But of course, she didn’t. My throat tightened as every possibility under the sun ran through my mind.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, my voice as rough as sandpaper.
“Jeff called me. I barely understood a word he said,” he bit out.
“Okay, what did you understand?”
I knew it was bad. Nausea swirled in my gut as Michael slowly turned and looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and anger.
The bottom dropped out. He didn’t need to say a word. I already knew it was fucking bad.
“He said he was shot.”
“Shot?”
“I’m sorry, man,” he sighed, rubbing a hand across his jaw. “He saidhe got Ellie.”
“He got Ellie? What the fuck does that mean?” I panicked. “Who got Ellie? What else did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything! He fucking passed out. I stayed on the line until it died.”
“That’s not fucking good enough, Mike! Where the hell is Ellie?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted, spittle flying from his mouth with every word that left his lips. “Don’t you think I would fucking tell you if I knew? My brother was fucking shot, and for all I know, he’s already fucking dead!”
He drew a deep breath before continuing. “Look, that’s literally all he said. I don’t know anything more. The closest town is Seeley Lake. Mav already called them and requested an ambulance. With any luck, they’ll get to him in time, and then we can get some fucking answers.”
“What about the crime scene? Who’s handling that?”
“Seeley Lake.”
“They’ve got like four hundred people in that town. There’s no fucking way they can handle something like this.”
“And they’ll call in backup. Mav is handling it, okay? Right now, we need to get to Jeff.”
“No, we need to get to the crime scene,” I argued.
“It’s out in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a damn thing the crime scene can tell us right now.”
“There could be clues?—”
“And no one is around for miles,” he snapped. “There’s no footage. We don’t know what kind of vehicle approached them.We don’t know how many there were. What we need is to talk to Jeff.”
I hated everything he was saying, even though I knew he was right. But if Jeff was shot, he could be in surgery for hours before we talked to him. And what if he couldn’t tell us anything useful? There had to be something I could do other than sit around on my hands and wait for answers.
“I know this is hard,” he sighed. “It is for me, too. I already asked Wayne to start checking out footage in either direction on that road, but it’s a long shot. There are so many side roads…this guy could have come from anywhere.”
“It’s a start,” I muttered, staring out the window at the passing landscape.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I did something I hadn’t done since I was a kid.
I prayed.
I prayed fucking hard.
And with every word I spoke to God, my chest hurt a little more, the pain inside me grew to something overwhelming that I couldn’t swallow down. I could lose the woman I loved.
But there was something that threatened to tear me apart inside, and it had nothing to do with me.
