A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) by Darynda Jones

She lowered her head and said softly, “I saw you. Deputy Rojas took our phones, but you pulled out another in the holding cell.” Her gaze drifted back to his. “Were you texting Deputy Rojas pretending to be your father? Was that his phone?”

He pulled away from her. Just barely. Just enough for her to notice, and she only did that because a light breeze rushed over a part of her arm he’d been protecting.

“He doesn’t actually know, yet, does he?” she asked, the realization startling. Why did he not only have his father’s truck, but his phone as well?

“I’ll tell him when he gets home.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

When he offered her a barely perceptible nod, she decided to drop it. He was lying. She could tell.

“You’d tell me if something were wrong, right?”

A sad smile spread across a face so handsome it stole her breath. “Right.”

Auri pedaled home more concerned than ever. In the last four months, Cruz’s dad had only let his son drive his truck a few times, and only when he was with him. But now, all of a sudden, he gets to drive it all over town? And Cruz had his phone to boot?

She had to figure out a way to ask her mother about Chris De los Santos, Cruz’s dad, without alerting her to the fact that something wasn’t right. She thought back to the last time she’d seen him. It was before spring break at the end of March. She hadn’t seen him since.

The Saviata Bridge was coming up, a narrow structure that bridged a shallow ravine. Having heard a vehicle approaching from behind her, Auri pulled to the side and waited with eyes closed, praying it wasn’t her mother. Or one of her mother’s deputies. Or her grandparents.

A vision hit her of her grandparents going in to check on her and finding her gone. They would panic. They would call her mom, the FBI, and National Guard. And then they would bring in the big guns. Her grandma’s book club.

The car, a tricked-out Nissan with the bass turned up loud enough to set off car alarms all over town, passed by without incident. Or it would have if Auri had been paying attention to her footing.

She was closer to the edge than she thought. Her foot slipped out from under her as the car passed and she tumbled down the ravine. Unfortunately, her bike followed.

Somewhere between doing the splits in midair and trying to balance the bike on the balls of her feet to keep it from crushing her head, she crash-landed on her back and slid the rest of the way down the steep ravine.

She lay at the bottom, listening to the trickle of water that bubbled mere inches from her head. After a moment, it became clear that the person in the Nissan was not going to help. She thought about calling out for help, but her rescuer could insist on calling Emergency, then where would she be?

Pushing against the metal contraption she’d been trapped under, she managed to move it a few inches before her foot slipped and it crashed down on her again. Pain shot through her ankle and shin. Her foot was somehow wedged between a metal bar and the chain.

This was a job for Superman. Or Cruz. Same dif.

After some maneuvering, and a few stabs of pain that had her seeing stars, she jammed her fingers into the slit in her jeans. Her phone, which didn’t quite fit all the way in her front pocket anyway, must’ve flown out during her performance.

She groaned and looked around. Her headlamp, still on, partially lit a small area off to her side. It picked up a flash of color in the dark part of the ravine below the bridge. Surely that was her phone. How to get to it was the real question.

Nothing was broken. She was certain of it. Her foot had decided to jam itself through the metal frame at an odd angle, because that’s what feet do. A car drove over the bridge, but the ravine was just steep enough to make it impossible for them to see her.

Leveraging her weight with her free arm, and wondering when she’d gained a hundred pounds because no way was she this weak, she huffed and puffed until she was a solid two inches closer to the flash of color. Reaching across the handlebars that were above her head, she angled the light for a clearer picture. It didn’t help. She still couldn’t tell what it was. Either way, it wasn’t her phone.

She scanned the area around her and finally saw it a couple of feet up the side. The lamp reflected off it when she moved it in that direction. Now for the real challenge. She had to get her foot free. Then she could get to her phone and call for help if she needed it.

After another test, she gave up and found a stick instead. Careful not to move her foot, she used all the powers of elasticity she could muster from the universe and her body—mostly her body—and reached up to coax her phone closer. After eons of grunting and groaning and sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth because for some reason that helped, it slid down the ravine straight into her outstretched hand.

It was like she had superpowers. She vowed to use them for good.

With the chain digging into her skin, she was just about to call Cruz when the object not ten feet from her piqued her curiosity again. It wasn’t a usual shape like a bottle or a cup. It was ghostly in appearance and almost swan shaped.

In a last attempt to get a clearer image, she took a picture with her phone. But even with the night-vision mode, the image was grainy. She enlarged it until a shape formed. Something white and puffy. She enlarged the picture even more and just made out the shape of a hand, only it was swollen and disfigured.