A sound like firecrackers—sharp, rapid, too loud and too close. My brain registered it as wrong before it registered what it was, the way you feel the drop in barometric pressure before the storm arrives.
Then the plate-glass window of the antique shop behind us exploded, and the morning tore itself in half.
Everything after that happened in fragments. Time didn’t slow down the way people always said it did—not like in the movies, not like in the books. It accelerated. Broke apart. Became a series of snapshots with no transitions between them, each one seared into my memory with the permanence of a brand.
Jack’s arm slammed across my chest, driving me down and sideways with enough force to take my breath away. The sidewalk rushed up to meet me, the impact jarring through my palms and knees, and the rough surface tore through skin. Glass rained down around us in a glittering curtain, catching the morning sunlight as it fell, beautiful and deadly in the way that only broken things could be.
“Stay down,” Jack said against my ear, his body covering mine, his weight pressing me into the brick like he could push me straight through the sidewalk and into the safety of the earth beneath.
More shots. A lot more. The sound was deafening—not just loud but physical, a concussive force that bounced off the brick façades and the stone face of the courthouse and came back at us from every direction, so that for a terrifying few seconds it seemed like the whole square was under fire. I could hear screaming now—a high, thin sound that came from a place beyond thought, from the ancient animal part of the brain that understood what bullets meant before language had been invented to describe it.
A black SUV. I caught it in a flash between heartbeats—tinted windows, dark as a hearse, moving fast along Main Street with the confident speed of a vehicle that knew exactly where it was going and exactly what it was doing. The rear passenger window was down, and something was extending from it—an arm, a shape, a weapon that my clinical mind identified and cataloged.
Jack rolled off me in one fluid motion, his weapon already clearing the holster before his knee hit the ground. He was up and firing before I could draw a full breath—four shots, controlled, precise, the reports of his forty-caliber splitting the air with a sound I felt in my sternum. The SUV was already accelerating, tires howling against asphalt, and I heard two of his rounds connect with metal—flat, heavy impacts, and the sound of lead meeting steel at velocity.
Then the SUV was gone. Roaring through the intersection at the end of the block, running the stop sign, fishtailing hard around the corner with a shriek of rubber and disappearing from sight as if the morning had simply swallowed it whole.
The whole thing had taken maybe eight seconds. Eight seconds from the first shot to the last. That was all it took to turn a beautiful morning into something that would make the national news.
“Jaye.” Jack’s face was in front of mine, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes raking over me with a desperation that had nothing to do with the sheriff and everything to do with the man underneath. “Are you hit? Talk to me.”
A flash of terror consumed me. Not for me, but for the tiny, fragile life inside of me.
“I’m okay. I think.” My voice sounded strange to me—thin, distant, like I was hearing it played back on a recording. My palms were raw and bleeding where the brick had scraped the skin away, and something warm was running down my cheek from a cut the flying glass had opened. “I’m okay,” I repeated.
Jack’s breath left him in a ragged exhale, and his hands tightened on my shoulders hard enough that I could feel each individual finger. For one second—just one—his face was open and unguarded and terrified in a way I’d only seen a handful of times in all the years I’d known him. Then the shutters came down, and the sheriff was back.
“Cole,” I said.
Jack’s head snapped to the right.
Cole was on the ground.
He was on his back about six feet from where we’d been walking, his long frame sprawled across the sidewalk at an angle that told me he’d been spun by the impact, his boots pointing toward the street and his head toward the antique shop. His Stetson had landed brim-down a few yards away in a scatter of broken glass that glinted around it like a crown of broken diamonds. His right hand was pressed against his left shoulder, and bright red blood was seeping between his fingers—vivid, obscene, the wrong color against the sun-bleached brick and the morning light that was still pouring down on all of us as if nothing had changed.
His face was the color of old paper. His jaw was locked so tight I could see the muscles bunching beneath the skin, and his teeth were bared in a grimace that was equal parts pain and fury—the kind that came from being too tough to scream and too proud to admit that the world had just knocked them sideways.
Training took over—muscle memory from more ER traumas than I could count, the body moving before the mind had time to catch up. Fear was there, somewhere behind the glass wall I’d built a long time ago for exactly this purpose—the wall that went up every time I walked into the lab, every time I knelt beside a body, every time the work demanded that I be a doctor first and a human being second. My hands were steady. My hands were always steady.
“Let me see.” I dropped to my knees beside him and pulled his hand away from the wound. Blood welled up immediately—bright arterial red, pulsing with each heartbeat, hot against my fingers in a way that was sickeningly intimate. The bullet had hit him high on the left shoulder, just below the collarbone, and I could see the damage in the way the tissue had been disrupted, the skin torn in a neat entry wound that was already swelling at the margins. When I pressed my fingers gently against his back, feeling for what I hoped I wouldn’t find and what I knew I would, the exit wound was there—slightly larger, ragged, weeping blood onto the bricks.
Through and through. That was good—no bullet lodged inside, no fragments to chase. But the location was dangerous, and I felt the knowledge of it settle into my chest like a cold stone. The subclavian artery ran just beneath the collarbone, and if the bullet had nicked it—even grazed it—he could bleed out right here on the sidewalk while the mockingbird on the courthouse roof kept singing its stolen songs overhead.
I stripped off my blazer, folded it into a thick pad, and pressed it against the entry wound with both hands, leaning my weight into it. Cole grunted, his body arching off the ground, every muscle going rigid against the pain.
“Ouch—”
“I know it hurts. Stay with me.”
“Hurts like hell.” He blew a breath through clenched teeth, the tendons in his neck standing out like bridge cables, and I could see him fighting to stay present, to stay on this side of the gray line that was creeping in at the edges of his vision. “That’s actually a good sign, right? Means I’m alive?”
“It means you’re too stubborn to die. Keep talking to me.” I maintained pressure with my left hand—steady and firm. I knew it was painful, but it kept blood inside the body where it belonged. I reached around with my right to check the exit wound. The bleeding there was worse, as it always was. Exit wounds were messy, the tissue torn and ragged, the body’s way of protesting the violence of something leaving it at speed.
A woman was crouched behind a parked car a few feet away, her face white with shock, a cotton cardigan clutched against her chest like she was trying to hold herself together with it.
“Ma’am—your sweater. I need it. Now.”
She tossed it without hesitation, her hands shaking badly enough that the cardigan almost went wide. I caught it, wadded it into a compress, and maneuvered it beneath Cole’s back, then shifted his body so his own weight helped hold pressure on both wounds—gravity and fabric and my hands, the holy trinity of field medicine when you had nothing else to work with.
