I drove her in silence, but she started to regain her consciouness. I stared at her face, now complete with a bloody lip, bruised cheeks, and a black eye. She stirred in my passenger seat and I gripped her hand. I massaged my thumb over the area between her thumb and forefinger and murmured, “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. Everything is going to be all right.”
She passed out on me again a second later.
At the hospital, I carried her through the emergency room doors and a heavy set nurse with short black hair greeted me.
A team of doctors and nurses came together to work on the angel girl, and the nurse stopped me at the double doors, a stern look in her steely gray eyes. “Are you family?”
“No, but—”
“Then you can’t come back here,” she snapped and rushed toward the doors.
“But I found her!” I screamed.
“Sorry, kid. Family only!”
Then the nurse disappeared through the double doors.
After I left the hospital, I went back to the scene of the crime to find Joe, pr
opped up against the side of one of the buildings. The rapist was gone. “What did you do with him?”
Joe pushed off the building and walked toward me. “What do you think? I called the cops. They came and got him and I covered for ya.”
I laughed. “You told them you beat the shit out of him?” If I was a cop I wouldn’t believe Joe could cause that kind of physical damage to a man. Whether he used to be a boxer or not. The man wasn’t an inch over 5’3. And he’d aged quite a bit since his boxing days. He told me this after the fact. Plus, I’d seen pictures and newspaper clippings.
“No kid, I told them what I saw. I told them I saw him trying to rape the girl and that the kid who knocked him out took her to the hospital.”
When I thought about the whole situation, I realized I could have called an ambulance, but at the time that thought had slipped my mind. “And my guess is that they’re going to want me to come down for questioning.”
“You got it kid.”
I kicked a rock across the alley and muttered, “Great. Just fucking great.”
I liked to avoid the cops at all costs.
And I’ll never forget what Joe said after that. He said, “You’ve got a hell of a right hook, kid.” He stood next to me and patted my shoulder. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone throw a punch like that.”
Those two sentences changed my entire life.
Murph shoves his hands in his pocket and rocks on his heels. A vibration in my pocket pulls me from my thoughts and I whip out my cell, thinking it’s either Joe or Connie. It’s neither. It’s my sister Teagan. I hit the silence button. I’ll call her back in the morning.
Tee has this weird notion that if she talks to me before bed sometimes it helps her sleep. I don’t know why she thinks so. My voice is deep. Thick. Harsh, with a slight Irish lilt. I assume maybe she likes hearing me because my voice is familiar to her. Or could remind her of happier times.
“Later Murph,” I say with a nod of my head.
He chuckles. “Tell Joe I said hey.”
“Will do.”
And with that, I speed off, leaving Murph to the streets’ violent delights.
Chapter Three
~Hadlee~
There are moments in my life where I feel like the self-blame for everything I’ve gone through in the past year will continue gnawing at me like a carnivorous beast mawling on my flesh until it picks my bones clean.
A lot of times I think I can feel my self-loathing snake through my bloodstream riding on nerve endings before it actually makes it to my brain and I can tell myself: