She shrugged off the nurse who hustled in to grab her arm, then leaned over the bed. “Why the hell didn’t you just die?”

“I don’t know,” Phillip said calmly. “I tried.”

“You’ve never been any good.” She hissed at Good Cop when he pulled her back. “Never been any damn good. Don’t you come around looking for a place to stay when you get out of here,” she shouted as she was dragged out of the room. “I’m done with you.”

Phillip waited, listening to her swearing, shouting, demanding papers to sign to get him out of her life. Then he looked up at Bad Cop. “You think you can scare me? I live with that. Nothing’s worse than living with that.”

Two days later, strangers came into the room. The man was huge, with blue eyes bright in a wide face. The woman had wild red hair escaping from a messy knot at the nape of her neck and a face full of freckles. The woman took his chart from the foot of the bed, scanned it, then tapped it against her palm.

“Hello, Phillip. I’m Dr. Stella Quinn. This is my husband, Ray.”

“Yeah, so?”

Ray pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down with a sigh of pleasure. He angled his head, studied Phillip briefly. “You’ve got yourself into a hell of a mess here, haven’t you? Want to get out of it?”

ONE

PHILLIP LOOSENED THE windsor knot in his Fendi tie. It was a long commute from Baltimore to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and he’d programmed his CD player with that in mind. He started out mellow with a little Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Thursday-evening traffic was as bad as predicted, made worse by the sluggish rain and the rubberneckers who couldn’t resist a long, fascinated goggle at the three-car accident on the Baltimore Beltway.

By the time he was heading south on Route 50, even the hot licks of vintage Stones couldn’t completely lift his mood.

He’d brought work with him and somehow had to eke out time for the Myerstone Tire account over the weekend. They wanted a whole new look for this advertising campaign. Happy tires make happy drivers, Phillip thought, drumming his fingers on the wheel to the rhythm of Keith Richards’s outlaw guitar.

Which was a crock, he decided. Nobody was happy driving in rainy rush-hour traffic, no matter what rubber covered their wheels.

But he’d come up with something that would make the consumers think that riding on Myerstones would make them happy, safe, and sexy. It was his job, and he was good at it.

Good enough to juggle four major accounts, supervise the status of six lesser ones, and never appear to break a sweat within the slick corridors of Innovations, the well-heeled advertising firm where he worked. The firm that demanded style, exuberance, and creativity from its executives.

They didn’t pay to see him sweat.