Chapter 9
Loco
I drove to the hospital like the roads belonged to me alone.
Red lights didn’t mean anything. Stop signs were suggestions.
The speedometer climbed and kept climbing, and I didn’t care if I wrapped my cruiser around a tree because there was a sound in my head—one continuous, rising tone—like the universe was warning me, this was the part of life I would never make it back from.
My radio crackled with units moving, detectives making calls, the hunt for her ex already spinning up into a citywide net. I wanted to be in the thick of it. My hands were locked at ten and two, knuckles white, jaw clenched so hard my molars ached.
My phone buzzed again. Another unknown number. Another text I didn’t open. The screen lit up on my dash like a threat in my peripheral vision. I turned it face down on the seat and kept driving.
When I hit the hospital parking lot, the world narrowed. I parked crooked, barely in a spot, halfway ran inside, and pushed through the sliding doors. Everything smelled the same. Disinfectant and fear. A hospital was a battlefield with better lighting.
The waiting area looked exactly like it had an hour ago—dim, quiet, chairs bolted to the floor like they were afraid of people breaking loose.
Two guys from my precinct were still there.
A lieutenant now, too. And a woman I didn’t recognize in a blazer, probably from the department, probably already thinking about liability.
Nita stood by the wall, arms wrapped around herself like she was holding her ribs in place.
Nita’s eyes snapped to me when I entered.
“How did this happen?” she started with tears streaming down her face. I called her on the way over to say Lamonte had been taken back into surgery. I didn’t explain further, I ended the call and hit the gas harder.
I didn’t take in anyone else. I couldn’t. I just kept walking until I was right in front of the double doors for the surgery nurses station.
A nurse tried to intercept me for me to sign in and get a number to stare at some screen with updates for patients. “Sir, you—”
“Where is Dr. Patel?” I demanded, voice clipped. “Where’s the surgeon from earlier? Is he still here?” I needed to know who was working on my best friend, my brother in arms.
Her mouth tightened. “He’ll be out when he can be.”
“Now,” I stated harshly. “I want an update immediately from him or his nurse. Lamonte Davis is the patient.”
Something in my tone must’ve carried, because she hesitated, then turned and disappeared back through the doors. My foot kept tapping against the tile, uncontrollable.
Behind me, I heard Nita’s footsteps. Felt her presence, close but careful. “You’re scaring me,” she whispered softly.
I didn’t turn. “Good.”
“Dante—”
“Not now,” I cut her off.
A minute later the doors opened and Dr. Patel stepped out.
He didn’t have to say anything. I saw it in his eyes first. It was all laid out without a single word.
In the way his shoulders slumped, like he’d been holding the weight of the outcome and it finally crushed him.
In the way he looked at me like he was about to break something sacred.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“No,” I said, before he spoke. “No. Don’t you fucking say it!”
Dr. Patel removed his cap slowly, like he was peeling away the last layer of hope. “Officer Verdone,” he began.
I stared at his mouth, waiting for him to say the words that would make my world stay intact.
When the hospital called requesting I come back I knew it deep inside.
The nurse could only say I was listed as Lamonte Davis’s emergency contact and there was a change and he was back in emergency surgery.
I rushed here, breaking every highway law along the way.
He didn’t stop or mince words. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “There was a problem with an internal bleed. We thought we caught it in time, but we didn’t. We lost him.”
For a moment the room went silent. Not the room, no, the whole fucking universe. It was like everything stopped and held its breath. Then sound rushed back in, distorted. My own heartbeat pounding in my ears. A chair scraping. Nita making a strangled noise behind me.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t blink. My body refused to understand the sentence it had just been handed.
Dr. Patel spoke again, voice careful, the way doctors speak when they’re delivering death.
“The bullet was lodged near the artery. When we removed it, we thought we cleared the artery. We didn’t.
There was internal bleeding. Too much lost too fast. Catastrophic and rapidly. We couldn’t get it to stop in time.”
Catastrophic. I swallowed. My throat made a sound like it was tearing in two. I felt my hands flex open and closed at my sides, like I was trying to grab the words and crush them into something else.
“You said,” My voice came out wrong. “You said he was lucky.”
Dr. Patel’s eyes shuttered with pain. “He was,” he said softly. “For a while. The fact that he even made it to the hospital was more than most people would have survived given where the bullet lodged.”
My vision blurred. Not with tears—not yet. With something sharper. Like my eyes were trying to reject what they were seeing. Nita stumbled forward until she was beside me. Her hand reached for my arm, then stopped short, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to touch grief this big.
“Can I see him?” I asked.
Dr. Patel nodded. “Briefly. Before we move him.”
The doors opened again and I walked through without feeling my feet hit the floor.
Lamonte looked like he was sleeping. That was the cruelty of it.
His face was calm, the lines of stress and pain smoothed out, his mouth relaxed.
If you didn’t know, if you didn’t see the sheet pulled up over his chest, if you didn’t see the faint stain at his neck where the blood had been—if you didn’t know, you’d think he was going to wake up and call me an asshole for hovering.
I stood at the side of the gurney and stared at him. The room was colder than the others. Or maybe it was just me. I reached out and took his hand. His skin was still warm. I hated that the warmth meant nothing.
“Brother,” I whispered.
My voice cracked on the word and for a second I thought I might actually fall apart right there, in front of strangers, in a sterile room meant for recovery.
But something in me froze instead. The tears retreated like they’d been ordered back.
The grief didn’t leave, it just hardened.
It turned into a dense, cold mass behind my ribs.
I leaned close to his ear anyway, because Marines talked to their dead. We talked to them like they could still hear us.
“I should’ve turned around,” I admitted, the confession tasting like blood. “I should’ve—” My throat tightened. I squeezed his hand once, a final squeeze, the way you squeezed a friend’s hand before you kicked in a door. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I left you to fight him.”
Time passed, I didn’t know how much. I said what I needed and Nita had her own goodbyes. We stood with him in silence both wishing we had a way to change the outcome. A nurse cleared her throat at the door. Time.
I didn’t let go of Lamonte right away. Then I did. And it felt like betrayal to walk away.
When I stepped back into the waiting area, the captain was there, eyes red. A lieutenant, too, and a chaplain from the hospital. Paperwork materialized like ghosts. A statement needed. Notifications. Chain of command.
Everyone spoke, words floating around me without meaning. Nita stood off to the side, face in her hands. I walked to her.
She looked up at me, eyes shattered. “No,” she whispered. “No, Dante.”
I nodded once. And for a second I saw something in her expression change—from grief to fear. Because she saw what I felt: that I didn’t look like a man who was going to cry. I looked like a man who was going to go numb as vengeance ate me alive inside.