed her aside firmly to head back the way she’d come. She spotted a bench a few yards away and leaped onto it, scanning the crowd. She saw the two men running toward her, their expressions changing when they spotted Officer Winchester. They stopped, but the cop had seen them. They turned and bolted.
    Soon the men’s dark heads were at the edge of the crowd, then they tore away at a dead run to the parking lot. She tried to keep track of them, but they ducked behind a large minivan, and then she couldn’t see where they went.
    The policeman was too far behind, hampered by the crowds. When he finally got to the parking lot, he looked this way and that, but appeared to have lost track of them. The two suspects were smart and didn’t go tearing out of the parking lot, drawing attention to their vehicle, and the lot was full enough that they could sneak around behind cars and avoid detection.
    Joslyn hopped down from the bench and fought her way through the crowd to the parking lot. Officer Winchester was standing near an exit, scanning all the cars slowly leaving this section of the lot, but the men could also have driven out the other exit.
    The policeman gave her a grim look. “Sorry, miss. Looks like we lost them.”

FIVE
    I t was an unbearably sweet sight for Clay to see Joslyn outside the police station, holding out to him a paper bag with grease stains along one corner.
    She smiled. “Fiona mentioned you liked bacon cheeseburgers. Is that still the case?”
    â€œYou are a dream come true.”
    She laughed, then turned to his lawyer. “I bought one for you, too, Ms. Harnett.”
    â€œCall me Jo.” The blonde lawyer smiled broadly. “And I
love
bacon cheeseburgers.”
    Elisabeth Aday had come through for Joslyn and Clay. Since