I was only vaguely aware of Indy saying my name and yelling at me to stop.
Slowly, my tunnel vision widened and the world around me came into view again. The redneck had gone limp in my arms, his face a bloody, pulpy mess. When I let him go, he slumped against his truck and groaned.
I looked at Indy. But she didn’t need to say anything. The look in her eyes spoke volumes. I had lost control.
When the police and ambulance arrived, the deputy interviewed the driver and other witnesses, while the EMTs saw to the redneck.
“He saved my life,” I heard the lady driver say to the deputy.
“I saw it,” said another witness. “I think he would’ve killed her if that man didn’t step in.”
I watched them load the redneck into the back of the ambulance. He was going to be fine. But a few more to the face and he wouldn’t have been.
“You come after another woman again and I’ll finish what I started,” I said to him before they closed the doors.
“That’s about enough from you,” the police officer said, dragging me away. “You’re going to need to give me a statement.”
Before I could answer, the lady driver came up to me and hugged me. Christ, she was only about nineteen. Probably a college kid.
“Thank you! You saved my life,” she said, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me again. When she turned to the police officer, she started to cry. “If he hadn’t come along and stopped him, I think that psycho would’ve killed me.”
“I’m taking him to the hospital to look at his hand,” Indy said to the deputy. “You can meet us there.”
I looked at her. “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
But taking a look at my hand and judging by the pain that was beginning to burn in my knuckles, I had probably broken something.
The police officer looked at me from under the brim of his hat. “Good. I’ll get the statement from you there.”
Nothing was broken. In me, anyway. The psycho with the axe wasn’t so lucky. He suffered several broken bones and a concussion, and Indy said he was being admitted. The police had already charged him at his bedside after a witness brought forward some footage they had taken of the attack on their cell phone.
Me, I wasn’t being charged.
But I should be. I had lost control.
I knew it.
And worse, Indy knew and had witnessed it.
She hadn’t said anything, but I knew it weighed on her mind.
She was quiet as we walked down the corridor of the hospital, leading outside, and I wanted to talk to her about it when we were alone. But just before we walked through the door, someone called my name.
“Mr. Calley!”
Indy and I swung around. Dr. Sumstad, the county medical examiner, approached us from the opposite end of the corridor.
“Those toxicology reports came back on your friend, thought you’d like to know before I hand my findings over to the proper authorities,” he said as he walked toward us.
The donation to Sumstad’s kid’s Boy Scouts fund let him know that yes, the Kings would like to know before anybody else got their hands on the findings.
He handed them to me, but I had no idea what the hell I was looking at so I gave the papers to Indy. Her eyes roamed over the report.
“What did you find, Dr. Z?” I asked.
“Apart from significant levels of THC, nicotine, and alcohol, no other drugs were found in his system. If he was taking medication for depression, such as SSRIs or TCAs, then he hadn’t taken them in days.” He nodded to the file in Indy’s hands. “What I found particularly interesting, though, was Mr. O’Connor’s blood alcohol level was .455.”
“Jesus!” Indy exclaimed.
“His levels were four times the legal driving limit,” Sumstad said.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning, Irish was too wasted to stay awake, let alone make the decision to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger,” Indy said.
“Exactly,” Sumstad agreed. “Also, his brain stem was severed by the bullet. But the police report said he was clutching the gun in his hand when he was found.”
I didn’t know what that meant, so I looked at Indy.
“The moment the brain stem was severed, it became an anatomical impossibility for him to maintain a grip on that gun.”
“Precisely. So, based on this, I’m citing cause of death as homicide.”
INDY
We lay on our bed in the darkness, the only light in the room coming from the streetlight farther down the road. We were awake but still. Lying together but not touching. Saying so much but not uttering a word. Emotion buzzed around us. We were showered and changed, me in a t-shirt and bed shorts, and Cade in a pair of sweat pants hanging low on his hips, his broad chest naked. We lay on our sides, facing each other. Our heads sank into pillows. Cade was calm, but shame clouded his handsome features.