The radio crackled. “Uh, Sheriff? J.J.?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Dispatch wants to know the nature of the emergency. Are we talking MVA trauma or heatstroke?”

“Uh…that’s a negative on both. Make that…woman in labor.”

“Labor?” Katie’s voice rose to a squeak-not very professional of her, in J.J.’s opinion. “Are you telling me this is the nun?”

J.J. grunted, being involved at the moment in helping the “nun” in question into the backseat of his patrol vehicle. He watched her sort of crumple onto her side and pull her knees up onto the seat before he closed the door. She was whimpering softly now. There was a knot forming in his belly as he turned his back to her and spoke to his radio mic. “Yeah, well, that seems doubtful. The nun part, not the labor. You got an ETA on that chopper?”

“Uh…that’s the problem. Ridgecrest’s choppers are out on a multi-vehicle MVA up on 395. No idea how long they’ll be.”

J.J. looked up at the sun-washed sky and swore. He was pondering his best course of action when his radio crackled to life again.

“I could get you somebody out of Barstow, but it would probably be just as fast if you take her in to Ridgecrest yourself, that would be the closest. How far along is she?” Katie had three kids, which probably made her the closest thing he had to an expert at the moment.

“In months? I’m guessing…nine.”

“No, I mean the labor.” She didn’t say the word dummy. J.J. being her boss, but he could hear it in her voice just the same.

“How the hell should I know?” he said. “Her water just broke.”

“Yikes,” said Katie. “Well, that could mean…just about anything, actually. She could have hours yet. Or minutes.”

“Well, don’t ask me,” J.J. growled. “I’m not a doctor.”

“I…am.” That came, surprisingly, from the backseat.

He jerked around to look at the woman, who he could see was now half propped up on one elbow. Her exotic eyes seemed huge in her chalk-white face. “You are what? A doctor?”

She nodded, then closed her eyes and sank back onto the pillow of her folded arm. “Well…sort of. I never finished my internship. But I know enough-” she broke off for a couple more pants and groans, then finished with clenched teeth “-to know I haven’t got hours.”

Grimly, J.J. relayed to his mic, “She doesn’t think she’s got hours.”

“How far apart are the contractions?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Seems to me they’re more or less continuous.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Katie. “That’s not good.”

“If you’re going to take me to a hospital, you’d better get going,” came the faint, gasping voice from the backseat, at the same time Katie’s voice on the radio was saying, “Well, you’d better hurry. I’ll let Ridgecrest know you’re coming.”

“Ten-four.” He put the SUV in gear and made a U-turn, tires spitting fine gravel.

“Okay, drive safe.” The radio went silent.

He didn’t turn on his siren, since it would only make the dog miserable, and there weren’t any other vehicles in the immediate vicinity anyway. He brought the speed up to what he considered the maximum for safety, then glanced in his rearview mirror.

“How you doin’ back there?”

No answer for a moment. Then, “Just lovely, thank you.”

He couldn’t believe he was even thinking of smiling.

As he drove, although his attention was totally focused on the road ahead, part of his mind kept jumping and skittering every which way, so full of the questions he wanted to ask, his head felt like a nest of spooked jackrabbits. For a long time he didn’t ask any of the questions because he couldn’t decide which one to ask first. Finally, though, when it seemed one kept popping up more often and more insistently than the rest, he looked up to his rearview mirror and said, “Ma’am, if you’re not a nun, what’s with the habit?”

Her voice sounded tired, out of sorts and groggy. “No…obviously…I’m not a nun. The habit-and the car-belong to a friend of mine. When I drove the car into that ditch…when I knew I was going to have to walk for help, I thought the habit might help protect me from the sun. You know, like the robes Arabs wear.”

J.J. nodded. He was thinking, Okay, she’s no dummy. But he wished he could see her face, because to him the speech sounded a little too long, a little too glib, like something she’d practiced in her mind ahead of time. It sounded plausible, might even be true-as far as it went. But he had a feeling there was more-a good deal more-she wasn’t telling him.

And it sure didn’t explain those bruises.

He said, “You ready to tell me the truth about how you got those bruises on your face?”

This time the only answer he got was some loud groans and whimpering cries, which he found both alarming and frustrating. Frustrating, because for all he knew she could be faking, or at least exaggerating her situation to evade the question. But if the sounds she was making were for real…

His radio coughed and Katie’s voice said, “Okay, J.J.? I’ve got Ridgecrest on the phone. Just in case.”

Just in case. Swell. He didn’t like the sound of that. “Copy,” he said on a gusty exhalation, but Katie wasn’t through.

“Okay, I gave them what you told me, about the water and all, and the contractions. They want to know if she’s feeling the urge to push.”

J.J. mashed the button to answer, but before he could get a word out, here came one of those gut-wrenching groans.

“Wow,” Katie said, “I heard that.”

Heart pounding, J.J. said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

What he got for an answer was a sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck-a primal sound somewhere between a growl and a scream. It even got to Moonshine, who whimpered and licked her chops nervously.

“Ridgecrest says don’t let her push,” Katie’s voice crackled from his shoulder.

“Ma’am, you got that?” J.J. was trying hard to keep his voice calm, and on the whole wasn’t displeased with the results. So far. “You’re not supposed to push. Try not to push, okay?”

“Okay.” She said that in a thin, pitiful voice, like a scared child’s. And in the next second, sounding like someone trying to bench press a Harley, “I…can’t…stop!”

“She says she can’t stop,” J.J. relayed to Katie. And he was shaken enough to add, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

There was a pause, and then, “Ridgecrest says get her to pant.”

“Pant?”

“You know. When she feels the urge to push, tell her to take in a breath and blow it out through her mouth in short puffs.”

“Ma’am? You got that?”

“Yeah. Okay…” Now she sounded like a little kid trying to stop crying.

“Oh, and J.J.? Ridgecrest says that won’t work indefinitely. It’ll only slow things down, and unless you’re less than ten or fifteen minutes out, you might want to pull over sometime soon.”

J.J. swore, muttering under his breath. The woman in the backseat was silent, for the moment, thank God. And for a moment, hope flared within him. Maybe…just maybe, she was slackening off this pushing business. Maybe things would ease up enough to give him time to get her to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Maybe…

“J.J., you copy?”

The woman in the backseat picked that moment to start with that awful noise again, causing Moonshine to whine and flop down on the seat with her head on her paws. J.J. bet she’d have put her paws over her ears if she could. He wished he could.

“Don’t push! Take a deep breath and blow!” he yelled over his shoulder, then said to his radio, “Yeah, copy. Ten-four.” Back to the woman again: “Like this-” And he was puffing like a steam engine, all the while craning to see the backseat in his rearview mirror.

“The hell with this,” he muttered, and pulled onto the wide dirt shoulder and jerked to a stop in a rising cloud of dust. He left the motor running for the air-conditioning and got out of the vehicle, telling Moonshine to stay put-not that it was necessary; the dog obviously wasn’t going anywhere except maybe to hide under the seat.

When he opened the back door, his passenger raised herself on both her elbows and stared at him, and this time her eyes were bottomless wells of fear. That kind of got to him, more so than the fact that she was breathing hard and her face was wet with sweat so that wisps of her black hair clung to her pale cheeks like seaweed on a drowned corpse.

“Why are we stopping?”

He really wished he had a more gentle and nurturing nature, but in his defense, those weren’t exactly qualities that made for a good homicide cop-or probably any kind of cop, for that matter. Still, he tried his best to be patient. “Because you’re about to have a baby, ma’am, and I can’t be much help to you if I’m driving.”

It wouldn’t have seemed possible for her face to get any whiter or her eyes any blacker, but he could have sworn they did. “No! We have to go to the hospital!” She struggled to sit up, at the same time yelling, fierce and stricken at the same time, her words tumbling from her with gasping breaths. “I can’t have my baby here-I can’t. I won’t push. I promise-just don’t let me-Oh…God!” And then she was doubled up, hands gripping her drawn-up knees, face contorted, making that awful sound.

J.J. looked over his shoulder, then up to the sky, as if there might be some form of help coming from either of those quarters. Which there wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t. It was all up to him. And he’d never felt so helpless in his life.

The contraction seemed to be passing, thank God. The woman was only sobbing now, which at least was something more like what he was used to. In homicide, everybody did a lot of crying-family and friends of the victim, traumatized witnesses, even the perps, when they got caught. This he could handle.

“I’m sorry,” she wailed, then hiccupped loudly. “I can’t help it. I just…can’t keep from p-pushing.”

“Well, ma’am,” he said, trying a firm and authoritative approach, “since we are going to do this thing, I guess there’s no need for you to stop pushing. But I’m going to need you to do some things, okay? I’m gonna need you to help me out here. It’s been a long time since they told me how to do this, so I’m pretty rusty. I’m sure you know a lot more than I do. So you need to stay calm, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered, sniffing. She swiped at her wet cheeks with one hand. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well, for starters,” J.J. said, giving her a smile he was sure wouldn’t fool anybody, “since it looks like I’m about to help your baby into the world, I’d like to be able to call you something besides ‘ma’am.’ Could you tell me your name?”

She hiccupped again and gave a funny little laugh. “Rachel. It’s…Rachel.”

Rachel.

The name sounded strange, coming from her own lips, like a word in a foreign language. The person named Rachel seemed to her like someone she might have known a long time ago, or perhaps in another life. Another universe.

The one she occupied now was a strange, dreamlike world where nothing seemed real and time had no meaning. How long had it been since she’d driven Izzy’s car into that ravine, since she’d put on Izzy’s habit and set out walking across the desert? One moment it seemed like hours-she knew it must have been hours-and the next she felt it had could have been only seconds. Right now she felt as if she was still out there plodding along, one foot setting itself down in front of the other in endlessly repeating sequence, sometimes without any direction from her.

I’m so tired. She wanted desperately to stop, to lie down somewhere. But her body kept pushing her on, forcing her on.

“I want to stop,” she said. “I have to rest.”

She heard a soft deep chuckle, and the face from the Western movie swam into view. “Afraid you can’t do that, Rachel, honey. Looks like you’re gonna have your baby right here, like it or not.”

What? Here? Ridiculous! She shook her head, adamant, furious. “No. I can’t. You’re taking me to the hospital. I have to go to the hospital.”

But then she felt her body being wrenched out of her control again, and now it seemed it was trying its best to turn itself wrong-side-out. Again and again she was caught up by terrible, powerful forces and was utterly helpless to stop what was happening to her. The only thing she could think of to compare it to was once when she and Nicky had been at the beach, swimming, and she’d gotten caught in a huge breaking wave. She’d felt herself being tossed and twisted and dashed down into swirling sand and seawater, arms and legs going every which way like a rag doll in a washing machine, and her mind, disconnected from her body, had thought, Oh, wow, I’m drowning. And she’d felt no fear, she remembered, only mild surprise.