AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Been shot before?” He asked.
I laughed. Because what a fucking question. “No. No, I have not.”
He raised the back of my shirt up to my shoulders and my whole body flinched in response to his fingers touching my shoulder blade.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “Doesn’t look like it feels so great.”
“Thanks. That helps.”
He walked back around to stand in front of me and put his hands on either side of my head to tilt my chin down toward my chest.
“Got a bathroom in here?” Utah asked, looking over his shoulder to Doc.
“Down that hallway behind you. Second door on the left.”
Utah nodded toward the hallway so that’s where I went. The amount of dried blood on my face startled me enough that I tried to back myself right out of that bathroom once I caught sight of the mirror over the vanity.
“Nope,” Utah said and laughed while he crowded me to get me to move forward again. “Head injuries always look worse than they really are.”
I stood perfectly still while he used a wet paper towel to clean my face.
“He knows who we are,” I whispered.
“I know,” Utah said and titled my chin up to direct the top of my head toward the light in the bathroom. “I’ll deal with it before we leave.”
“You’re going to kill him? He’s helping. He’s probably saving Jersey’s life.”
Utah stopped to look at my eyes then. “You’re a confusing person, you know that?” He asked and smiled. “We’ll just see what he does. We need him to look at your head first, regardless.”
“I don’t want you to kill him, Utah.”
He laughed. “I will take that into consideration, Trista.”
I couldn’t begin to guess how long we waited while Doc worked on Jersey. I went from sitting in that uncomfortable wooden chair to pacing the full length of that mobile home, back to the chair, and then paced some more. I had no understanding of how Utah just stood there beside that bed, waiting to be told how he could help. They talked about stitches in one place and staples in another, then maybe he should glue some other part of his skin back together. He had no way to know if there were really broken bones anywhere without imaging equipment, but he spent an absurd amount of time pulling bullet fragments from Jersey’s shoulder and closing that back up.
“Alright, team,” Doc said. “I think I’ve done all I can do. I drugged him hard before I really got started so with any luck, he’ll just stay asleep for a long time. I would keep him on this IV for another day or two if you’re able. I can send some bags with you, if one of you knows how to change them out? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anybody this dehydrated and still alive.”
“I can do it,” Utah said. “Check her head before we leave.”
“It stopped bleeding,” I said quickly and went to stand next to Jersey instead. “I’m fine. Can we just leave?”
I watched Utah’s face change into the intense and slightly frightening one that he kept hidden for moments that weren’t usually friendly.
“So,” Doc said, glancing between the two of us. “How are you going to play this, Utah?”
“Depends on the next words out of your mouth.”
We both watched while Utah sucked all the oxygen from the room in the simple movement that it took for his thumb to unlatch the gun that sat holstered on his hip.
“I can’t just not tell them,” Doc said quietly.
“Wrong words,” Utah said.
“What do you think they’ll do to you if they realize that you knew who we were, that you helped us, and then just let us leave?” I interrupted quickly to stop Utah from drawing the gun.
“They know I can’t ignore a dying man, regardless of who he is or what he’s done,” Doc said. “That’s not how it works.”
I looked back down at Jersey. So much of his body was covered in bandages now. “You really believe they’ll care about your morals more than they’ll care about you letting us leave? They’ll want to know why you didn’t call them as soon as you got here.”
