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I wasn’t about to argue with that. I watched from around Utah’s shoulder while a tall, slender man stood from the car to look at the three of us.
“He’s not New Jersey, is he?” He asked.
“No,” Utah said, in the calmest lie I’d ever heard. And that was saying something, coming from me.
“You sure?” He asked. “That’d make you Utah, and her—.”
“Not us,” Utah said again.
“I’m not armed,” he said. The way that Utah chuckled at that made my whole body shiver.
“I don’t intend to hurt you, Doc,” Utah said. “Help him and we’ll go. It’s that simple.”
“This one doesn’t feel so simple,” he said and closed the car door to come the rest of the way toward us. “But I’m not about to let a man just die if I can prevent it, and he doesn’t look so great.”
“You can let go of me,” Utah whispered to me while Doc unlocked the door to the mobile home. I released my desperate grip on his arm and realized that my fingers actually ached from how hard I’d been squeezing him.
I was pleasantly surprised once we were inside, and all the lights had been turned on. It just looked like a tiny, traveling clinic inside. The place was completely spotless and organized, despite the unkempt appearance from the outside. It dawned on me that he probably used this space for that exact reason. He didn’t want to conduct these dealings in his own home, and this certainly didn’t look like the kind of place for a doctor to perform secret operations.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
trista
I sat in one of the simple wooden chairs along the wall of what was probably meant to be a kitchen but had instead been transformed into a doctor’s office. There was a single twin bed in the middle of the room, where Utah laid Jersey while Doc bustled about the space gathering things from cabinets and a closet in the back corner.
“Pull that cart over here to the bed, would you?” Doc asked Utah. “You comfortable with this kind of thing?”
“I can follow directions,” Utah said.
That made one of us.
I could probably throw up on command right now. That would be the extent of the help I could offer.
“What’s his name?” Doc asked.
“Jake,” I said quietly from my safe space by the wall, thinking back to the name he’d handed out when anyone other than Memphis asked for it.
Doc took a tiny light from his pocket and used it to look into Jersey’s eyes.
“Jake, huh?” He asked and chuckled. “Can you hear me at all, Jake?”
No response. No movement. No nothing.
“How long has he been unconscious?” Doc asked.
“Half hour,” Utah said.
The fuck? The drive that felt like an absolute fucking eternity was thirty minutes?
I put my face in my hands and tried to stop listening.
I didn’t move until I felt a hand on my knee, and I looked up to find Utah crouched in front of me.
“You alright?” He asked.
“Is he alright?”
Utah smiled and stood up, motioning for me to stand too. I didn’t bother to ask why or argue. I was too tired to behave like my usual self, so I just did as he said. He took his jacket off me and started to unfasten the sides of the vest. He moved to stand behind me and lifted the vest over my head.
