2. Priest #2
I wanted to ask. I wanted to step around the counter and tell her that whatever was wrong, I’d been dealing with wrong my entire adult life and I was good at it and she didn’t have to carry it alone.
But she hadn’t asked for that and we didn’t really know each other that way.
She’d asked me to leave her shop yesterday and she’d done it with a voice that shook and I’d respected it because respecting what she asked for was the only thing I could give her.
I heard the engine first. A car on Main Street, accelerating when it should have been cruising, the RPMs climbing wrong. My brain classified it before the first shot landed. Drive-by. Moving vehicle, automatic fire, short burst. An attack that relied on volume and speed, not accuracy.
Suddenly, the front window exploded. I was already reaching for her when the glass came apart.
I grabbed her by the waist and hauled her down behind the counter, pulling her into me, my back to the windows.
I curled over her, head tucked against hers, arms wrapped tight.
Rounds punched through what was left of the shopfront, shredding stems and scattering glass across the floor.
The cooler blew out in a spray of cold air and crystal.
A round hit the pressed tin ceiling and sent fragments raining down.
Another caught the wall behind the register, plaster dust filling the air.
A burn across my left shoulder. Sharp, hot, the specific pain of a bullet that catches skin without burying itself, fortunately it was likely just grazed. I cataloged it and dismissed it. Irrelevant in this moment, I was protecting Macy.
Three seconds of fire. Four. Then the engine pitch shifted, accelerating east, and the sound thinned, faded, and the shop went quiet except for the hiss of the ruined cooler and water running from toppled buckets onto the hardwood.
I held position. Counted to ten. In the Rangers, the silence after a burst was the most dangerous part.
The instinct was to move, to lift your head, and that’s when the second volley found you.
I waited. Listened. No engine returning.
No footsteps. Just the tick of debris settling and the drip of water and, underneath me, the rapid expansion of her ribs against my arms.
“You hit?” Low, close to her ear.
She didn’t answer right away. Her breathing was ragged, shallow, the kind that happens when the body is running on adrenaline and the mind hasn’t caught up. She was shaking against me, hard tremors running through her whole frame.
“Macy. Are you hit?”
“No.” Barely a whisper. “No, I don’t... no.”
I checked anyway. Ran my hands along her arms, her sides, her ribs. Glass dust everywhere. A cut on her forearm where a shard had caught her, superficial. No bullet wounds. She was okay, at least physically.
I eased off her and she sat up slowly, her back against the counter, her hands flat on the floor.
Her face was white. She was staring at the ruined shop, the blown-out windows, the water and glass and scattered petals, and her mouth was open and nothing was coming out.
Shock. The delayed kind that hits after the noise stops and the brain has to reconcile what just happened with every assumption it had about the next five minutes.
“Hey.” I put my hand on her arm. “Look at me.”
She looked. Her eyes were wide, unfocused. Then they sharpened, came back to the present, and dropped to my shoulder.
“You’re bleeding.” Her voice cracked on the second word.
I looked down. The round had opened a line across the top of my left shoulder, three inches long, shallow enough that the muscle underneath was intact. Bleeding but manageable. I’d had worse from training exercises that went sideways.
“Graze,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“But…you’re bleeding.” She said it again, harder, like the repetition was the thing keeping her tethered. Her hand came up toward the wound and stopped, her fingers trembling so badly she curled them into her palm.
I caught her wrist. Gentle, steady. Held it until her eyes came up to mine.
“I’m fine. Tell me what’s going on here.”
She pulled her hand back. “I don’t know what...”
“Macy.” I kept my voice level. “That was a targeted drive-by. Automatic weapon, moving vehicle, a burst pattern aimed at this building. That’s not random, not a robbery, and not someone with a grudge against flower arrangements. Who’s after you?”
She stared at me. Behind the shock and the glass dust and the cut on her arm, she was deciding what to tell me. The calculation was fast, practiced, a split-second assessment.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” she said.
“You can’t handle an automatic weapon.”
“I have a plan. I was already...” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. I saw the almost. The edge of whatever she’d been about to say before the training kicked in and shut it down.
“You were already what?” I said. “Packing? Running?”
She didn’t answer. Her jaw tightened and her eyes went bright and the fight was visible in her, the refusal to let anyone in, the discipline that had kept her alive this long telling her to shut up, move, trust no one.
“I can handle this,” she said again. Firmer now. Like she was convincing herself as much as me.