I push myself up to sitting, and catch sight of Ken on the other side of the hallway, his back against the wall and his face even paler than before.Mancuso is by his side.Then my eyes are drawn to a huddle of medical staff crouched over someone on the floor ten feet away, and those long legs sticking out look all too familiar.
“Hugo…” I mutter, trying to scramble toward him on hands and knees, when Savvy pulls me back.
“Let them work on him.”
“What happened?What’s wrong with him?”
“He was injured.”
“What do you mean?”
Then my brother speaks up across from me.
“Your man took a bullet meant for you.”
Chapter26
Bess
“No.”
I turn my back on Savvy.
“Look,” she persists, “until we’ve made sure there are no other threats, you’ll be safer somewhere else.”
I can be equally stubborn.
“I’m not leaving voluntarily.”
Not a chance in hell.The man took a bullet that was intended for me, I’m not about to leave him by himself.
“Bess, come on.Nate is on his way to the school to pick Carson up and bring him here.”
“And the last thing that boy needs is to see me turn tail.I love you, Savvy, but you’re wasting your energy.”
We’re in an empty room on the first floor where Hugo was taken to have a tube placed in his chest.
The bullet hit him under the right shoulder blade, fractured a rib, and nicked the right lung before lodging just under his clavicle.His right lung collapsed, which is why they’re putting in a chest tube.It’s supposed to drain air and blood from around the lung so it can reinflate.
Thank God for Dr.Sharma, who handled the injury like it was par for the course, and not highly unusual for this small-town hospital.Two gunshot wounds in a week must be a rarity.
I’m on pins and needles, wanting to see for myself Hugo is going to be okay, but having my friend hovering restlessly is only amping up my anxiety.
“Go,” I tell her.“Check on progress, do what you need to do.There’s no need to babysit me.You said the FBI team had the situation under control.”
Apparently, the shooter had been posing as a utility worker, doing inspections on the electrical poles along the street.He’d been up in a cherry picker in front of the hospital.Roy Battaglia’s team intercepted a young kid running out of the hospital lobby when the shooting started.They figure he was a lookout and probably alerted the shooter when Mayor Merrick held us up in the middle of the lobby.
I was surprised to hear Mancuso tell Savvy the shooter was none other than Shane Lee himself.The agent suggested he probably got tired of his soldiers not delivering on his orders, and decided to come out and do the job himself.
A decision that cost him dearly when a bullet from one of the agents returning his fire ended his life.
I should feel relief, but I don’t, and I likely won’t until I can look into Hugo’s eyes and have him tell me he is going to be okay.That’s the only thing that matters in this moment.Everything else gets shoved to the back of my head until later.
“Where’s Dad?”
Carson barges into the room, panic in his eyes when he locks them on me.
“Bess?”His voice is small and wavers.
