“Come on,” Miguel urged me, taking Tina’s hand and leading her out, too.

Marsh was next off the elevator. I told him what had happened. He started to storm into the hotel room, but the paramedics pushed him out of the way and walked quickly past him.

“What happened?” Marsh asked me. “Who shot her?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know why she came up here. She was trying to tell me something. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.”

Tears in his eyes were hastily pushed away as he pulled himself together. “What is it with you people? This race needs to end now.”

He rushed for the next elevator to follow his partner to the hospital.

Hotel security came next, ushering me out of my room and into another room. The red bloodstain on the beige carpet stood out as I quickly gathered my things together and hid Crème Brûlée under a blanket. He was squirmy and hard to carry.

“Why did she come to see me?” I kept asking Miguel as he helped me relocate. “She said she was shot outside the hotel. Why didn’t she stay outside and call for help? Or ask for help at the check-in counter. That would have made more sense.”

“People do strange things during emergency situations,” he explained. “It’s as though whatever is on your mind supersedes what’s happening to your body.”

Tina was crying and following us around like a puppy.

“She’s exhausted. Let me get her somewhere she can sleep,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

After he was gone, I looked around the new room. It was exactly like the old room, except there was no blood on the floor.

It was crazy. The whole thing seemed crazy to me.

Maybe Marsh was right. Maybe the race should be stopped. How many more bad things could happen before we got home?

I sat in a chair and held Crème Brûlée close to me until Miguel got back. He brought Uncle Saul with him. “Do you think this had something to do with the race?” Uncle Saul sat on the edge of my bed.

“I don’t know.” That sparkly, fun feeling I’d had after drinking too much was gone, leaving me with a raging headache. “Helms said it had something to do with the killer. I couldn’t understand anything else she said.”

“That poor woman.” Miguel shook his head.

“We should see if Chef Art still has his limo out.” I jumped up. “We could go to the hospital and find out how Helms is.”

“I’m sure someone will let us know,” Uncle Saul said.

“I can’t sit here not knowing. I don’t care if I don’t sleep at all tonight—I have to know if she’s okay.”

“Someone will call and let us know,” Miguel said. “You should get some sleep.”

“I don’t know if I can.” I completely lost it, sobbing into Miguel’s shirt. “I want to go home. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt or die. This is it.”

While I cried and tried to stop myself from hiccupping, Miguel and Uncle Saul came up with a plan. I was so glad they did because I wasn’t drunk, but my brain wasn’t functioning right, either. We went downstairs to get Miguel’s car. Several of Birmingham’s uniformed police officers passed us. I kept my head down, not up to answering a barrage of questions about what had happened to Helms. We managed to get out of the hotel. Miguel used his cell phone GPS to find the hospital.

When we got to the hospital, Miguel asked at the admitting desk about Helms. The nurse pointed to a place we could wait. Marsh was already there. He only looked slightly better than his partner had after she’d been shot.

He was staring at a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that hadn’t been opened. “I gave these up six weeks ago. I promised Macey I’d quit. Neither of us is married anymore. No close family. She’s all I have that makes my life normal.”

“They won’t help,” Miguel said as he sat down next to me. “I smoked for a long time after my wife died. It never made me feel better. Nothing does.”

It was another little piece of the puzzle that was Miguel Alexander. I was almost too tormented to even notice. I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room to wash my face.

Blotchy complexion and swollen, red-rimmed eyes had taken their toll. Even my curly hair was flat. I blew my nose on some rough toilet paper and splashed cold water in my face. “Don’t make me slap you, Zoe Elizabeth Chase. You know I’ll do it. Pull yourself together. This behavior isn’t going to help.”

They were my mother’s words on occasions like this one. I imagined her standing in this hospital bathroom saying similar things to herself. Somehow, that grounded me again and made me take a deep breath.

My mother was a tough, pragmatic taskmaster at times, but she was also a rock. I’d never seen her panic or lose it, as I had back there. My dad was a different story. He cried at movies and after listening to his favorite jazz songs.

Maybe it was the curly hair.

When I went back out to the waiting area, I was calmer and beginning to cope with the situation. My head still hurt, so I bought a Coke from a vending machine and swallowed two Tylenol. Good thing, too, because the Birmingham police had caught up with us.

They were actually very polite and apologized for bothering us. They asked a few questions but didn’t stay long.

Marsh kind of vouched for us. I was surprised that he suddenly seemed to trust us. Maybe it was because Helms had come to me after being shot.

The only sticking point I seemed to have with anyone was that I hadn’t been able to understand what Helms had been trying to tell me before she’d passed out. I said the same words over and over, attempting to explain the situation. The Birmingham police looked skeptical.

“She mentioned that there was a new development in Alex Pardini’s death, right?” Marsh asked me.

“I think that’s what she was trying to say.” I sure couldn’t swear to it. “We’re going to have to ask her when she wakes up.”

The surgeon finally came out to talk to us at around three A.M. He said Helms was stable and holding her own. She’d be unconscious for at least the rest of the night and on strong pain meds the next day.

In other words, we might not have any answers about what had happened to her, or what her new information was that might have caused her to get shot, until we were already in Mobile for the last leg of the race.

“Don’t worry,” Marsh told us when the surgeon had gone. “I’m staying here with her. I won’t let anything else happen to her.”

It seemed as though there was nothing else to do. Uncle Saul said we should go back and get some sleep. I agreed, though it was hard leaving Helms.

We were back at the hotel by three thirty A.M. Everything was so quiet. Even the manager at the night desk whispered good morning to us as we walked by.

Uncle Saul decided to go up and sleep for two hours.

Miguel and I went upstairs. He walked me to my door and we went inside. The room was mostly dark. Crème Brûlée was snoring on the chair.

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” Miguel said.

He started to walk away and I caught his hand. “Will you stay instead? I don’t think I can sleep, and I don’t want to be alone.”

He nodded and shut the door behind him. “I can do that.”

We ended up sitting up against the pillows on the bed in the dark room. I had thought we could talk; you know, exchange secrets we wouldn’t have said at any other time. I leaned against his chest and heard his heart beating. I thought about him being alone and smoking after his wife and baby had died.

I closed my eyes to gather my scattered thoughts before I spoke, and the next thing I knew, the alarm on my phone was going off. It was six A.M. Time to go on with the race.

“I think I fell asleep for a while,” Miguel whispered, a smile in his voice. “How about you?”

“I think I completely passed out, and I apologize if I was snoring louder than my cat.”

“There were a few gasps and a little muttering, but no snoring,” he assured me.