66
ANSON
The moment Stash was gone, Detective Moss turned to me, cradling her useless radio and phone. “We can’t trust him. Not after what we found downstairs. He might be working with Meagan.”
Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “What did you find?”
We quickly told him.
The Kid listened in silence, and I could only imagine what was going through his head. Every time he trusted someone, they betrayed him. Paul wasn’t much better. He’d quickly hashed out a sketch of Stash with the shotgun, and he added Meagan standing beside him, tying a noose with a length of rope.
Drawing in a deep breath, Detective Moss turned to me. “I need to find some way to get in touch with my men. If I leave you here, are you going to be alright?”
I exchanged a quick look with Vincent. Images of the fight at Finicky’s farmhouse played out in my head. How we killed Welderman and Stocks. “We’ll be okay,” I told her.
Detective Moss pressed her mobile phone into my hand and nodded at the Kid. “Maybe your friend can get this working. If he does, press number one on the speed dial. It will connect you directly with my partner. I trust him. Tell him what’s going on and tell him we need help. Understand?”
Again, I nodded.
She was gone then. Out the door and down the steps.
“Help me out of this bed,” the Kid said with a soft grunt, sliding to the edge of his mattress and rolling his legs over the side.
I shuffled around and got an arm around him. “Are you okay to move? Maybe you shouldn’t.”
He winced when he tried to stand. “I can’t stay in this room and wait for them to take me away. I want to help.”
His legs were wobbly, and when he put pressure on them, all the color left his face. A thin sheen of sweat appeared. He pinched his eyes shut and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth.
“You should stay—”
He shook his head before I could finish and opened his eyes slowly—first the good one, then the blackened, swollen one. He met my gaze. “I’m going to help.”
The way he looked at me . . . I saw a much older boy.
Not even a boy—a man. I saw the man he would become.
This determination and perseverance someone his age shouldn’t understand yet, much less possess.
He’d hardened in the past days. He was becoming someone I wished he didn’t have to become.
I understood, though, because I had changed too.
We all had. I placed my hand on the small of his back and steadied him. “Okay. Okay.”
“You might be the toughest person in this building, Kid,” Vincent told him. Then he reached for some clothes piled on a chair in the corner of the room and tossed them on the bed. “But you’re not helping anyone with your ass hanging out of that hospital gown. Get dressed.”
That sounded dangerously like a compliment, and Vincent didn’t do compliments. The awkward silence that followed only reinforced that. His gaze shifted to me. “Stay with him and meet Paul and me by the stairs with Pudge when he’s ready.”
Without looking up from his sketchpad, Paul said, “Paul wants to stay right here and maybe hide under the bed.”
Vincent grabbed him by the arm and dragged him through the door. “If you’re not willing to fight, I’ll just use you as a human shield. Either way is fine by me.”
When they were gone, I helped the Kid out of his hospital gown and into his clothes.
His shoes gave us the most trouble—although they were the right size, his feet had swollen from lying down so long.
With his first few steps, I thought for sure he’d fall, but instead, he grew stronger as the unused portions of his battered body returned to life.
He no longer had an IV line in his wrist, so I didn’t understand why he dragged the IV pole out from behind his bed and wheeled it toward us.
Then I saw the wire trailing from the pole back to his laptop.
“I needed an antenna,” he told me in this matter-of-fact voice, and I answered with the only thing that made sense.
“Of course you did.”
We took the narrow stairs down to the Quick’s main level slowly.
The Kid held the railing with both hands while I had his laptop and the antenna. At the base of the steps, we found ourselves in a madhouse.
People, both young and old, were quickly shuffling in both directions.
Some running, some walking as fast as their bodies would allow, all moving with purpose while simultaneously looking like they had no idea where they were going or what the next minute would bring.
Many held some kind of weapon—everything from guns to chair legs.
Worried voices poured out from the cafeteria, a jumbled mess of unintelligible sounds.
If the Kid looked pale upstairs, now he was colorless.
His skin had gone nearly translucent everywhere but the bruises, and those stuck out like oil haphazardly painted on a white canvas.
He’d lost a lot of weight over the past few days, and although his appetite had steadily increased, he had a ways to go just to get back to the skinny beanpole he was before.
“Do you want me to find a wheelchair?”
He shook his head. “I know it looks bad, but it feels good to be moving. I’ll be alright.”
And that was when he collapsed.
The Kid didn’t so much fall as fold. His knees buckled, his waist and torso a moment later, and he melted in a heap.
I managed to grab him and slow his fall as he went to the floor.
If he passed out, it was only for a second.
His eyes danced around and took in his new surroundings with confusion, then he realized what had happened as he grasped where he was. “Well, that was weird.”
“This is a bad idea.”
I was thinking about the ruptured spleen he had suffered.
The three broken ribs. While he may have had some time to mend, it wasn’t enough.
It probably wouldn’t take much for those wounds to get injured again.
I didn’t know enough about the human body to understand what that really meant, but I assumed it would be dangerous, particularly without medical care nearby.
And there certainly was no medical care to speak of.
Even if Meagan appeared, there was no way I’d let her anywhere near him.
“Anson, when Weasel died, was he alone?”
The words slipped from the Kid’s mouth in a papery thin voice barely above a whisper.
I was blindsided and not sure how to respond.
While I had heard the shot, I had been in the car with Vincent.
Only Paul saw what happened. I realized the two of us—now sitting on the ground, our backs against the wall—were in a similar position to how Weasel’s body was most likely found.
Paul had said the bullet hit Weasel, and he crumpled in much the same way the Kid had a moment earlier.
In his semiconscious state, his mind had somehow connected that to Weasel’s final moments.
Weasel had been the Kid’s only real friend, and the truth was, the only person who had been with him was that cop, Sam Porter.
A dirty cop hovering over you as you drew your final breath was anything but comforting—not a thought I wanted to share.
“He knew we were nearby,” I instead told the Kid.
“He knew we all cared about him. We might have been the only family he’d ever known.
I like to think he thought about all of us.
I’m sure he thought about you. In a way, we were all right there with him, and there’s no way any of us will ever forget what he did. Who he was. He was our brother.”
The Kid didn’t respond to that; instead, his gaze fell to the floor as people continued to rush by us.
When I felt a vibration in the pocket of my jeans, I nearly jumped to my feet. Then I realized it was Detective Moss’s phone. When I saw the name on the display, I nearly dropped it.
Derrick Hillburn.
Van Man.