by Zahra Girard
She opens two heavy-lidded eyes and smiles at me.
“We didn’t die.”
“Not yet. And not any time soon, either. I’m going to take care of you, Tiffany.”
“Just call the ambulance and go. I’ll be fine,” she says. Then Tiffany slumps, going limp for a second before regaining her consciousness and sitting back up straight. Gritting my teeth, I take another look at her foot.
It’s bad. And getting worse by the minute.
“This might be the first time in your life that you’ve heard this, but you look like shit.”
The sliding doors open and a guy in a Gas & Gulp shirt steps outside. He’s in his late thirties, with a patchy, red-fringed spot of baldness atop his head, a goatee that looks like it was taken from a shower drain, and an unjustifiably smarmy look on his face.
“You can’t go overdosing or whatever the hell you’re doing in my parking lot. So, buddy, you and your druggie whore need to get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”
I stand. Two steps gets me face to face with him. I look down into his beady brown eyes.
“Call her a whore again and I’ll rip your throat out,” I say. “She’s hurt. I need to use your phone.”
The man flinches and takes three steps back.
“I’m sorry, man. Phone’s behind the counter. Help yourself. Just please don’t hurt me.”
“Then keep your fucking mouth shut and go get her some water. Now.”
There’s a television mounted on the wall behind the register and it chatters at me as I pick up the phone and dial 9-1-1. I have a curt conversation with the operator; Gas & Gulp, injured woman, infected wound, hurry the fuck up, please and thank you.
I slam the phone down before she can tell me in her too-calm voice that I should stay on the line while she talks me through the kind of incompetent first aid that would have an elementary school nurse rolling her eyes.
“Give me that and stay out of our way,” I say, snatching the water bottle out of the gas attendant’s hands and then kneeling down at Tiffany’s side. Gently, I lift her chin up and she opens her captivating brown eyes. They take a second to find their focus, and then she smiles. “The medics are on their way. I’m going to give you some water. Open up and drink.”
She does as I ask without any kind of smartass retort.
That’s got me worried.
My heart’s rolling thunder in my chest while she sucks a few meager drops from the bottle before collapsing back against the wall of the gas station.
“I don’t feel so good,” she murmurs.
“I know. But we’ll have you fixed up in no time. Just hold on for me, OK?”
The corners of her lips twist upward a bit. “I’ll try.”
The sound of a siren rises in the distance. An urgent call that both puts me on edge and raises hope in my chest; anything to do with the law gets my back up, but Tiffany desperately needs medical attention.
“You hear that? The ambulance is almost here.”
She nods. “You owe me. Anna’s probably already filed the paperwork to get me fired. Which means my insurance is canceled. This ambulance ride will cost me a ton.”
“We’ll figure something out.”
“Says the man with a negative credit score.”
The ambulance screams to a stop in the parking lot of the gas station and two paramedics — both men in their late twenties, young, but with the same steady look of veterans — hop out and hurry to our side.
“Tell me what happened,” one of them says while the other one kneels down next to Tiffany and begins examining her wound.
I shrug, clear my throat and do my best to sound like some clueless civilian. “We were out hiking in the desert. She stepped on a rock, and it got deep in her foot. I got it out, but her wound got infected. So I brought her here because I didn’t have cell service and couldn’t call you guys from the middle of nowhere.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tiffany give me a confused look over the dumb yokel tone I put in my voice.
The paramedic nods. “Does she have any allergies? Any medications we can't use? Any medical conditions that we should be aware of?”
Tiffany pipes up. “No. Just get me to the hospital.”
“Let’s get her up and moving. We don’t have much time,” the kneeling paramedic says to his partner. “We need to get this wound flushed ASAP and we have to get her on some serious meds.”
“Give us a hand, sir? Can you help carry her while I fetch some gear from the ambulance?” he says to me.
I nod and one paramedic and I lift Tiffany in a two-person arm carry, while the other races ahead to grab some equipment. Just as we’re setting Tiffany onto the gurney in the back of the ambulance, the front door to the gas station opens and the station attendant comes charging out.
“Stop,” he shouts. “You need to stop!”
Both paramedics turn toward the man. Reflexively, the muscles in my shoulders tighten and my fists clench; there’s a look on the station attendant’s face that I do not like.
Then I see the cause for his shouting. My face. Visible right on the TV mounted behind the register counter. With the word ‘Wanted’ in red letters right below it.
“Son of a bitch.”
I draw my gun.
Chapter Five
Tiffany
Men.
Even when there’s a way to solve a problem with a simple conversation or some basic thinking, they’re so quick to resort to their fists. Or guns.
And, even though they seem experienced and dedicated to saving lives, the two paramedics tending to me are suddenly quick to remind me that, just like other men, they can be incredibly stupid — they try to fight Blaze.
The first one drops his medic kit — it hits the floor of the ambulance with a metallic crash — and throws a punch at Blaze that the big man easily ducks. The air whistles with his errant punch and Blaze retorts by seizing the man around the throat and ramming him backward into the sheeted steel wall of the ambulance. There’s a heavy thud as his head cracks into steel. Blaze lets go with one hand — still holding him by the throat with the other — and he rams his heavy fist hard into the man’s face. That fist is followed by another. And another. And then an elbow and a knee that impacts with such concussive force that the other man gasps in pain.
Bone cracks, metal dents, and blood flies in thick droplets, coating the inside of the ambulance.
I’d scream if I weren’t half unconscious.
The other paramedic leaves my side, rising to his feet and lunging at Blaze, grabbing him around the waist and pulling him backward and off his bloodied partner.
The two of them spin and roll, crashing into the opposite wall of the ambulance and landing with two heavy thuds on the floor.
A brutal fight for top position breaks out; the paramedic throws an elbow that sends Blaze’s head snapping backward, spit flying and wetting my forehead. Blaze is dazed for only a second before he roars and fires back, dismantling the other man like a brutal, bloodthirsty surgeon.
In seconds, he’s dumping both their unconscious bodies out of the back of the ambulance. Then, quick as lightning, he hops out right behind them and charges into the gas station. He emerges a moment later, blood on his knuckles.
I stare, horrified, the entire time.
He gives me a cockeyed grin. “Relax. I left them alive. They’ll wake up with headaches, some bruises, and a story to tell the next chick they want to pick up. But I couldn’t let them call the cops on us. I’ve got my mom’s business to take care of.”
“Let’s just get to the hospital.”
He nods and settles in to the driver's seat and starts the vehicle. “We should talk about what comes next. After the hospital, that is.”
“What do you mean? I’m still going to help you. It’s the right thing to do. I think. Even if you did nearly kill those guys.”
“When you’re out, call me,” he says, then he says aloud his number. Twice. And has m
e repeat it to him.
Through the narrow windows set into the ambulance doors, I watch the gas station fade into the distance. The bodies of the two paramedics — little blue dots prone on the pavement — quickly disappear.
I want to answer. Want to give him some smart retort that’ll have him expressing at least some regret for massacring two EMTS and a hapless gas station attendant, but there’s a tremor working its way up my leg and, before I can open my mouth, my whole body shakes with frightening ferocity.
The last words I hear before I black out are: “Shit.”
* * * * *
“You’re lucky.”
My eyelids open reluctantly. My entire body hurts. My foot feels like it was dipped in hot lead. I’m a wreck.
“I don’t feel lucky,” I croak.
I’m in a hospital bed, swaddled in scratchy sheets and shivering because the air-conditioning vent is blowing right on me. There’s a doctor looming over my bed. He looks like he’s in his sixties, with an all-white beard, an all-bald head, spectacles, twinkling blue eyes that shine prismatically through his thick glasses, and a friendly smile.
“If that Good Samaritan hadn’t left you on our doorstep when they did, you would’ve been a goner. So, yeah, I’d say you got lucky.”
As I shake off the shackles of sleep, I start to feel stronger and sit up in bed. My foot still hurts, but the pain no longer throbs up my entire leg. Reluctantly — as if revealing it will suddenly cause my foot to change back to the infected, monstrously painful appendage it was — I pull the blanket back and look down at my foot. It’s wrapped in bandages, but the black lines no longer color my veins, and there’s no redness at all visible anywhere on my leg.
“What happened?”
“Your wound was infected. We gave you a high dose of some very strong antibiotics. Several doses. Enough to break the infection and we gave you some other medicines to get your other symptoms under control. You’ve been out for a long time, but you’re now well out of the woods. So, like I said: lucky.”
Even as I listen, I start to feel better. The pain fades, the chills stop, I feel stronger. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, maybe it’s the doctor’s cheerful bedside manner.
“When can I leave?” I say. Even my voice sounds stronger.
“In a few hours.”
“Are you serious?”
He doesn’t even check the clipboard in his hands. “I am. Your fever’s broke, the infection is gone. The nurse will give you a final evaluation before you leave, and we’ll send some antibiotics home with you — and you are to finish every single one of them. As long as you take it easy for the next few days, monitor your temperature, and stay off your foot, you should be back to normal soon enough.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“Just doing my job, Miss…” He stops, looks at his clipboard, then looks at it again. “Hmm. It seems there’s one more thing for you to do: complete your paperwork. Whoever brought you here left you with no identification of any sort, so please see one of the registrars on the way out and make sure all your information is in order.”
With that, he takes one last look at my chart and then leaves. I let out a relieved sigh and sink back into my scratchy-sheeted bed.
Anonymous. Party to a whole litany of crimes. I’ve crossed all kinds of personal red lines, all in a couple days. And yet, laying here alone, the first thing I think about is getting back to Blaze.
I tell myself it’s for the purpose of solving his mother’s problem. Whoever she is, she’s surely — I hope — more innocent than her son and, judging by Blaze’s reaction and his desperation, she’s likely the victim of some kind of crime. Nobody deserves to suffer like that. Besides, getting back to Blaze is the surest way to stop him from committing more crimes. That’s it. That’s my only motivation for thinking about him. It’s not because he emanates a violently feral sexuality and the kind of impossible cockiness that would make me mad enough to rip my hair out just listening to him, if not for the fact that he’s so strong and so willing to risk his own life that I believe there’s not much he can’t do.
Except maintain a good credit score, that is.
I fall asleep thinking about him. And his problems. Though mostly him.
When I wake up a few hours later, there’s a set of crutches by my bed, the clothes I came in with are sitting on a chair — cleaned and neatly folded — and there’s a note reminding me to see Ms. Carlotta in the registry office before I leave.
I get dressed while hopping on one foot, then prop the crutches under my armpits and hobble to the hospital billing department to find Ms. Carlotta.
It doesn’t take me long to find a frumpy, bespectacled woman in her fifties and the nameplate on her desk that gives her away as the arbiter of my financial future.
“Uh, hello Ms. Carlotta. The doctor said I should see you on the way out. I’m the one who was dumped by the front door. The one with the foot wound and no ID.”
She looks up from the paperwork in front of her, wrinkles her forehead and nose at me, and then pulls a clipboard and a thick stack of papers from a file folder on her desk and hands them over to me along with a pen that’s seen better days.
“Fill those out. Bring them back to me when you’re done.”
Nodding, I flip through the stack of forms. Most of it is basic demographic and registration information — my address, my name, contact information, allergies, current medications, etc. — but then there’s a section for my insurance information. And seeing that brings me back to the reality that I’m no longer a loan specialist for a crappy, no-name regional bank; I’m an unemployed loan specialist who used to work at a crappy, no-name regional bank. And I don’t have insurance.
There’s no way I can afford this. And I haven’t even seen the bill. I haven’t worked at Southwest Regional Bank very long, my numbers were terrible because I actually gave a damn about doing what was in my client’s best interest instead of pushing unnecessary loans on them, and I don’t have any insurance.
I swallow, lean a little harder on my crutches to steady myself, and then say, “Ms. Carlotta, do you know how much all this will cost?”
“One moment.”
My heart waits in my throat while her fingers fly across the keyboard. She spends way too much time with her eyes darting across the screen while the keys clack and rack up an insurmountable total. The debt accumulation ends with the wailing cry of a dot matrix printer coming to life. After a minute, she rips the sheet of paper from the printer and hands it to me.
“Here.”
My eyes scan down the page; my mouth drops in surprise; my fingers lose their grip and the paper flutters aimlessly down to the floor.
“This much?” I say.
On this paper is the death knell to my financial future — the Sisyphean medical debt that I’ll be dealing with for the rest of eternity.
“Don’t worry, that’s only what we will send to your insurance. I’m sure your portion will be much less. Just fill it all out and, if you need to complete anything later, that’s fine — just make sure you get that information to me by tomorrow so I can process everything properly. I understand that you were left here without your purse or any ID cards, so it is OK if you need a little more time.”
Somehow, I keep a straight face.
There’s an enormous part of me that wants to fill this form out in full; it’ll be so easy to put down my name, contact info, and even my insurance info — because it sure is easy to write ‘No insurance’ — and then make sure every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted. It would be the right thing to do. But, if I do it, I’m dooming myself to a lifetime of debt and financial ruin.
Ms. Carlotta clears her throat. “If you’re having trouble with some of it, I understand. You were in bad shape when they brought you in and I imagine you are still feeling pretty out of it. But, if you could at least put in your contact information, Ms…?”
I hesitate. My name sitting right on the tip of my tongue. Jus
t two little words — Tiffany Santos — and a few scratches of my pen on this paper and it’ll all be over. I’ll be over, too. Unless I want to declare the ultimate financial failure of bankruptcy and give myself the kind of credit score that even Blaze would scoff at.
“Your name?” Ms. Carlotta repeats.
My pen halts on the page, the only evidence of its presence a single blue dot. Signing my name, accepting responsibility, is the thing I should do. But it will break me. And I can’t help Blaze and his mom with their problems if I’m struggling under the burden of my own crippling debt.
“Do you have a phone here that I could use? I need to call a friend to come pick me up.”
“You can use the phone once you fill out the forms, Ms…?”
I smile. My pen starts moving.
“It’s Anna. Anna Ebri.”
Chapter Six
Blaze
My telephone opens my whiskey-heavy eyes. Groaning, I sit up on the couch and snatch my buzzing phone off the coffee table.
“Hello?”
“Blaze, it’s me. Tiffany Santos. I need you to come pick me up at Alameda General Hospital. And if you could be prompt about it, I would really appreciate it.”
Likely sedated, doped up, and dazed, and she still sounds like she’s got a stick up her butt.
“Why the hurry?” I say.
“I just have a pressing need to get out of here as soon as possible. So hurry, please.”
Who is she to order me around?
“And I have a pressing need to finish my whiskey. Open up, Saint Tiffany; tell me what’s got your panties in a knot or else you’ll be waiting a long time for your ride.”
She huffs. I can picture her screwing her face up in distaste. The way her plump lips curl in disgust and how cute her nose looks as she crinkles it, it’s enough to make me smile.