Driven to Ink

Chapter 53

I felt myself start to hyperventilate, but I took a couple of deep breaths. I still held my phone, but I hadn’t opened it yet.

“You have to stop, Jeff,” I shouted. “You’re bleeding.”

“We’re going to the hospital. Call the cops. Tell them what happened.”

My hand was shaking as I flipped up the cover on the phone. Instinct made me call Tim.

“What, Brett?” He sounded annoyed.

“Tim,” I said breathlessly, still looking at Jeff’s shoulder. All that blood was making me woozy.

“Talk to him, Brett,” Jeff said sternly, although his voice wasn’t nearly as strong as it should’ve been. “Don’t look at me.”

I closed my eyes.

“What’s going on, Brett?” Tim’s voice echoed through my head.

“It’s Jeff. He’s been shot.” It was all I could concentrate on at the moment.

“Shot? Where?”

“In the desert.”

“Where are you?”

I opened my eyes and looked through the windshield. The shattered glass gave it a sort of magnifying glass appearance. The lights from the strip malls and the gas stations and the apartment complexes glimmered against the broken windshield and bounced back off it in a halo effect. How on earth could Jeff see to drive?

“We’re on the way to the hospital,” I heard myself say, the question about Jeff’s driving still bouncing around in my head like a pinball. “He’s been shot.” I didn’t say he was at the wheel.

“Which hospital?”

There was only one on this road, so I figured that’s where we were heading. “University Medical Center.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Um, Tim? We hit the guy who shot at us. He’s back there-I don’t know-somewhere on the side of West Charleston Boulevard in Summerlin. Near a streetlight that’s out. He forced us off the road. Then he shot at us. Jeff ran him over. We left him there.” I couldn’t stop talking; I didn’t want to stop. I felt as though if I stopped, something even more awful would happen. My hand was still shaking as the phone vibrated against my ear.

“Brett, stay calm.” Tim’s voice was soothing. “Did you recognize the guy who shot at you, the guy you hit?”

“No, I never saw him. Even when he hit the car”-the words got stuck in my throat for a second-“I just saw a body. Not his face. Nothing to recognize.”

“That’s okay; don’t worry about it. I’ll meet you at the hospital. I’ll send someone out to Summerlin. How’s Jeff?”

I looked over at him. He was focused on the road; his hands were holding the steering wheel tight. The blood was spreading, and his breaths were short and shallow.

“He’s okay,” I lied to Tim, then closed the phone.

We were almost at the hospital. We’d run every red light, but, remarkably, we didn’t see any cops. The emergency entrance was up on the next block. I sighed with relief.

Too soon.

As we approached the driveway to the hospital, the car suddenly swerved as Jeff’s arms fell from the wheel.

I braced myself as we slammed into an ambulance. My neck snapped back and hit the headrest.

Security guards, paramedics, and doctors surrounded the car in seconds. Faces peered through the windows. The door opened, letting in a cold gust of air that made me shiver. Jeff was white as a ghost; he looked as though he’d passed out. My heart leaped into my throat as someone tried to pull me from my seat.

“Help him,” I begged, although they were already doing that. Jeff was out of the car; they had him on a gurney; they were rolling him away.

It was only then that I let myself be brought out of the car, unlatching my seat belt, reaching for my bag at my feet. My legs got caught for a second in the air bag before I wrenched them free and stepped out of the car. I felt as though I’d been at sea for days; my knees buckled, and I almost went down. Hands were under my arms, pulling me back up.

A familiar voice asked, “Are you okay?”

I turned my head to see Colin Bixby in his white lab coat, holding me.

I tried for a small smile, but I couldn’t carry it off. “Yes. But Jeff…”

“We’re taking care of him. Don’t worry about him.”

I wanted to worry. “He lost a lot of blood.” I saw it then, on my arm, on my shirt. It had splattered all over me. Bixby was looking at me, wondering whether I’d been shot, too. “I’m okay,” I said, lying again. Sister Mary Eucharista was giving me a pass, though. I asked her to look after Jeff.

“You weren’t shot?” Concern laced Bixby’s words.

“No.”

He helped me around the ambulance, and I glanced back at the Pontiac. There was blood on the hood.

My knees buckled again, and I started to fall. Bixby leaned down and swept me up in his arms, carrying me like a child through the sliding doors into the emergency room waiting room. People who’d probably been waiting here for hours watched as we went through another set of sliding doors into the emergency room. I’d been here once before.

Bixby set me down on a bed and pulled the curtain around.

He peered into my face and gently touched it. I winced when his fingers probed my nose.

“Air bag?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It’s not broken.”

I sighed. “I feel like a truck ran over me.” And then I thought about Jeff, helpless and bleeding on a gurney. Never having shot his gun during a war. But getting shot by a crazy person in the Vegas desert. The tears started then, and Bixby let me cry. His fingers probed my arms, my legs, my torso without a word. I barely felt them.

Finally he stepped back and said, “You’ll be okay.”

I sniffled. “Thanks.”

The curtain snapped back then, and my brother came in. He didn’t say anything. He came over and put his arms around me, pulling me into a tight hug.

It made me start crying all over again.

Bixby stepped back. “I’ll check on Coleman,” and then he disappeared, making sure the curtain was giving us as much privacy as possible.

“He’s in surgery,” Tim said. “He lost a lot of blood.”

I nodded against his chest.

“What were you doing out there?”

That’s when I saw him. Detective Kevin Flanigan was standing behind him. Tim saw where my gaze had settled.

“Tell us what happened,” Tim said softly.

I knew it was procedure, but it still felt like an imposition. I didn’t have a choice. I reared my head back and frowned. “We were coming back from Rosalie’s. We had dinner with her and Sylvia and Bernie. Jeff was taking me home.” It all sounded so benign, considering everything else that had gone on in the past couple of days. In the last hour. Who would try to kill us? Granted, I had been poking around a little too much maybe, but I didn’t know diddly about anything. Although perhaps the guy shooting thought I did. I shivered at the thought.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Flanigan asked, a little notebook in his hand. His voice was kind, as if he had some empathy after all.

In fits and starts, I told them what happened on the road out there in the desert.

“I don’t know why…” I said when I finished. “Who would do that?”

“You didn’t recognize him?” Flanigan asked, the same question Tim had asked on the phone earlier.

I shook my head. “I just saw a shadow. He rolled onto the hood of the car, but I didn’t see his face. The windshield shattered. I couldn’t see much of anything too clearly.”

Tim and Flanigan exchanged a look, and I could see they knew something.

“What?” I asked.

“The timing is convenient,” Tim said to Flanigan, ignoring me.

Flanigan put his notebook and pen into the breast pocket of his pin-striped suit. He looked dapper, even when interrogating accident witnesses.

“What timing?” I asked.

“Let me see if we can locate him,” Flanigan said, nodding a good-bye to me and disappearing around the curtain.

I turned my gaze on Tim. “You have to tell me. What timing is right?”

“Dan Franklin. We let him go about two hours ago.”