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Carl stood in the middle of the parking lot, staring at the cloudless winter sky, a look of absolute Zen on his normally surly face…
She held the phone receiver away from her ear and strained to hear…
Yep, he was singing.
“No, he’s not threatening anyone.” She sighed. God, did nothing normal ever happen in Salvation? “He’s singing.”
“Singing?” The operator’s voice went up an octave.
“Classic rock.” Sean muttered. “Maybe Nirvana.”
“Are you sure he’s singing?” the operator asked, surprise making her voice crack. “I know Carl Brennan. I’ve seen him drunk and in lockup plenty of times. I’ve never seen him singing. Usually he’s as mean as a teenage girl cut off from her cell phone”
“You’re missing out then,” Natalie responded. “He’s actually better than the last cover band they had at the Boot Scoot Boogie.”
“I was there. That’s not saying much.” The operator chuckled.
The ends of Natalie’s lips twitched in a smile when Carl jackknifed at the waist. He started making herky–jerky motions as his cheeks puffed out. After a few deep breaths he straightened, hiccuped, and finished with a woozy smile before giving a quick salute to the Sweet Salvation Brewery sign. A second later he waved around like an inflatable dancing man at a car lot…and then threw up.
The brewery staff let out a collective “ewwwww” and took a step back. It seemed that the possibility of getting shot wasn’t worth losing a good seat. But puke? Everyone hop–stepped it away. Natalie rolled her eyes. The whole town was cracked in the head.
Carl stripped off his coat and started wiping down the sign, but the arm holding the shotgun got tangled up in a sleeve. He tried to jerk it free. The move threw him off balance and he tumbled over. He hit the ground and a shot went off.
Everyone in the brewery’s tasting room froze.
“Ma’am, I heard a shot. Is everyone okay?”
A small red stain bloomed on Carl’s sleeve, right above his elbow. He clutched his arm and twisted the ground. The BB gun lay a few feet away from where he’d fallen.
Her mind was six steps ahead before she’d even whipped around and ran back to the bar. “You’d better get an ambulance out here. Carl shot himself.”
“The deputies are a few minutes out, ma’am.”
She rounded the bar and raced to the supplies. Carl was an ass, and she had to admit a part of her enjoyed seeing him in pain after all he’d done, but she couldn’t leave him out there to bleed to death. BB guns weren’t usually dangerous, but you clip a major vein or artery and that was all she wrote. “Hailey, take this.” She handed the phone to the brewery’s office manager, grabbed a handful of souvenir Sweet Salvation Brewery T–shirts and towels, and sprinted to the door.
“Oh no.” Sean blocked her path.
She pushed against the immovable arm keeping her from walking out the brewery’s front door. “He’s drunk, not dangerous.”
“And you think the two are mutually exclusive?” The low growl in his voice had nothing on the ice in his eyes. Whatever he’d seen in his life before he got to Salvation must have taught him the truth of that lesson with brutal efficiency.
But life had taught her things too. The main one being you couldn’t run away from all the ugly in the world, sometimes you had to face it and tell it to fuck off.
“I’m not leaving a man in agony on the front lawn.” She dipped underneath his arm and pushed open the door.
Sean muttered a curse and followed her into the sunshine. “He’s not dying.” He grabbed her arm, yanking her to a stop.
“You a doctor all of a sudden?” She shoved his hand away, spun on a heel, and hustled to the injured Carl.
Short of hauling Natalie screaming back into the brewery, there wasn’t a damn thing Sean could do to stop her from helping Carl, who was sweating like an ice cube at the beach and taking in shallow breaths. The pain, however, didn’t seem to be having any effect on Carl’s attitude. If it wasn’t for the blood, Sean would have thought the idiot had shot at himself and missed.
True to form, Natalie had gotten the old brewmaster’s sleeve up enough to expose the BB gun wound and its messy aftermath. Sean may have played the hero on the big screen, but without a stunt double and a screenwriter, he was just fumbling out in the wind.
But not Natalie.
Even as Sean plotted how to get her back into the brewery before the pain sobered Carl up and he roared back into his normal mean–ass self, Sean admired the confidence it took for Natalie to do the ri
ght thing, even when it could come back and bite her on the ass. Not a lot of people did that anymore. Hell, the vast majority of people didn’t do that anymore.
