It was another ten minutes later that he caught the blurred rear lights of a car on the side of the -road—-and it wasn’t Evelyn’s old Mini. It was Vincent’s silver Mercedes, a car the other man usually only drove for short trips and never in this kind of weather.

Bringing his vehicle to a stop beside the crippled sedan and turning on his hazard lights as well as the blue and red flashers atop the roof and in his front grille, Will got out. Vincent’s car had smashed into the ditch, the front crumpled in. Not enough to have crushed the driver, but enough that the car would need a tow. More worried about Vincent than the car, Will blinked the rain out of his eyes and wrenched open the driver’s--side door.

Vincent looked at him, a streak of blood down one side of his forehead and a faint smile on his lips. “This is the last thing you need, isn’t it, Will?”

“Where’s Evelyn?” Will yelled to be heard over the pounding rain that thundered on his head and dripped in rivulets down his face. The extremely low visibility made it difficult to see any markings on the road right in front of him, much less farther down the road; Evelyn’s smaller vehicle could be lying broken ten meters up and he’d never spot it.

“Evelyn?” Vincent stared blankly at him for a second before shaking his head. “I sent her home. She was driving back in after running one of the hunters home, and she saw I’d spun off the road. Insisted on stopping to call you.”

Will knew the chairwoman of the Golden Cove Business Council; a bulldog had nothing on her. “How could you possibly have convinced Evelyn to go home?” At least that explained the car Will had seen heading into -town—-it had been the size of Evelyn’s compact.

“Wayne.”

Will should’ve thought of that -himself—-Evelyn’s husband was in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, and while he had good mobility around the home, he still relied on Evelyn for a lot. He was older than her by fifteen years at least and far more frail.

If Will had realized Evelyn wasn’t home, he’d have checked on Wayne during his patrol. The Triskells lived on his street and he often lent them a hand if they needed physical help with something. Half the time, the request was a thin excuse for Evelyn to attempt to pump Will for scandalous details about her fellow Covers.

“How seriously are you hurt?” He’d automatically grabbed a flashlight as he left his vehicle, now focused it on Vincent’s head wound.

Blue and red flickered against the night around them, the police lights incongruously like neon flashes in a bar.

“It doesn’t look too bad from here.” Will could see a little blood along Vincent’s hairline, but there was no sign of a gash.

“It’s fine.” Vincent raised his hand to his forehead. “I’ll probably have a headache tomorrow, but that’s about it.”

“We still need to get you in front of a doctor,” Will began.

“Dominic de Souza isn’t in any condition to help anyone.” Vincent’s tone was tight. “And I don’t think you’re going to be driving me out of Golden Cove for treatment. We’ll be in more danger from the weather than I am from this shallow cut.”

The other man was right. With Dr. de Souza crushed by Miriama’s disappearance, and the town cut off by the heavy rain and rising winds, Vincent would have to wait until tomorrow to get any medical care. That was, if the rain let up. “Come on,” Will said, “I’ll run you home. Grab your stuff.”

Vincent didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but Will had things to do. And as far as he could tell from Vincent’s speech and general mental responsiveness, it wasn’t the head injury that was slowing him down; Vincent just seemed oddly unmotivated. When the other man made no move to get the sports bag he had in the backseat, a bag most likely filled with outdoor gear he’d used during the search, Will opened the back door and grabbed it himself.

Returning to the sedan after dumping the bag in his SUV, he turned off the car’s lights, then took the keys out of the ignition before leaning down to look into the other man’s face. “Look,” he said, his patience at an end, “you want to sit out here all night, fine. But I can’t sit with you and I can’t leave you here. So get off your ass. There are a lot of other people who might need me tonight.”

Vincent blinked, as if becoming aware of his situation for the first time. Swearing under his breath, he got out into the rain. “Will the car be safe here?” he asked, blinking water away from his eyes. “I mean for people on the road.”

Will had been thinking the same thing himself; he had accident alert beacons with him, but they’d be washed or blown away in this weather. And calling Peter at the garage to tow this would just put another man at risk from the worsening weather. “How’s your back?”

“I haven’t got whiplash, nothing like that. The car slid very gracefully into the ditch.” Vincent raised his fingers to the cut on his head. “This is from me leaving a metal -business--card case on the dash. It flew up during the slide.”

Trusting the other man’s analysis of his own injuries since he gave every appearance of being fully lucid, Will handed the keys back. “Put the car into neutral. Let’s see if we can push it farther into the ditch so it’s not half hanging on the side of the road.”

The heavens seemed to open up even more as the two of them attempted the maneuver. The one good thing was that the rain made the land slippery. Peter Jacobs’s younger and far more hotheaded brother would probably bitch about the work involved in towing the sedan back out of the ditch, but they got it safely off the road and into the depression. No one should hit it unless they themselves went off the road.