A few people shook their heads, but no one said anything.
I couldn’t have been the only one on the sidewalk, Nancy thought in frustration. Somebody must have seen something.
She knew they couldn’t have gotten the license plate number, though. In those few awful seconds before the car hit Kim, Nancy had noticed that it didn’t have a front plate, and as it tore off down the street, she realized that the back plate was missing too. But she’d been in such a hurry to get to Kim that she hadn’t taken the time to look for anything else.
“How about the make of car or the year?” Nancy asked the onlookers. “Or whether it had two doors or four doors?”
A few more heads were shaken.
“Anything?” Nancy asked desperately. “This is important. Didn’t anyone see anything?”
Nancy scanned the crowd, trying to catch a sympathetic eye. At the edge of the group she noticed a young guy, about nineteen or twenty, wearing a black swimsuit. He was one of the handsomest boys Nancy had ever seen, with black hair and eyes and smooth, dark gold skin. But it wasn’t his looks that caught her attention—it was the expression in his eyes. He’d been staring at Kim, but as Nancy watched he raised his head and glanced down the street, in the direction the car had gone. His eyes glittered, and his lips curled into a tight smile.
What kind of smile? Nancy wondered. An angry smile? A satisfied one?
But Nancy didn’t have time to do more than wonder. Its siren shrill and piercing, a police car rounded the corner, followed by an ambulance. The moment they came into sight, the crowd scattered, leaving Nancy alone with Kim.
“It was a hit and run,” she told the officer who hurried over to her. “The car didn’t bother to slow down for a second.”
The policeman nodded and began firing questions at Nancy. What was Kim’s name, where was she staying, where was she from? Nancy answered and then told him all she could about the accident, which wasn’t much. “There were a lot of people around,” she finished, “but they all split the minute they saw your car.”
Closing his pad, the policeman nodded again. “Illegals, probably,” he said. “Afraid to get involved.”
Nancy suddenly understood. If people were in the country illegally, they’d rather keep their mouths shut than come forward and tell what they saw. Because if they had to testify in court, they’d be discovered, and then it would be goodbye, U.S.A.
Nancy looked over at Kim, who was being lifted gently onto a stretcher. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, feeling both sorry for the illegals and frustrated with them. “My friend gets run down in front of half a dozen witnesses, but I’m the only one who sees anything.”
“Yeah, it’s tough,” the officer agreed. “There’s a lot of ugly business going on down here in paradise.”
Kim was being loaded into the ambulance by then. One of the medics jumped in after her.
“What about the car?” Nancy asked. “Do you think you’ll find it?”
“There’s not much to go on,” the officer replied frankly. “But we’ll give it our best shot.”
“Okay,” said Nancy. She climbed into the back of the ambulance and settled herself next to Kim. The medic closed the doors, and the ambulance pulled away, its siren going full blast.
Nancy thought about what the officer had meant—that if the car ever did turn up, it would probably be weeks later, in a junkyard somewhere. If they were lucky.
But Nancy wasn’t going to put her trust in luck. She might return to River Heights with her skin as winter-pale as when she left, but she was going to find out why her friend was deliberately run over on a bright, sunny day in the middle of paradise.
It was two o’clock by the time Nancy left the hospital. Kim was still unconscious, but the doctors were almost certain she’d be okay—the worst they could find were a bad concussion and a broken wrist. Nancy had called Kim’s mother, and Mrs. Baylor had said she’d be down later that afternoon if she had to hijack a plane to get there.