CHAPTER 2 #2
The shooter is to blame—for both boys. Whether directly or indirectly, the shooter was the reason for the two innocent lives lost. This truth felt like the only solid ground in a world suddenly made of quicksand.
As Axel and Clint passed through the hospital parking lot near the ER entrance, the cowboy pointed out the hit-and-run car, parked haphazardly across two slots, its rear end jutting into the driving lane.
They approached the vehicle cautiously, as if it might still harbor residual violence.
Clint double-checked the license plate number against the one in his phone.
But it wasn’t necessary; the dent in the right front fender and traces of blood smearing the warped metal told its own story.
“Jesus,” Clint whispered, his voice barely audible over the distant ambulance siren as he peered inside the car.
“What?” Axel leaned forward, his breath fogging the glass.
Night had settled in, but the sickly yellow glow from overhead halogen lamps infiltrated the vehicle's interior, illuminating a horror scene.
“Fuck…” Axel's throat constricted, acid rising as he registered the passenger seat—once beige fabric now saturated with dark, coagulating blood that had pooled, then congealed in the seat's creases.
Handprints smeared the dashboard and door handle, desperate fingers having clutched at anything solid.
Clint's words echoed in his mind with terrible clarity: A panicked kid…
trying desperately to save his dying brother.
Axel felt numb as they entered the ER waiting room, his legs moving mechanically across the scuffed linoleum floor.
Night pressed against the outside of the large windows—the blinds half closed, their plastic slats yellowed with age—and turned the glass into warped mirrors, reflecting the occupants' grief back at them in fragmented, distorted images.
The first thing Axel registered was the screaming.
.. raw and primal, echoing from deeper within the hospital, beating against the double-hinged doors separating the waiting room from the ER nurse's station on the other side.
A chill ran through him, skittering up his vertebrae one by one and prickling the hairs on the back of his neck until they stood on end.
He recognized the cries; the woman from the street.
The wail of grief was so profound it could split the soul asunder.
A cry every human heart feared to make, the sound of someone's world ending in real time.
The wails halted Axel in his tracks, paralyzing him.
For a terrifying instant, it was his own screams ricocheting through the hospital as he hovered over his son’s dead body.
He felt sick, thought he might puke. He almost turned and ran—fleeing those screams that scared the fuck out of him.
His heart hammered against his ribs, and his head felt light.
They were the same screams that had echoed in his head when Clint had disappeared a few months ago, and he’d thought he’d lost him forever.
Clint paused beside him, his hand finding Axel's elbow.
“Axel?” His deep, southern-laced voice cracked slightly, revealing his own visceral reaction to the mother's anguished cries.
What Axel was feeling—Clint was surely feeling a thousand times more intensely, the memories etched into the lines around his eyes.
He had been with Rodriguez as the young man cradled Greco—the love of his life—while he died in his arms. Clint had been present, hearing the primal screams that only the loss of a loved one can wrench from the deepest part of the human soul, sounds that leave permanent scars on everyone within earshot.
“I’m…” Okay? He wasn’t. Axel didn’t know if he would ever be okay again after this day.
The horrifying image of the boy being struck by the car…
it would play on a forever loop in his head.
And every time the film rolled—it would be Luke’s face he saw.
He cleared his throat and started forward without saying anything more.
They reached the doors that led into the main ER corridor before he registered the sobbing coming from the corner of the waiting room; deep, wrenching sobs that matched the devastation of the mother from the street, if not the volume.
Axel looked around, and his gaze fell on the sobbing woman—the same woman who had rushed past him down the apartment stairwell.
The boy was shot in the chest. He’s in critical condition. Devlin said that he isn’t expected to make it.
It took a moment for Axel to register that she wasn't alone.
A boy of eighteen or nineteen sat beside her on the cushioned, upholstered chair, his raw-knuckled hands resting limply on his jean-clad thighs, trembling with the fine, constant vibration of shock.
Rust-colored blood caked his hands, arms, and the full front of his once-white T-shirt, with copper-brown smears on his hollow cheeks and matted in his jet-black hair.
His eyes—bloodshot and sunken into purple-shadowed sockets—stared into a void too vast to comprehend, slightly flickering as he watched his own nightmare play on a merciless loop.
The woman clung to him, her sobs shaking them both. Between ragged, hiccupping cries, broken prayers slipped out—“Please… don’t take my baby… please… save him…”
Was the boy still alive? Still clinging to life?
Maybe there’s a chance. Doctors don’t know everything—
The outer entrance door to the waiting room slammed open with such force that the blinds rattled against the windows.
A barrel-chested man in a grease-stained work shirt burst through, his steel-toed boots pounding across the tile like thunder.
Axel caught only a glimpse of his face—granite-hard with clenched jaw but eyes wild with terror—before the man's shoulder clipped him hard, sending Axel stumbling backward into Clint's solid chest. The man crashed through the ER doors, the hinges protesting with a metallic shriek as he bellowed, voice breaking with desperation: “Where is he?! Where is my SON?!”