“Now you,” he ordered Louis. “Unlock his handcuffs and then all of you will get away from the door.”
“Fuck you,” said Louis. “I’m not letting you leave here with my gun.”
“How about it I give you it to you a piece at a time?” The man pulled the trigger. Saks reacted without thought. He flew at his cousin and knocked him over. White-hot pain flashed in his shoulder as Oakie moved forward. Saks groaned turned to see Oakie plow into the man with the force of a bull, dropping him against the wood coffee table in front of the couch. The man grunted as the coffee table splintered in pieces on the floor.
Saks clasped his hand to his shoulder, trying to ignore the pain and the blood streaming from it.
“Fuck,” said Louis. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Shouldn’t have done what?” said a feminine voice. “Saks! Son of a bitch! What’ve you done to yourself now?”
“What the hell?” said another male voice.
Saks groaned when he saw it was Marcus. Of course, when he got hurt Marcus wasn’t far away.
“Gloria,” said Chrissy. “Call an ambulance.” She knelt beside him. “Give me a pillow for him,” she ordered to no one. “And towels.”
Marcus ambled in while Oakie and Louis secured the man who fired the gun once more. Oakie stood guard over them with a scowl on his face, daring either to move. Sirens sounded in the background as Marcus handed Chrissy a pillow she slipped behind Saks’ head.
“You just can’t do without me,” she tutted. “I leave you alone for half a day and you get yourself shot.”
She said this with a slight smile and a worried look on her face at the same time. All he wanted to do was kiss her pretty pink lips. The pain was making him delirious.
“Did you get my flowers?” He was feeling woozy, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his eyes open. He felt pressure on his shoulder and Chrissy held one of his expensive white, one-hundred- percent cotton towels to the gunshot wound.
“You sent the flowers?”
“Sure. Who else would send you a card with a quote from Shakespeare? Or do yo
u have a bunch of men who do that?”
“No,” she said gently. “No one sends me flowers but you.”
“The florist did sign my name, didn’t he?”
“Yes, yes,” she said thickly. A tear slid down her cheek.
“Don’t cry, Chrissy.” He tried to raise his hand to wipe it away.
“Where’s the damn ambulance?” she yelled.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They wouldn’t let her go with him in the ambulance. She was so frantic that Marcus drove them all to the hospital. This time, however, the fiction of Chrissy’s sisterly relationship to Saks was ripped to shreds. The staff would give her no information about Saks at the desk and told her to go the waiting room.
Chrissy, Marcus, and Gloria entered the waiting room to find two men wearing Hades Spawn jackets. One was the man at Saks’ apartment. His jacket had embroidered badges that announced him as “Oakie” and “President.” The other’s jacket said “Spade.”
She remembered seeing the man at the party at the Red Bull, talking with Saks.
Spade stood with his arms crossed when a nurse in blue scrubs talked with him. He signed something on a clipboard and gave it to her. His face was grim.
When the nurse left, Chrissy worked up the nerve to talk to him. “What’s happening with Saks?”
“They took him to pre-op to stabilize him for surgery. He lost a lot of blood. They had to fix that before they could take him in.”
Chrissy didn’t know how to respond.
“Maybe you should go,” growled Oakie. “We’ll take care of this.”