The first thing I did was cough.
The second thing I did was groan.
The third thing I did was open my eyes.
When my vision started to clear, I could see that there was a white ceiling above me-but not too far above. At least that is how it looked. My depth perception seemed to be a bit off for some odd reason.
There was something resembling artificial light filtering in to aid my sight, which was a far cry better than darkness. Why darkness stuck out in my mind I didn’t know, but I didn’t need to give it much thought to decide that I preferred the light.
There was a lot of noise too. Things like distant voices and staticky radios. I picked out the rumble of a motor and even a few electronic sounding beeps. There were countless other things, both identifiable and not, but I very quickly grew tired of trying to associate names with them.
Everything in my head was a jumbled blur. I had no idea where I was or why. There wasn’t an inch of my body that wasn’t killing me, but at the moment the real pain seemed to be centered on my chest. Just the very sensation told me that I had been hit by something, but I couldn’t begin to say what. I knew what it felt like, and that was a freight train; but since I appeared to still be in one piece, I decided that might be an exaggeration on my part.
I lay there for a moment trying to remember. There seemed to be something important stuck in the back of my head, and it was fighting a desperate struggle to be released from its holding cell. It felt like an imperative, something urgent, but I couldn’t connect with it and that just brought on a feeling of frustration.
“Hurts like a motherfucker, don’t it, paleface?” Ben’s words worked their way into my ears over the multitude of ambient sounds.
I rolled my head in the direction of his voice and blinked, then I blinked again. When I was still unable to focus, it dawned on me that I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Somewhere in the dark ball of memories that was bouncing around inside my head, I seemed to recall having lost them. But at the same time, I remembered having another pair. The attempt at reasoning just made me hurt even more, so I gave up and centered on his blurry face.
“What?” I croaked.
He started to repeat himself. “I said, hurts like a motherfu…”
“Yeah,” I eked out the gravelly word to cut him off. “I got that.” I cleared my throat and coughed again before continuing. “What hit me?”
“Piece of lead,” he said. He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger spread slightly apart, then added, “About so big, actually. But it was movin’ pretty fast.”
“Porter shot me?” I asked.
“No, not Porter.”
“YOU shot me?!” I half yelped then immediately regretted it.
“Hell no,” he returned. “SWAT did it. If I’d shot you I probably woulda aimed for your goddamned hard head.”
“They shot me?” I muttered.
“Hey, look at it this way, white man,” he offered. “You just joined an elite club. That friggin’ vest you were wearin’ saved your ass.”
“But they shot me,” I said again, confusion permeating my voice. “Why?”
“Row, what the hell? You got amnesia or somethin’? They didn’t have much choice. You were gettin' ready to stab Porter to death with a big ass butcher knife. Don’tcha remember?”
His words triggered the mechanism that released the lock on the cell door, opening it wide to allow the urgent memories of the evening to flood back in. Everything rushed to the front of my brain and then vied for my undivided attention. One item stood out from all the others, and I seized on it immediately.
“Star?” I asked. “How’s Star? Is she okay?”
My friend stayed conspicuously silent and simply looked away.
My brain was adjusting to the blurry picture being fed to it by my uncorrected vision, and I watched as he brought his left hand up to smooth back his hair then massage his neck.
“Let’s talk about that later,” he said.
“Tell me she’s okay, Ben,” I insisted.
He hung his head down and continued to work his fingers against a muscle in his neck. His only audible answer was a heavy sigh.
The stark memory of the wet sound just before Porter and I crashed through the floor returned to echo in my ears. The phantom odor of urine and feces sharply tingled my nose, and I instantly realized I had been standing next to Star when she had died.
I wanted to cry, but my body refused. It had nothing left to give. Not now, anyway.
“They should have let me kill the sonofabitch,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry, Row,” he returned quietly.
“At least tell me they shot him too,” I said, my voice a mixture of pleading and demanding.
“No,” he shook his head as he uttered the word. “He’s already been transported to the hospital.”
“Critical?”
“No. He’s worse off than you,” he replied, “but not critical. He’ll make it.”
“Too fucking bad,” I said.
“He’s off the street, Row,” he offered. “It’s over.”
“Yeah. Tell that to Randy and Star.”
“Row…” he let his voice trail off.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Whaddaya mean,” he replied with a shrug. “We’re sittin’ here in the back of an ambulance. They’ll be takin’ you to the hospital in just a few.”
“So that’s where we are,” I said.
“Man, what did they dope you up with?”
“The way I hurt? Nothing.”
“The way you sound? Something,” he replied.
“So which one?”
“Which one what?”
“Which hospital?”
“Oh, yeah. I already asked ‘em to transport you to University.” He picked up on where he thought my mind was going. “Felicity will be waitin’ for ya’.”
“Where did they take Porter?” I asked.
“Not there, so don’t worry.”
“Where then?”
He shook his head. “No way, Row.”
“So maybe I’m just curious,” I returned.
“Uh-huh, yeah, sure,” he grunted. “I know better. You ever hear the term ‘malice aforethought’? How about ‘premeditation’?”
I stewed in silence for a moment.
“You know, this is gettin' to be a pattern with you,” he announced. “This is the second person you’ve tried to kill in less than a month.”
I knew that the other person he was referring to was the deranged rapist who had kidnapped Felicity on Christmas Eve. I had come very close to pulling the trigger on the gun I’d had aimed at him that night. Fact is I did pull the trigger; I just managed to point it somewhere else first.
“Can you blame me?” I asked.
“Hell no.” He shook his head as he answered. “But like I told ya’ last go around, you need to keep that to yourself ‘cause not everyone is as open-minded as me.”
“Yeah, right,” I grunted and then came back around to the original question. “So, hospital, then what?”
“Home I guess,” he returned.
“Just home?” I questioned. “So I’m not under arrest or anything?”
“Shit, Row,” he exclaimed as he began massaging his neck again. “Not as it stands now, but I can’t really tell ya’ what’s gonna happen at this point. This whole scene is a clusterfuck.”
“How so?”
“Did you happen to catch that big boom just before you went runnin’ across the street like the wild man of Borneo?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. What was that all about?”
“Flash-bang grenade,” he told me. “Special ordinance, used by SWAT entry teams for the element of surprise. Seems that one went off in the front seat of a highway patrol Interceptor.”
“How did that happen?”
He shook his head again. “You’re askin’ the wrong Injun, Kemosabe. Nobody knows. Hell, nobody even knows what it was doing there to begin with. Right now the SWAT commander is crawlin’ all over the guy who was in charge of the van because accordin’ to the inventory, that’s apparently where it came from. The hubcap chasers are pointin’ fingers at City and SWAT. City is pointin’ fingers back at ‘em since it went off in their car. The Feebs are pointin’ fingers at EVERYONE and claimin’ that Federal shit don’t stink. And to top it all off, since Albright’s site commander, she runnin’ around spoutin’ crap about chargin’ everybody with everything.”
I groaned. “Including me I’ll bet.”
“Yeah,” he confessed. “She’s taken your name in vain a few times, but I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“So what about her?” I asked. “Is she so above reproach?”
“You mean tonight?” He scrunched his face.
“Now, earlier, any of it,” I replied.
“Well, she’s site commander so the buck stops with her,” he offered. “But she can bury the whole fuckin’ thing and lay it on someone else, which is what she’ll do, guaranteed.”
“What about earlier?”
“We’ll see,” he returned. “I’m talkin’ to IAD in the morning.”
“You think they’ll listen?”
“Dunno,” he confessed. “All I can do is try. It might take you pressing charges to get anything done.”
A paramedic climbed into the back of the ambulance with us and pulled the door shut then quickly checked my restraints.
“We’re getting ready to roll,” he said. “How are you feeling, Mister Gant?”
“How do I look?” I asked.
He grinned back. “Okay, sir, we’ll have you at the hospital in just a few minutes.”
“Feel free to take the scenic route,” I quipped.
“Ignore ‘im,” Ben told the paramedic. “He ain’t exactly natural.”
I rolled my gaze back to my friend. “So what we were talking about…”
“Yeah?”
“If that’s what it takes, let me know, and I’ll do it.”
“Okay.”
I turned my face back to the ceiling and tried to relax as we began moving. Settling in, I noticed an extra set of pains coming from my left forearm. I slowly cocked my head at an angle and saw the edge of an inflatable splint encasing the appendage. Then I remembered the snapping sound of the bone and felt slightly queasy.
Flashes of memory whirled around inside my skull, always seeming to come back around to Star hanging from the end of the rope. I wondered, if I hadn’t hesitated, would it have been different? If I’d just been there a few seconds sooner, could I have stopped it all from happening? Or at least gotten her down before she choked to death?
As random thoughts tend to do, something that Agent Kavanaugh had said flitted past, and I latched onto it in an attempt to divert my mind. I mulled the comment over for a moment then twisted my head back to face my friend.
“Did Porter have a gun?”
“The scene hasn’t been cleared yet,” he returned. “But they haven’t found one yet, no. Why?”
“Something Agent Kavanaugh said.”
“About the bum from this morning.” He gave me a knowing nod as he made the statement. “Yeah, I heard. Even if they don’t find one, that doesn’t mean anything, Row. He coulda ditched it. Probably did in fact.”
“But he didn’t have one.” I tossed his original answer back to him.
“Not that we’ve found.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “Is there somethin’ I should know?”
“No,” I said in a dismissive tone. “Not really. Just do me a favor. If you see Kavanaugh, explain Twilight Zone to her and let her know I was right.”
“Jeez, Row.” He shook his head. “You and your hocus-pocus.”
“Yeah, me and my hocus-pocus,” I muttered.
The ambulance rocked as it bounced over what was probably a curb then listed slightly as it hooked into a turn. Ben reached out to steady himself, and I saw his right hand was tightly wrapped in gauze once again.
“So how is your hand, Tonto?” I asked.
“Hurts like a motherfucker.”