Behind me, Jack was already on his phone, his voice carrying across the square with the clipped authority of a man who’d spent years giving orders in situations where hesitation cost lives. “Shots fired, Main Street at the Towne Square. Officer down. All units. Black SUV, tinted windows, heading east on Elm, running the stop. Shooter is armed with an automatic weapon.”
“How bad?” Cole asked, and I looked down to find those pale blue eyes locked on mine. They were cloudy with pain but clear with intention—he wanted the truth, not comfort. He’d always been that way. Cole didn’t believe in sugarcoating. He believed in information and what you did with it.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said.
“That’s what doctors say right before you’re not fine.”
“That’s what doctors say when their patient needs to shut up and let them work.” I checked his pulse, pressing two fingers against his wrist—rapid and thready, a bird’s heartbeat trapped beneath skin that was going cool and clammy despite the morning heat that was radiating off the sidewalk around us. His breathing had turned fast and shallow, his body’s panic response kicking in even as his mind tried to stay calm. He was shocky. Expected, with this much blood loss. But expected and acceptable were two very different things.
“Tell me what you’re going to do when you get out of the hospital,” I said, keeping my voice conversational, easy, the voice I used when I needed a patient to stay with me and the darkness was trying to pull them somewhere I couldn’t follow.
“What?”
“Stavros. The case. What are you going to do when you’re back on your feet?”
“I’m going to find every rat in this county who’s on that man’s payroll. And then I’m going to enjoy taking them apart.”
“Good. Hold on to that anger.” The blazer under my hands was soaked through now, warm and heavy, and I adjusted my grip, finding the places where pressure mattered most and bearing down. “What else?”
His accent was thicker now, the polished edges of his speech softening like they did when he let his guard down—the vowels stretching out, the consonants going lazy, all of it drifting back toward wherever in Texas he’d learned to talk like that. “Hey, Jaye?”
“Yeah?”
“You think…” He swallowed, and I watched his Adam’s apple move in his throat, slow and effortful. “You think Lily would say yes if I asked her to marry me again?”
Something tightened behind my ribs. “I think you’d be an idiot not to ask.”
“She said no last time.” His voice was getting softer, drifting, and I could see the gray creeping around his mouth—the pallor that meant his blood pressure was dropping and his body was starting to prioritize the organs that mattered over the ones that merely wanted things like consciousness and conversation. “What if she says no again?”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she loves you. When you get out of surgery, you’re going to ask her yourself. And she’s going to say yes.”
“I hope so.” Barely a whisper now. His eyes were drifting, the blue going hazy, unfocused, like he was looking at something behind me that I couldn’t see. “Will you ask her for me? If I can’t?”
“You can. And you will. Eyes on me, Cole.”
His lids were heavy. I pressed harder on the wound and his body jerked, a sharp hiss cutting through his teeth, and his eyes snapped back into focus—angry and alive and blue as a gas flame.
“There you are,” I said. “Stay right there.”
“Yes ma’am,” he managed, and his cocky grin came back, strained and stubborn and so completely Cole that I had to lock my jaw to keep something embarrassing from happening to my face.
Around us, the Towne Square had transformed. What remained was the chaos that followed violence in places where violence wasn’t expected—worse, somehow, than chaos in places where it was, because the contrast made everything sharper, louder, more wrong. People who’d been walking and shopping and pushing strollers had scattered into doorways and behind parked cars. A woman was crouched behind the memorial bench on the corner, her body curved around a little boy whose face was buried in her neck, her hand covering the back of his head as if her palm could stop a bullet.
Patrol cars were arriving now, sirens splitting the morning into before and after, officers spilling out with weapons drawn and faces tight with the specific tension that came from responding to a call that included the words officer down. Jack had taken command without missing a beat—directing officers to establish a perimeter, coordinating the vehicle pursuit through dispatch, barking orders with quiet ferocity. All of it while staying close enough to touch, close enough that his shadow fell across Cole and me like something he could wrap around us if he tried hard enough.
“I can see the ambulance,” he said, crouching beside us, his phone still pressed to his ear. His free hand found Cole’s boot and gripped it hard. “They’re right across the square.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cole said, but his voice was thin and reedy, and the color had drained from his face until his lips looked almost blue. His hand on the wound pad had gone slack, and the tremors in his fingers were visible even in the bright sunlight.
“I’ve got it,” I said, replacing his hand with mine and pressing down with both palms. The blood was still coming—slower now, which could mean the pressure was working or could mean his blood pressure was dropping to a place where there wasn’t enough left to push through the damaged vessel. Neither option came with comfort.
It couldn’t have been more than ninety seconds, but it passed the way time passes when someone you love is bleeding out under your hands—slowly, cruelly, each heartbeat a negotiation between hope and dread. I knelt there on the hot brick with Cole’s blood soaking through the knees of my jeans, the sun beating down on the back of my neck, glass glittering on the sidewalk around us like something a child had scattered for the fun of it. I kept pressure on the wound and talked to him about cases and proposals and all the things he was going to do when he got out of here, while some quieter part of me counted his respirations and monitored the pulse fluttering under my fingertips and carried on a silent, desperate conversation with his subclavian artery that consisted mostly of the word please.
Somewhere above us, the mockingbird was still singing.
