Trifecta
Authors: Pam Richter
Trifecta
A Compilation of Several Works
By Pamela M. Richter
Midnight Reflections
The Living Image
The Necromancer
AMAZON KINDLE EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Pamela M. Richter
Book Description: Midnight Reflections
Book Description: The Living Image
Book Discription: The Necromancer
Trifecta © 2011 Pamela M. Richter
All rights reserved
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for respecting the hard work of this author.
This ebook is a work of fiction. The names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or
have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations
is entirely coincidental.
Formatting by
Bob Houston eBook Formatting
Book Description: Midnight
Reflections
Book Description: The Living Image
F
rom the Urban dictionary:
"1.
trifecta.
a perfect group of three; winning three times."
I
hope you will enjoy this special edition of three of my books.
Midnight
Reflections
The
Living Image
The
Necromancer
A
big "Thank You" to all the
people who read my novels.
I am so grateful for all the friends I've made since
these books were published. Some having written wonderful reviews, which are
so much appreciated.
A special thanks to Cindy, Elva, Bob, and Carol, Authors
Shirley, Shaina, Melissa, Gordon, and Thomas, my sister Penny, and my many
friends on Facebook.
I'd also like to thank Bob Houston of Bob Houston eBook
Formatting for all his hard work in making my novels shine, and for providing a
sounding board for some of my ideas. You can find information about his
superlative formatting service
here.
Have fun reading.
Readers are welcome to
email me at: [email protected].
J
ulia's midnight reflections actually happened
at about four in the morning. She was far from home, lonely, watching a handsome
man sleeping in her bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Robin, the handsome man, had
put himself in terrible danger so she could solve a mystery. Now she was feeling
guilty as hell.
Robin is obsessed with Julia. Knowing something besides
her attractiveness enchanted him, he's hiding his true identity, trying to win her
heart.
Julia is playing a dangerous role herself, working for
a man she suspects of murder. She also suspects that Robin is much more than the
simple working man he proclaims himself to be. Can she trust him?
Together they uncover information so inflammatory that
they are forced to flee an angry politician who rules a dangerous and profitable
drug army. His people will do anything to get into his good graces. Even murder.
S
he almost turned away from the man lying so still
on the bed. Her mind was momentarily playing tricks, refusing to identify him,
trying to keep the pain at bay. But her body already knew. Her eyes had filled
with tears. Her mind reasoned it was because the poor man was so badly hurt.
Then she noticed his hand lying outside the covers. It
was raw and scraped, but artistic and beautifully formed.
Julia shook her head, still in partial denial, and a moan
escaped involuntarily. How could this have happened?
"He's not your relative?" the nurse asked.
Julia looked at the woman standing at her side, blinking
away tears. "This is my brother."
Julia turned back to him, her eyes widening in anguish.
It was no wonder she hadn't recognized Brian at first glance. Her brother was young.
Now he looked like an aged, wizened old man. His skin had turned grey and slack
and he appeared desiccated, as if the vital fluids in his body had dehydrated.
All that was visible of Brian's head was his shrunken face,
with pinched nose, sunken eye sockets, and a mouth which seemed to have withered
around his teeth. The rest of his head looked enormous, covered with thick bandages.
"We have to move him to a private room," Julia
said, still gazing at her brother. "I have to talk to his doctor. He looks
so...sick."
Julia carefully picked up his hand. She leaned over him,
putting his hand against her cheek. "I'm here, Brian. You're going to be
fine."
There was no returning pressure from the limp fingers.
She touched his brow, smoothing it, almost expecting his
eyes to open, with the quick, wide smile she was used to seeing when he surprised
someone with one of his famous practical jokes. But he lay still. The only movement
was a slow, almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest with each breath.
"We don't have private rooms," the nurse said
crisply. "The doctor will be making rounds this evening. You can stay if
you like. In the mean time, we'll take your brother off the John Doe status. You
are next of kin?"
Julia took a deep breath and turned toward the nurse.
"Yes. I want to talk to a doctor. Now."
The nurse explained that this was a county hospital, where
the indigent, without any means to pay, were given medical treatment. There were
no private rooms. The doctors rotated in from other hospitals, so speaking to one
at this moment would be impossible.
"What if there's an emergency?"
"We have a doctor on call at all times," the
nurse said.
How utterly unreassuring, Julia thought. What if there
were several emergencies at the same time?
"I'm sure you've taken good care of my brother,"
Julia lied carefully. "But I want Brian moved to the best hospital in Los
Angeles. I'll pay for any treatment he's had. I don't know why he was sent here.
He's not destitute. What happened?"
"He didn't have identification. No wallet, no money.
This is where injured and sick people go when the police don't know who they are.
Lucky you found him."
Julia thought she saw a shimmer of compassion on the woman's
tired face before she turned and led her to the office of the hospital administrator,
where arrangements were made to take her brother to Cedars Sinai Hospital in West
Los Angeles. It was the hospital where the rich and famous went. The hospital
with the best doctors on staff.
The portly hospital administrator, who appeared as tired
as his nurse, didn't seem to mind that Julia was taking away one of his critical
patients. Particularly since she was paying for all the medical treatment. He
quickly sent for the one doctor on call who could legally sign a sick patient out
of the county hospital.
Julia felt like she was in a haze through the next hour.
Her eyes were raw and hurt with the effort to keep them from blurring. She tried
to remain oblivious to a family clustered around one of the beds, near Brian's,
praying for their loved one to get well.
The transfer was risky. Brian had sustained what could
be lethal injuries. The ambulance attendants were careful. It took three of them
to move Brian from his hospital bed to the stretcher.
After they wheeled him outside the hospital and transferred
him to an ambulance sitting in the parking lot, they waited until Julia was behind
them in her car before taking off across town to Cedars.
The traffic was hideous. Typical for Los Angeles, Julia
thought in frustration. The bumper to bumper flow seemed unfazed by the siren.
Cars would not, or could not, make an opening for the ambulance. The heat was almost
overwhelming, tempers also soaring.
Didn't they understand that the piercing, undulating siren
meant that there was an emergency vehicle trying to save a life? Julia pounded
her fist on the steering wheel and prayed that Brian would survive the trip.
Finally, the ambulance parked in the back of the Cedars
Sinai Hospital, right next to the Emergency Room entrance. A uniformed security
guard walked over and waved Julia away, pointing her toward an open parking lot
a couple of blocks away.
She sat stubbornly in her car, as the guard glared at her,
watching while the gurney with her brother was guided through the sliding glass
doors into the hospital.
Then she accelerated with a squeal of tires to find a place
to park. In her rush to make sure her brother had arrived safely she ignored the
no-parking signs.
"I hate Los Angeles," Julia muttered to herself
a few hours later.
She stood perfectly motionless in the hot, dusty impound
lot, gazing at her car. It sat like a shiny, blue jewel among a collection of dilapidated
vehicles. All had shared the same fate; towed away for being in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
Totally focused on the huge dent in her driver's side door,
she finally walked over and tried to open it. There was a horrible squealing noise.
She almost moaned in sympathy as it creaked open about a foot. She managed to squeeze
inside the small opening and got the registration papers from the glove compartment.
As Julia hurried to the impound office to pay her illegal
parking ticket, she passed a typical denizen of this sleazy, benighted town. The
man was half naked, his shirt over a shoulder, on hands and knees, gazing at the
underbelly of an enormous, septic yellow truck.
The man straightened up, brushing dust off the knees of
his jeans, and smiled as she passed. Julia pretended not to notice. She couldn't
help noticing the dark tan, which probably indicated an incipient case of skin cancer,
and the eyes, which were a startling light blue in the bronzed face.
At the impound office, she knocked at the locked door.
A woman behind a grimy bullet-proof window buzzed her inside. Julia handed over
the registration and produced her drivers license, trying to remain calm as she
said, "My car was smashed. I can hardly open the door."
"Sign here," the woman told her, pushing over
a yellow form.
"It wasn't that way when I left it."
The dark haired woman peered at the parking ticket through
half glasses perched on her nose, her eyebrows rising. "In a red zone. At
a hospital entrance."
Julia nodded without remorse.
"I'll send someone over to look at your car."
There was an exorbitant fee to get her car back, Julia
saw when she signed the form. Besides the ticket there were additional charges
for towing and storage. It didn't matter. She was frantic to get back to the hospital.
Julia could feel a headache beginning to throb as she rushed
back to her car. She passed the big guy with the awful truck again. Handsome and
undoubtedly a dangerous degenerate, she decided. They sure grew them big and healthy
in this town, she mused, as she waited in the sweltering heat.
A tubby man in a greasy blue mechanic's uniform sauntered
over with deliberate, thorizine slowness. Julia felt like screaming with frustration
and tried to take some deep breaths as she pointed out the damage to her car. She
noticed that the big dark man standing beside the hideous yellow truck was motionless,
watching with concentrated attention.
"Look lady, we just tow 'em," the mechanic said
with lazy apathy. "We're not liable for an old rusty dent."
Julia stared at him in disbelief. "This car is brand
new. There's not a speck of rust."
She listened as the mechanic explained very clearly that
they had towed the car from the front end, not from the rear. He denied any liability
and strolled insolently away, chuckling and shaking his head like she was crazy.
The towing company was responsible, there was no doubt,
but right now it didn't matter. Julia got inside the car and drove slowly and carefully
through the gritty, bumpy lot to a security gate. She didn't want to damage her
car any further. And what difference did it make, anyway, how they had towed the
car from the hospital? Front end or back end, the door was ruined.
The security gate opened after what seemed like hours when
she finally tooted her horn, and she drove out of the impound lot. She had been
in Los Angeles for two days, leaving behind a man who wanted to marry her, and in
search of her brother, Brian, who had abruptly stopped all communication after the
last email, urging her to come and enjoy the wonderful California sun.
Julia felt like she was in an oven in the sweltering heat,
which her car had been sitting in for several hours. She turned on the air conditioner
and accelerated. Santa Monica Boulevard was packed in the evening rush hour, but
as her car moved forward she grew increasingly alarmed. Something was disastrously
wrong. When she pressed the accelerator the car responded sluggishly. Then it
sprang forward suddenly, forcing her to slam on the breaks so she wouldn't hit the
motorist in front of her.
Julia prayed she would make it back to the hospital as
the car lurched along. Frustrated and aggressive L.A. drivers started honking,
slowly at first, but soon there was a chorus from the parade of angry motorists
behind her. Julia gritted her teeth, but was afraid to go any faster. The car
was a new BMW Roadster. She had driven it across the whole country to join Brian
in California, and the car's responses had almost become an extension of her own.
It wasn't behaving like her car any more. It was hurt.
Julia turned into an alley to go back to the towing company.
They had ruined her wonderful little car.
When she shifted into reverse and tapped the accelerator,
the engine revved loudly, but the car didn't budge an inch. Oh no, she whispered,
please go. She put the gear lever into drive, squinted and pressed the gas carefully.
Nothing happened.
Julia took a deep breath and sat there a moment. The impound
place was blocks away. She would either have to walk or get a taxi, but she didn't
think you could just wave and get a cab in this awful place, like you could in Boston
or New York. Everyone here drove their own cars until the air turned to a stinky,
filthy brown sludge.
She hated Los Angeles.
The irony was that her brother, Brian, had loved this place.
He had been beaten unconscious and horribly wounded in this gloriously sunny town.
Julia was startled by the scalding tears on her cheeks,
but the last two days had been a nightmare. First, the frantic search for her brother,
calling police stations and hospitals. Then the shock of finding Brian in that
crowded county hospital.
Julia felt around in her purse for a tissue. She couldn't
just leave the car, but she had to get back to the hospital. She didn't know if
Brian had been neglected because he was found without identification, money, or
any proof of medical insurance. The county of Los Angeles was in financial straits
and had laid off many health care workers. They were overburdened by those who
could pay. Now the doctors at Cedars were saying he might not survive.
Julia opened her glove compartment and reached for her
cell phone. Her fingers didn't feel anything and she leaned over to look inside.
It was empty.
Unbelievable, Julia thought, not only had the impound place
ruined her car, they'd stolen her cell phone. She checked into the little niche
on the dashboard where she kept loose change for toll roads. It, too, was empty.
Julia took her purse and jacket out of the car and locked
it, dabbing at her wet cheeks, biting her bottom lip hard to gain control. She
noted she was near the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica Boulevard as she gazed
around for a public phone. All she saw were grungy bars and several pawn shops.
Abruptly, there was the sound of squealing breaks and she
saw a yellow streak from the corner of her eye, like a big angry bumble bee, hurling
toward her through the heavy traffic. It shrieked across several lanes to a jarring
stop. It happened so fast she was afraid the truck would leap the curb and hit
her.
Startled, she sprang back, almost tripping on the sidewalk.
She recognized the big guy from the towing lot, gazing
at her through the front windshield of the ugly yellow truck. Did he think this
was a funny situation, or what? An ironical smile, and a shake of his head.
Julia backed up as the man slid across truck's front seat
and got out on the passenger side.
"A damsel in distress?"
Julia shook her head. The man was smiling at her and had
made a dumb joke. Brian had told her native Californians were friendly, but this
was certainly appalling. The guy must be an idiot if he couldn't tell she didn't
want his attention or help. He was a bit intimidating up close, towering over her,
muscular and fit. He had curly, uncombed dark hair. At least he had his shirt
on, she noted.
"I'm Robin," the man said.
Now she understood. "I'm not Maid Marian. And I
have mace in my purse."