Page 148 of Cozen

No fingerprints left behind.

A good thief gets out clean.

Sargon’s feet moved him forward down the hall, and further away from the scene of the crime. Only down to the next room, though.

Jett’s bedroom.

He knocked once.

Then, twice.

Silence answered back.

“Jett?” Sargon called.

Silence.

“Jett.”

Louder the second time.

Nothing.

Sargon pushed open the bedroom door, and stuck his head into the darkness of the space just enough to listen for his boss. Through the silence, he heard almost nothing.

And then there it was.

Shallow breathing.

Too many seconds between breaths.

Struggling for air.

Sargon shoved the door open, and struggled to find a light switch. Once he did, the panic he felt was quickly replaced by a need to act.

The man was blue.

Or … quickly getting there.

“Call for an ambulance!”

Sargon’s shout echoed into the hall. He didn’t even know if any of them downstairs heard him, or not. It didn’t even matter.

He was already on the bed, and straddling over Jett as he forced the man’s head back, and tried to give the man more room in his airways to breathe. Jett was cold—not deathly so, but cold enough—and clammy.

Around his slack lips, a blue tint was starting to form. A telltale sign that the man was going without any decent amount of oxygen. The rest of his skin had taken on a rather gray pallor. Every breath Jett did take was not nearly enough, he struggled for it, and his chest rattled.

“Call for a fucking ambulance!”

Sargon stayed back in the hallway as the doctor entered Jett Griffin’s hospital room. Both of Jett’s sons were waiting inside—one on each side of their father’s bed. The tube down Jett’s throat was keeping him breathing because his lungs could no longer do the job.

None of the men in the room thought to close the door, and Sargon couldn’t make himself move to give them privacy.

He needed to know.

He needed to hear it.

“The blood tests came back in, and it confirmed my suspicions,” the doctor explained.