“Days?” Dimitri verifies, his tone a cross between a mass murder craving a bloodbath and a man bogged down with grief.
I can’t see the woman he’s conversing with, but I picture her jerking up her chin when a curse word seethes from Dimitri’s mouth a couple of seconds later.
I abandon my pain for a minute when she asks, “Should I call in the authorities?”
“No,” Dimitri and I shout at the same time.
Dimitri drags his eyes over my battered face and body before he cranks his neck back to the slim silhouette. “I’ll take care of it.” He tosses what I think is a set of keys her way. “Take her back to your grandparents’ ranch. I’ll organize for a doctor to come and see her there.”
With the command in his tone leaving no room for a rebuttal, a female with piercing green eyes and plump lips squats down to my level a few seconds later. “Can you walk?”
I halfheartedly nod. “Umm… I-I think so.”
The kind stranger would be at least two inches shorter than me, and she has a slim build, but you wouldn’t know it for how strong she is. Within a couple of seconds, she has me on my feet and walking toward the front door.
Just before we break through the threshold, she cranks her neck back to the living room. “Dimi…”
Although she leaves her question unspoken, Dimitri has no trouble reading the worry in her tone. “I’ll be right behind you, Roxanne. You couldn’t get rid of me that easily.”
After taking a moment to breathe out the nerves I hear twisting in her stomach, Roxanne assists me into a car similar to one I’ve seen Rocco get around in previously—a Mercedes Benz G Class.
I lay across the cool leather material before calling Max to my side.
“Come on, Max,” Roxanne chimes in, stealing his devotion from a detached garage at a neighboring house. He isn’t growling and going crazy. He’s sniffing around like he’s dying to use the bathroom as badly as me.
Before he can lift his leg, Roxanne bribes him into the car with leftover food from a fast-food chain I’ve never heard of. After accepting half a chicken Caesar wrap without the gobbles mealtimes are usually filled with, Max jumps into the passenger seat, leaps over the middle console, then dumps the now drool-covered wrap next to my head.
“Thanks f-for the offer, Max, but I-I’m not hungry.”
Since neither of us are in the right frame of mind to tackle food right now, the unwrapped sub teeters between us for the next hour. I’m not sure where we’re going, and in all honesty, I don’t care. I’d let Roxanne drive us to Mexico if it continues to eradicate the smell of death that’s been hovering around me the last few days. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I sucked down the dirty air of Hopeton like I was standing in the middle of Switzerland.
After inhaling another big breath of freedom, I float into my fourth bout of unconsciousness today, only waking when someone jabs their fingers into the bump covering a majority of my right eye.
“Sorry,” murmurs a female paramedic with long dark hair. I want to say her eyes are as caring as her words, but I can’t. My vision is too blurry for me to see her facial features. “I need to make sure there are no obvious breaks beneath the swelling.”
She assesses my eye for a couple of seconds before she asks me to sit so she can shift her focus to the back of my skull. Dizziness bombards me when I swing my legs off a bed in a residence I’ve never been in before, but it has nothing on the unease I feel when my dreary eyes lock in on a man-size shadow blocking the only door out of the modest-size room.
The situation worsens when I blink to clear my vision. Max’s toothy growl will ensure Officer Daniel Packwood keeps an amicable distance, but I don’t like being eyeballed by a man who tries to use his public service position to woo women into an adulterous relationship, much less one who thinks I’m addicted to painkillers.
“It’s okay,” advises the paramedic when she feels my skyrocketing pulse firsthand.
She’s in the process of taking my vitals, so she knows how erratic my heartrate became from spotting Officer Packwood. Adulterers and a rapist aren’t on par with one another, but the knowledge doesn’t lessen my discomfort. Furthermore, not in a million years did I think Dimitri would bring the authorities into this. There are more Ravenshoe PD officers on the Petrettis’ payroll than not, but this still isn’t unkosher. My family usually handles instances like this in-house.
I drift my eyes back to the medic when she explains, “Officer Packwood is here to take a statement about your assault.” After giving me a second to hear the honesty in her tone but not enough time to register why she appears familiar, she twists her torso to Officer Packwood before gesturing for him to enter. “Keep this quick. She’s still very groggy.”
My already dangerous heart rate spikes even more when Officer Packwood asks, “From an opioid overdose?”
“N-no,” I answer before the medic can, aware of what he is insinuating even with my head and eyesight being as hazy as hell. “I haven’t takenanyp-pain medication in days.”
The slurring of my words would have you believing otherwise, but everything I’m saying is true. I promised Maddox I wouldn’t have another slip-up. No matter how hard the circumstances become, I plan to keep my promise.
“Then why was there an empty canister of oxycodone at the scene?” Too scared to come closer, Officer Packwood pulls out an office chair tucked under a desk butted against the doorframe his shoulder was braced on, then straddles it backward. Once he has himself comfortable, he hands the medic a printed-out photograph to hand to me. It shows Justine’s canister of oxycodone on the floor of my childhood bedroom. It’s empty as he stated.
I thrust the photograph over Max’s head before replying, “My attacker knocked it off the dresser during his assault.”
He halfheartedly shrugs. “Then why were no pills found sprinkled across the floor?”
Shocked, I sheepishly pull the photograph back to my side of Max’s protective barrier to peruse the evidence for the second time. I didn’t give it the attention it deserved the first time around. I was too busy denying Officer Packwood’s second underhanded claim that I’m addicted to painkillers to look at all corners of the blown-up image.
