Excerpt: Claire Lance IV: Chasing Dragons

The front wall of the waiting room was glass, so Lance saw the doctor approaching as soon as he rounded the nurse's station. He made eye contact with her, so she stood and waited for him to step into the room. "How is she?" Lance asked as soon as the doctor was close enough to answer.

"She's in stable condition. You got her to us just at the right time, Ms. Vernon."

"Langer, actually," Lance said. "Carol Langer. Beverly is just a friend of mine."

The doctor nodded. "Good friend. She had systemic lupus erythematosus. It's an autoimmune disease, but it's treatable with corticosteroids and regular checkups to make sure it doesn't flare up again. If this was a few decades ago, I would have to give you a darker diagnosis. But with treatment, she should be able to live a relatively normal life. We can go over all of that later, if you'd like to see her."

"Yes, please," Lance said.

The doctor escorted her from the waiting room, past the nurse's station toward Beverly's room. As they walked, he glanced back toward her for a moment. "You look familiar to me. Have you been to this hospital before?"

"No," Lance said quickly. She resisted the urge to adjust her glasses or duck her head to keep him from examining her face too closely. "I'm just visiting. Passing through. I guess I just have one of those faces."

The doctor nodded. "The number of faces I see a day, I'm surprised I can even tell my kids apart." He gestured at a door as the pager on his hip began vibrating. "I'll let you talk. Excuse me." He turned and walked back the way they'd come, shoes squeaking on the tile. Lance watched him go before she knocked on the doorframe and entered the hospital room.

It was virtually identical to every other hospital room she'd ever seen. The window was dark, occasionally lit up by a flash of lightning that reflected off the raindrops streaming down the pane. Lights glowed from two sconces on the wall near the only occupied bed in the room. The elderly woman lying there glared at Lance when she came in. She aimed a gnarled finger at Lance and said, "I hope you're happy. I just hope you're just thrilled."

"I am. Your daughter is going to be cursed with many more years of you driving her crazy."

The woman folded her arms over her chest and stared out the window, lower lip stuck out like a petulant child. "Have to change my diet, they said."

"But you'll be healthier."

"Like that matters. Hardly a life." She scoffed, shook her head, and shifted on the mattress.

Lance looked at the magazines next to the bed. "Do you need anything from home? Books, or--"

"No, I'm just fine, than you. Pamela is bringing some knitting because the doctors want to keep me overnight for observation. I can't even sleep in my own bed because of you and your, your meddling."

Lance shrugged. "Well, next time I'll just leave well enough alone."

"I hope you will."

"Fine," Lance said.

Beverly looked at Lance, and then reached out her hand. Lance took it, and Beverly squeezed. "Thank you," she said in a soft voice. She had her eyes on the foot of the bed rather than at Lance, her lips pressed together in an attempt to keep them from trembling. Lance returned the squeeze before letting Beverly withdraw her hand.

"Why don't I go see if I can round up some snacks?"

"You're a good egg, Carol. Not like the other punks that have lived in that apartment."

Lance smiled. "I'll be right back."

She was at the door before Beverly said, "And I'll deny it to the end of the Earth if you tell anyone I said thank you for this!"

Lance mimed zipping her lips and left the room. Lance's first impression of Pamela Vernon and her mother, Beverly, was that they were extremely loud. Lance occupied the apartment near the stairs, for a quick exit, and Pamela lived with her mother at the opposite end of the corridor. She could hear Beverly griping at Pamela as they passed her door on the way back from some errand or another. Beverly complained about going up and down the stairs, about her arthritis, how bright it was outside... nothing seemed too trivial for her.

Lance later struck up a conversation with Pamela in the laundry room, one of the few times Lance had ever seen her without her mother in tow, and discovered the truth about Beverly Vernon's gripes. It was just the way she communicated with others. Pamela had long ago learned how to translate the language, and she offered to give Lance pointers. Lance agreed, and the three of them started spending more time together. Lance offered to help Pamela with the groceries so Beverly wouldn't have to navigate the stairs, and Beverly simply scoffed and said, "Fine, shop together, if you don't mind if everyone thinks you're lesbians."

After they left the apartment, Pamela said, "That means 'thank you'."

Lance spent the better part of a month getting to know the two Vernon women, lending a sympathetic ear to Pamela's list of grievances. Two marriages, one ending in death and the other in a bitter divorce, had led to Pamela moving back in with her mother. She swore she didn't mind. "Once you learn how Mom talks, it's actually quite nice."

The hard part was listening to all of Pamela's most closely guarded secrets while offering none of her own. The Vernons knew her as Carol Langer; there was no way she was going to endanger these two the way she'd endangered others in the past. But that meant lying to someone she thought was becoming a good friend. She used as much truth as possible; her relationship with Elaine, her mother, and other innocent things like that. But when it came to why she was living alone in southern Oregon, working as a bartender, she had to lie about a bad breakup. That usually set Pamela off on a tangent about her own failed relationships, and Lance could relax.

She spotted Pamela in the corridor across from her, the two of them separated by the nurse's station. She wore a rain slicker and her untamed red curls were hidden underneath the hood of her sweater. She was speaking with the same doctor that had given Lance the news about Beverly's diagnosis. Pamela nodded, smiled, and thanked the doctor for the information. She glanced up and spotted Lance over the doctor's shoulder and smiled as she shook the doctor's hand. She started walking, so Lance changed direction to meet her halfway.

An alarm went off in Lance's head, but she wasn't sure what caused it. She slowed her pace and examined the entire hallway. Nothing had changed. Pamela was still walking toward her, but they were separated by about a hundred feet. Doctors and nurses swarmed through the open space between Lance and Pamela, and visitors in jackets carried umbrellas to minimize dripping on the floor. There was nothing to cause alarm.

It took Lance a moment to realize what had alerted her to danger. A woman with short blonde hair who had been leaning against the wall was now walking a few paces behind Pamela. She was a few inches shorter than Pamela, dressed in a leather jacket and blue jeans. She had a hands-free phone clipped over her ear, her lips moving as she surreptitiously spoke to someone on the other end. The woman had pushed away from the wall and started walking at the same time Pamela left the doctor. It could have just been a coincidence. But why had she been waiting? And what prompted her to suddenly start walking?

Lance stopped walking and ducked into an open door to the right. There was a bathroom and a closet right next to the door, and Lance stepped around them and pressed her back against the wall where she couldn't be seen.

The occupant of the room, an elderly woman in a fancy white nightgown, looked up from a book of crossword puzzles. Her eyes were wide and vivid blue, her jaw dropping at the sudden intrusion. Lance smiled in a way that she hoped was non-threatening and said, "Trying to surprise my cousin. I don't want her to know I'm here, and she just showed up. Could you tell me when a blonde woman in a leather jacket walks by?"

The woman smiled and nodded, then gave Lance a double thumbs-up. She then craned her neck and looked out the door. After a few seconds, the woman looked at Lance and cupped her hands around her mouth. "She just walked by."

"Thank you," Lance said.

She stepped away from the wall and peered out. Pamela had just stepped into her mother's room, and the blonde woman continued walking. She got to the end of the corridor and looked down the opposite branch, then touched her ear. Lance ducked back into the room as the blonde woman turned and looked back down the hallway. She glanced at the woman's nightgown and said, "They let you have your own clothes?"

"I'm in here for a while, dear," the woman said. "They said I should be comfortable."

Lance nodded and looked at the closet. "I don't suppose you have something I could use to get past dear old Cousin Shelly, do you?"

The woman leaned forward and thought hard. "There's a sweater I hate. And a big sun hat. Take 'em. You're doing me a favor."

Lance opened the closet and did a quick search. "The sweater with the flowers. The black one. Take it, please."

Lance found the sweater she meant and exchanged it for her own coat. She grabbed a paper bag off the floor and stuffed her coat into it. The sun hat was huge and hideous, but the brim drooped enough to hide her face. She put it on, took off her glasses, and said, "How do I look?"

The woman cackled. "Like my sister!"

Lance smiled. "What's your name, ma'am?"

"Trudy."

"Trudy," Lance said. She took out her wallet and put two twenties on the tray table that held the remains of Trudy's dinner. "Buy a couple more crossword puzzle books."

The woman said, "Honey, that'll buy more books than I have time to do."

"Call me an optimist," Lance said. "Thanks for the help."

She went to the door, stooped her shoulders as she stepped out into the hallway. She lifted her hand in farewell and said, "I'll see you tomorrow, Trudy." It took all of her willpower to make her feet shuffle across the tile, to keep from turning back and watching the blonde woman to see what she was doing. There was a chance this was all just a ridiculous overreaction, that the woman was visiting someone else. But Lance hadn't stayed free for this long by taking chances.

She kept up the shuffling walk all the way to the elevator. None of the doctors looked at her, but a few of the visitors she passed did a double take when they saw how young she really was. She smiled to let them know she wasn't crazy, that this was just a trick she was playing on someone. She got to the elevators just as the doors were about to close on a pair of male doctors in rumpled scrubs.

When she turned to face forward, she saw the blonde in the leather jacket about ten yards behind her. The elevator doors closed before the mysterious woman could get a good look at Lance's face. She shed the sweater, straightened her spine, and took off the hat. She balled the clothes up and turned to the doctors. She handed the clothes to one of them, who was bug-eyed at the transformation that had just taken place.

"Make sure those get back to room 305."

"Um... okay."

Lance smiled at him and put her own jacket back on as she waited impatiently for the elevator to reach the lobby. She didn't wait to see if the blonde had followed her down in another elevator or if she had decided to take the stairs. She didn't worry about what the people in the lobby would think as she started running, feet pounding on the tile floor and echoing off the walls as she ran from the hospital. The revolving doors were too slow, so she slammed into the regular door set off to one side.

The rain was darts of ice, pelting her face and body as she ran through the parking lot to where she had parked Jodie's car. She only looked back when she was safely in the car, driving back to the main road.

The blonde woman in leather was standing just outside the revolving doors, scanning the parking lot. Lance ducked down in her seat and drove past before the woman even looked in her direction.

#

Lance parked at the end of her block, scooting down in the seat so she could see the window of her third floor apartment. She had designed the apartment with a singular purpose; it was on the corner of the building, and had two windows facing opposite streets. At night, a streetlight shone into one. She was parked on the opposite street, looking up at the subtle glow of blue light in her current home.

She took out her Tracfone and dialed her own number. She let it ring ten times, eye on the window. Her phone sat on a table that was in the corner between the two windows. She was about to hang up and call again when the shadow of an arm appeared against the glass. Lance froze as she saw the subtle movement of someone picking up the receiver. Lance snapped the phone shut and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

Lance pulled away from the curb and drove past her building without stopping. Someone had found her. They tracked her down and got too damned close. She tried to think of anything important that had been left in her apartment. There was nothing she couldn't leave behind. She kept a duffel bag of clothes under the backseat of the Cobra, along with the majority of her money. The only thing she regretted was walking out on Pamela and Beverly without a word. But that was a necessary evil. Her life was designed so that she could pick up and leave at a moment's notice.

The most important items in her life never left her person; she reached up and touched the pocket of her blouse, where photographs of Jodie Curran and Elaine Mallory rested. Anything else could be easily replaced.

She looked in the rearview mirror as she tried to decide where to go next. She could keep moving south, as she had been for the past seven months. Or she could head back north. It had only been a month since her last vacation; she could do with another one. When she was a mile away from her former home, she pressed her foot down and the car lunged forward, pressing her back against the seat as she left Oregon, and Carol Langer, behind.