Mrs. Mastings whimpered.
That whimper turned to a cry when Adrian screamed over something the firefighters did.
I grinned.
“My Adrian wouldn’t do that,” Mrs. Mastings implored. “He’s a good boy.”
“Loves his mama?” I grumbled under my breath. “Probably loves Jesus and America, too.”
The cop next to me, Dax, snorted. “Quoting songs now?”
I looked over at him. “Better than telling that bitch that her son’s a piece of shit that I hope dies.”
Dax’s lips turned up at the corners. “He’ll make it out of this, I’m sure. Only the devil has luck like that.”
I agreed with him completely.
“Did you hear that the girl he hit outside our duplexes almost died?” Dax murmured low. “Juniper coded three times last night. She had an air embolism and they were able to save her. Then something else went wrong. And when they were doing emergency surgery on her yesterday around eleven, she coded on the table yet another time.”
I thought of the doctor, Zach, then.
When it’d happened with Juniper, I hadn’t understood. I’d had no idea what he was going through.
Now? Now, I knew exactly what he was going through.
And that slithering cold that was coursing through my veins? The fucking itch to walk over there, jump on top of the crunched-up hood of that truck, and kick that piece of glass that was embedded in his chest? It was a really real thing that I wanted to do.
The sad thing was, as I arrived at the hospital twenty minutes later, the kid was still very, very much alive.
And, apparently, he’d been very, very talkative on his ambulance ride over.
“Did you hear him saying that he wished he would’ve hit her?” one nurse whispered to another. “He said that he hoped ‘that bitch lost her baby.’ That she ‘didn’t deserve to be a mother.’”
I felt my insides clench.
The firefighters, medics, and nurses had done a damn fine job getting him the help he needed, and not once did they shake the piece of glass in his chest.
“He also admitted to running Dr. Caruso’s girlfriend over with his truck. He straight up told the medic to his face as they were pushing him in,” a doctor interjected.
When I arrived at the room after making my way through the long line of nurses and doctors that were looking at the spectacle of the guy who had a three feet wide piece of glass in his chest, it was to find none other than Zach himself working on Adrian.
My entire being stilled, and for one heartbeat in time, I knew that something big was about to happen.
We made eye contact over the table.
The kid that’d been doing the terrorizing of Sierra, also the one who’d confessed to running the girl off the road and nearly killing her before leaving her there to die, was on that table. And he was laughing.
The motherfucker was laughing that he’d finally gotten caught.
He was a spoiled little asshole, and he had no fucking clue that the doctor working on him was also the doctor that was in love with the girl he hit.
He had no clue that, just a few steps away, I was in the end stages of not caring so much, either.
Like, if that scalpel that Zach was holding accidentally slipped, my heart wouldn’t be broken in the least. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep. I’d still feel like a thousand bucks, actually.
Zach’s hand twitched as he carefully pulled a piece of glass out of Adrian Mastings’ face.
They were waiting for a surgery room to open up. After the terror that Adrian had caused in the hospital parking lot, there’d been no one in a hurry to get him into the operating room. Though, as luck would have it, before Adrian had arrived, a couple driving their van of six kids had been struck on the interstate, almost all of the children had needed surgery, meaning all of the ORs were full.
Sadly, for Adrian, he’d have to wait his turn. As long as they kept him still, the piece of glass in his chest hopefully wouldn’t pierce his heart.
I kind of hope that they didn’t bother to keep him still.
I kind of hoped that Zach shook him like the ragdoll that he was.
I sure the fuck couldn’t do it. Not with all of these witnesses. I’d never be able to get out of here without looking like I was guilty.
Something like understanding crossed over Zach’s eyes, and in the next moment, I knew what he was going to do.
I turned away so that I could honestly say ‘no, I wasn’t watching him at the time that the murder happened.’
A nurse who was in the doorway of the trauma room we were all gathering around gasped, and my eyes went to her.
“Oh, fucking shit,” she said as she watched with wide, almost unbelieving eyes.