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“Is he okay?” she asked, sounding sick to her stomach.
I smiled as I said, “Yeah, baby. I’m fine.”
Then she burst into tears, and I would’ve much rather been holding her when I told her that news.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
She sniffled. “I am now.”
I felt like the lowest pile of shit when she said that.
“I can’t stay on the phone long,” I explained. “But I wanted you to know that I’m okay and that Tara is in police custody.”
There was a long, drawn-out pause before she spoke. “It was Tara?”
I could practically feel her outrage over the distance separating us. “Yes. It was Ta—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” a female nurse said loudly, bringing all of our attention to the hallway where a commotion was in progress. “You can’t go in there. She’s in police custody…”
There was a gasp, and suddenly that woman lay on the floor. The x-ray technician that’d been in the hall. The one I’d heard talking to the nurse earlier about taking me down to x-ray.
That woman being a tiny little hobbit of a female who was adorably cute but honestly looked like Tinkerbell in scrubs.
Her hair was in a long braid that went to the top of her ass, and she was now lying on the floor holding her cheek.
Andy, who’d been the cause of the commotion, caught everyone on the floor by surprise. I.e., the young cop that’d been assigned to cover Tara, but was busy talking up a nurse at the nurses’ station instead of being where he was supposed to be.
“Oh, fuck,” Hoax murmured as he started out the door. “That’s Max Tremaine’s daughter, Harleigh. Be back.”
Then he was gone…but Slate had beat him to the punch, literally.
Before Andy, who’d been the one to backhand Harleigh and send her to the ground in his effort to get to his sister, Slate was taking him out with a single punch to the face.
Only, the moment that Andy hit the ground, he popped back up like one of those plastic clowns, up-righting himself and going after Slate all over again.
I pushed Wade, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Go get him to shoot you.”
Wade looked at me incredulously. “I’m not going to allow anyone to shoot me like you did last night.”
I turned to Castiel. “How about you? It would look better if he attempted to murder a cop.”
Castiel rolled his eyes but walked toward the door, looking out at the commotion in the hallway.
Hoax was standing there, allowing Slate to handle Andy who just kept popping back up, running at him like he wasn’t going to get knocked down like the last time.
And Slate, who didn’t look like he was even winded or hurting in the least, continued to pop him with a punch to the face.
When Andy would try to get around Slate to his sister, who was watching it all with a blank expression—which I assumed was her usual expression when she wasn’t trying to act like she had a conscience—Slate would just knock him away again.
But then he made a mistake.
He tried to go to Harleigh, who’d only managed to back up and push herself against the nurses’ station in her haste to get out of the way.
Slate shifted, trying to draw the fight away from the entrance to Tara’s room, and Andy pulled a gun and aimed it directly at Harleigh.
Slate froze.
Hoax, who’d been creeping around to Andy’s back, froze.
Harleigh?
She didn’t freeze.
She went wild.
She dove and rolled behind Slate in her haste to get behind the nurses’ station, but only managed to get mostly behind Slate and nowhere near the nurses’ station because her roll went wild due to a cart that Andy shoved forward.
The cart hit Harleigh in the side, causing her to squeak in pain, and Castiel and Wade finally managed to get into a position with their guns drawn.
“Drop it,” Wade said, his weapon aimed right at Andy’s chest.
Andy’s eyes went wild.
“No.” He shook his head. “I will not.”
“You’ve already committed a felony for assaulting a healthcare worker.” Wade gestured with his chin to Harleigh, who was now fully behind the cart and no longer behind Slate. Slate, however, was guarding that goddamn cart with his life. He looked like an avenging angel holding a sword at the ready to defend, yet the sword he held was actually an IV stand, and he didn’t look angelic as much as devilish. “And resisting arrest as well as whatever else we can pin on you. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
Castiel tensed, and that was when I saw that Andy had moved his gun to his sister.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” he hissed at her. “That you should’ve stayed home and left well enough alone.”
“She’s alive,” Tara said in a near monotone voice, no inflection whatsoever. “And she has Linnie.”
