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The safety was off.
He was ready to shoot.
Laura felt it in her gut. The wave of nausea, the shadow creeping across everything. The aura of death. She’d felt it so many times around Nate. She knew he was at risk. She knew he was going to die.
And she felt it in her gut that he was going to die now if she didn’t do something.
“Come on, drop the gun,” Nate was saying. “There are more of us. Be smart. You’re not walking away from this.”
“Then at least I’ll take you with me,” Paul replied. “And you’ll never know why I did it. You want to know, don’t you?”
Laura saw it. Saw Nate hesitate. He was going to do it, wasn’t he? Put his gun down. Raise his hands. Ask Paul to come peacefully.
And Paul would start firing and wouldn’t stop until they were all dead and he could run.
Laura’s head lolled to the side, so heavy and slow, and she saw them. A pair of crutches, discarded in the trash for some reason. One of them was broken, she saw. But the other…
“Alright,” Nate was saying. “Let’s be calm and talk about this. If we just put the guns down…”
Laura reached for the crutch, the one that was whole.
And she swung.
She felt the impact along her whole arm, ricocheting into her skull, and for a moment she had no idea what she had managed to do, or not do. But then she blinked and saw Paul laying on the floor next to her, turned away so she couldn’t see his face, and Nate rushing towards them to dive with his handcuffs.
“Laura? You alright?” he called out.
“Yeah,” she managed, though it came out more as a groan, belying her answer.
Nate covered the last bit of ground rapidly and snapped a pair of handcuffs onto Paul’s wrists. It was only then that he yanked the EMT to his feet, pulling him away from Laura. She groaned again, sitting up, feeling how the cold of the ground had seeped into her bones through her clothes. She was dirty, cold, and in pain, and still a little groggy.
“You’re under arrest for assaulting a law enforcement officer. At the very least,” Nate said, then to the other cops: “Take him in.”
He turned back to Laura and offered her his hand, and for once she took it, even though the swirling black aura of death around him almost made her throw up before she was back on her feet – though this time, she could swear, it was a little lighter than it had been before.
But it was still there, even though it shouldn’t have been.
r /> She still hadn’t saved his life.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Laura glared at Paul across the interview room table, placing her own hands flat on the surface between them. She could feel Nate glancing at her every now and then, as if he wasn’t entirely sure that she should be in the room. She’d reassured him as many times as she could bear that she was fine.
All she had was a bit of a black eye.
An eye that she was still able to use, albeit with a bit of a squint, to glare at Paul Payne and let him know that his presence was not appreciated.
“Alright,” Nate said, clearly feeling that it was down to him to take charge of the situation. “There’s something I want to ask you, Paul. I’m very curious. You’re an EMT. You’ve trained to get to this position, dedicated years of your life to the service. You’ve saved so many lives. So, why start taking them?”
“Taking them back,” Paul said, lifting his eyes from Laura’s to respond directly to Nate.
“Excuse me?”
“You said taking them,” Paul clarified. “I’m not just taking them. I’m taking them back.”
Nate shifted in his chair. “So, you gave them their lives and you get to decide whether they get to keep them? Is that it? You felt they didn’t deserve the lives they’d been living?”
“None of them deserve a second chance,” Paul said, bitterly. “No one does. It’s not about what you do with the time you get afterwards. It’s not supposed to be yours. That’s not the way any of this works.”
