AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When I get to the trauma center, I can’t talk to Dr. Raymond Williams because he’s in the OR, attending to Jimmy.
I ask an emergency room nurse how long the surgery might take, knowing I sound like a complete idiot as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
As if she has any idea.
“There’s just no way of knowing that,” she says patiently. “The EMTs said that your friend had lost a lot of blood.”
“Do you know where he was shot?” I ask.
“Somewhere in the midsection is all I really know. They wheeled him past me pretty quickly, as you might imagine.”
She smiles at me.
“I’m sorry, were you asking about the wound or about where they picked him up?”
“Both.”
“It was North Haven,” she says.
“Was he conscious?”
“I really didn’t have eyes on him long enough to notice whether he was or wasn’t. I’ve really told you all I know.”
“I’m sorry to be bothering you.”
“You’re not bothering me. Are the two of you close?”
“More than I could ever properly describe.”
I feel like I’m in some sort of fever dream, talking to this woman just to talk, preferring that to taking a seat in the waiting room and being back inside my own head worrying that something might go wrong and Jimmy might not make it through the night.
I do take a seat now, but then I’m right back up and walking back to where the ER nurse is on the other side of a clear plastic partition.
“Do you have any idea who found him and called it in?”
“I found him,” a man’s voice behind me says.
Eighty-Seven
Jimmy
THE FIRST FACE HEsees is Jane’s.
“Well,” Jimmy says to her. “I can’t be dead.”
“Why is that?”
“Because if you’re here, this can’t be heaven.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“That’s supposed to be my line.”
Jane pulls a chair up next to the bed.
“They find the bullet,” Jimmy asks, “or was it another through-and-through?”
“Dr. Williams has it,” Jane says. “The bullet. He found the little sucker after establishing that no major organs had been damaged.”
