A hand on my shoulder pulls me off the asphalt. “Sir, can you stand? Can you look at me?”
I look up at another cop. A younger one, early twenties, with a face that hasn’t learned how to hide what it’s feeling yet. His eyes move from my face to my jeans to my hands. I watch him take in all the blood, wondering how much of it is mine and how much isn’t.
“Most of the blood is his,” I say. “The officer who was shot. I’m not hurt.”
That’s a damn lie.
My ribs are on fire. My lip is still bleeding and my cheekbone feels like it’s swelling by the second. But I’m standing upright now. The man they put into that ambulance is not.
The parking lot is full of strobing red and blue lights. There are four cruisers here now, maybe five, their light bars spinning. Radios crackle from every direction. Everyone is responding to an officer-down call.
“Were you involved in the incident inside?” the young cop asks. He’s got a notepad out but his hand is shaking. He’s rattled. They all are. One of their own just got loaded into an ambulance with a gunshot wound.
“Yes, I was in the hallway,” I tell him. “The four guys. They followed me. The officer, he came in and... he was handling it and then one of them had a gun and...”
“Okay, we’re going to need a full statement but not right now. Right now, I need to get you to the hospital. You’re injured.”
“No, I don’t need...”
“Sir,” he says, firmer now. His professional voice winning out over the rattled one. “You’re still bleeding. You need to be seen. I’m going to drive you to the hospital. The same hospital they took Officer Weaver to. We can get your statement tomorrow.”
Officer Mickey Weaver.
The cop walks me to his cruiser and opens the back door. I’ve never been in the back of a police car. The seat is hard plastic. It smells like disinfectant and sweat. There’s a cage between me and the front seat. The radio mounted on the dash won’t stop talking, the voices overlapping, the whole system buzzing with the news of what happened.
He pulls out of the lot. The Roadhouse slides past my window with its big neon sign and the lot still full of muscle cars surrounded by police cars. It looks like a crime scene now. It is and I’m the reason why.
The cop doesn’t talk on the drive to the hospital. Neither do I. I sit in the hard plastic seat and hold my ribs. Then I glance down at my hands. The cop’s blood is going brown in the creases of my knuckles and under my nails.
The six-minute ride is long enough to replay everything that happened over and over. The cruiser pulls up to the Emergency Room entrance and stops. The cop comes around and opens my door.
“Go to the front desk,” he says. “Tell them you were involved in the incident at Big Tex’s. They’ll triage you. A detective will be by for your statement.”
“Okay,” I say.
“We’re all pulling for him,” he says. Then he gets back in the cruiser and pulls away, leaving me standing at the ER entrance.
I step inside and the triage nurse at the front desk takes one look at me and pulls me behind a curtain before I can say a word. She’s not interested in my story. She checks my vitals, presses along my ribs while I hiss through my teeth, cleans my lip and puts three small butterfly strips on it, shines a light in my eyes and asks me to follow her finger.
“Two bruised ribs, maybe a hairline fracture,” she says. “We need to get you to X-ray.”
“I’m fine. I’m not going to X-ray. My insurance is crap. Can you tell me about the cop that was brought in?”
“Sorry, I’m not allowed to disclose patient information. You’re not fine, but I can see from your face you’re not going to let me do the X-ray right now.” She opens a cabinet and pulls out a folded set of scrubs, pale blue, the kind that come in plastic bags. “You need to change out of those clothes. The blood is a biohazard. I’ll bag everything for you. Put these on.”
She holds out the scrubs and I take them. As soon as she pulls the curtain closed, I start changing out of my clothes.
The white jeans are destroyed. The blood has soaked through from the waist down, dark and stiff where it’s dried, still wet in the creases where the denim folds. My beautifulshirt, what’s left of it, is torn down the back and plastered to my skin with sweat and blood. The chain is still on my neck, crusted with dried blood. I’m sure my eyeliner is gone, cried off somewhere between the bar and the parking lot. My hair is dark with sweat.
I peel it all off behind the curtain and drop it into a red biohazard bag. The jeans. The ruined shirt. The bloodstained rings. I keep the chain out. I put it back on over the scrubs because it’s the only piece of me left.
The scrubs are too big. They hang off my shoulders and pool at my ankles. I look at myself in the stainless-steel paper towel dispenser and the face looking back is someone I barely recognize.
I walk out and the nurse hands me an ice pack for my face. “Where can I wait for word on the cop they brought in?” I ask her. “I was involved.”
She points me toward the waiting room and I limp that way. The waiting room is depressing and I take a seat in the far corner.
Why am I here? I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is that I have to be here.
