The Losing Game

by Lane Swift

“Yes.”

  Dante knelt down in front of Lucas, pushed back his hair, and kissed his bashed forehead so gently that Lucas let out a sob.

  Dante soothed Lucas again, touched his face, then took out a tiny penlight from his pocket and shone it over Lucas’s upper body. Lucas winced, not from the light but at what he saw when he glanced down at his left shoulder. The warmth of his spilling blood was spreading, along with the pain. Tendrils of agony stretched to the back of Lucas’s head, to his arm, and his back. His body began to shake, completely beyond his control.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Dante hushed him. “I need to see where you’re hurt.” He spoke very gently. “Try not to move.”

  “Just my shoulder. Shaw shot me.”

  “Your face.” Dante shone the light into the space between their faces. The whites of his eyes, the way they seemed to pop out of his head, would have looked comical if Lucas wasn’t so scared.

  Dante unwrapped Lucas’s scarf from his neck, rolled it into a ball, and pressed it to Lucas’s shoulder. “Can you hold this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now I’m going to help you up, and you’re going to sit over there, so that you can lean against the fence.”

  Lucas didn’t question Dante. He felt Dante’s breath on his cheek as Dante slid his arm and shoulder under Lucas’s right armpit and helped him stand. Lucas had the stupid urge to kiss him. He wasn’t sure if that was shock or relief or something else. Something uncomfortable that he didn’t want to—couldn’t—think about at this particular moment.

  Dante lowered Lucas gently. “Sit very still. Try to stay calm. It’ll slow down the bleeding.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  Lucas had heard a car. He was sure of it.

  Dante didn’t answer the question. He said, “I need you to listen to me very carefully. Can you do that?”

  Lucas wanted to ask Dante so many questions. He knew he did, but the words wouldn’t form. All he could focus on was in, out, in, out—breathing carefully through the hammer and chisel, clawing and tearing at his shoulder muscle and collarbone.

  He shivered, and it hurt. The ground was freezing. His fingers and toes were numb. Dante pressed his hand over Lucas’s, over the bullet wound in his shoulder.

  “Lucas? Are you listening?”

  “I’m so cold.”

  Dante took off his jacket and draped it over the front of Lucas’s body and the tops of his thighs. He put his hand under Lucas’s jaw, the good side. “Please, Lucas. Please focus.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You’re doing well. But you need to listen to me. I have your handset. I’m going to call 9-9-9, and when they answer you’re going to speak. You’re going to tell the operator that you’re alone. Do you understand me?”

  Lucas tried and failed to move his left hand upward, as if he could somehow hold on to Dante. “Are you going to leave me?”

  “No. No. Not until the ambulance is here.”

  “But….”

  “No more questions. You have to trust me. No one can know that I was here.”

  Lucas blinked wearily. His eyelids were heavy, but he had to tell Dante. He didn’t know why, but on some level he understood that Dante had a plan. Because of this, he couldn’t help thinking it was important for Dante to know, “It was my gun. Not registered. Shaw took it from me…. I messed up.”

  “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”

  “It was my gun.”

  “There’s no proof of that. When the police ask you what happened, you say you were out for a night run. You accidentally crossed paths with a couple of men, you can’t describe them because it was too dark, and one of them shot you. That’s it. You keep it simple.”

  “What about Shaw?”

  Dante paused and pressed harder onto Lucas’s shoulder. Lucas hissed with the pain.

  “I’m sorry.” Dante paused again. “Don’t mention Shaw. Say as little as possible.”

  “Okay.” Lucas nodded and repeated, “Night running. Two men here on the lane. One of them shot me.”

  “Good. Now, to get you an ambulance.”

  Dante held Lucas’s handset where Lucas could see it and pressed the keypad. 9-9-9. He waited for the call to be picked up—Lucas heard the ringing, then the voice—and held the handset to Lucas’s ear.

  “Emergency. Which service do you require?”

  Lucas tried to speak clearly, but he stumbled over every word. “I’ve been shot. In my shoulder. I need an ambulance.”

  The operator asked Lucas a series of questions. When he replied his voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. He gave the operator his name and his handset code and repeated that he was alone. “I don’t know where I am exactly. In Milton. At the entrance to a private drive.”

  “Stay on the line. An ambulance is on its way.”

  “I’m very tired.”

  “I know, Lucas. But you need to try to stay awake.”

  Lucas lifted his eyes to Dante’s. Dante nodded, then pressed his lips to Lucas’s head.

  “I’ll see you soon?” Lucas asked, no louder than a whisper.

  Dante nodded again.

  The operator replied, “That’s right. They’ll be there soon. Don’t hang up, Lucas, and stay awake. Can you do that?”

  “I think so,” he said, leaning against Dante, crouched at his good side, cradling him against his chest.

  They didn’t speak. They couldn’t. In any case, as the minutes ebbed away, Lucas found he cared less to say anything. He turned his face into the steady warmth of Dante’s neck. Dante still smelled of the musky aftershave he’d worn earlier in the evening. It was a spicy, Christmassy smell that made Lucas think of mulled wine and mince pies.

  He tilted up his face, close to Dante’s ear, and whispered, “I wish I’d asked you to come in tonight.”

  Dante lowered the handset to the ground, cupped the back of Lucas’s head in his hand, and whispered back, “So do I.”

  Somewhere, at the edge of Lucas’s mind, he had a terrible premonition. His hand could barely hold the handset, let alone control it, but with every ounce of his focus, he swiped his thumb over the End Call button.

  “Dante,” he croaked. “Don’t go after Shaw. If you kill him, I’ll never forgive you. Do you understand?”

  “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Promise me.”

  There were no sirens, but they both seemed to see it at the same time—the flash of blue lights arcing into the sky in the distance.

  “I promise,” Dante said. “I have to go.”

  When he took away his hand, his jacket, and his embrace, the loss was unbearable. Lucas tried to hold in the urge to cry. He curled up his knees and pressed his hand against his shoulder harder, as hot tears ran down his cheeks.

  Chapter 21

  WITH MONUMENTAL effort, Lucas lifted his eyes. Fluorescent jackets moved toward him. The voices of the paramedics sliced through the mental fog. It took every ounce of his concentration and energy to answer their questions.

  A police car swerved around the ambulance. Lying on the stretcher, Lucas heard their voices as if he was submerged, under water, and they were above, far away. From the snatches of conversation, he could pick out enough words to understand. This was a crime scene. The victim would need to be asked questions. Could one of the officers ride in the ambulance and speak to him? Was the wound a through-and-through? Should they be looking for the bullet on the ground?

  Lucas knew, on some level, that in his current state he wouldn’t do a good job of lying. He wasn’t a good liar at the best of times, though lately he’d made remarkable improvements. Thus, he decided, as he was jabbed and jolted and moved, that it was best he say nothing. A decision that was made easier by the addition of an oxygen mask.

  He needn’t have worried about the police. The paramedic crew wouldn’t let anyone else in the ambulance. Though at that point, the police were the least of his worries.

&n
bsp; The ambulance bumped and swerved. A clear plastic bag swung overhead. And suddenly the pain in Lucas’s shoulder exploded. He grappled with the mask, only to have the paramedic sitting next to him ease it back over his face.

  “It hurts. Fuck. It hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re trying to replace some of your fluids, but the downside is that as your blood pressure goes up, so does the pressure in your wound.”

  “God, I feel like shit. Can’t you put something extra in the gas?” Lucas could feel the slur in his voice. His lips and tongue didn’t seem to want to move. He doubted the paramedic could understand him through the mask, and even if she did, he didn’t care. It was on his mind, and he had an ominous sense of urgency that probably had something to do with the fact that he might be bleeding to death. “I really like Dante.”

  She must have had a sixth sense. Or maybe Lucas’s expression alerted her that he was saying something important. She lifted the top edge of the mask and bent down closer. “What was that?”

  “I really like Dante. I wish he was here.”

  “Who’s he? Your boyfriend?”

  “I think so.”

  Lucas noticed the lights in the top of the ambulance had little rainbows shooting out of them. He chased one with his forefinger. Until the paramedic lowered it and said, “Only think so? You’re not sure.”

  Lucas struggled to think of how to word what he wanted to say. He ought to have said nothing, but it helped to keep his mind off his shoulder and his jaw. “I wish I could speak to him.”

  The paramedic had red hair. And freckles. And a dimple on her chin. She’d told Lucas her name, when she was helping to lift him onto the stretcher, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

  She spoke to the driver for a few seconds, then returned her attention to Lucas. “I have your handset. Is there anyone else we should call? Mum? Dad?”

  “Dead. And my sister. And Avery.” Lucas felt his throat closing, and his eyes prickled. Not now. Don’t get upset about that now. He summoned up the strength to draw in a big breath, but it hardly seemed to fill his lungs. “Not Lily. She’s in a wheelchair. Dante. He knows what to do.”

  The paramedic put her hand—it was so warm—on his face, just as Dante had. His eyes filled with tears he couldn’t stop.

  “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Is his number on here, sweetheart?” She lifted his handset into his line of sight.

  “Yes.”

  The paramedic held the handset in front of Lucas. “Is the screen locked?”

  “No.”

  She swiped her thumb over the window.

  “I see him.” She checked over Lucas’s shoulder and said, “That’s it. Here we are. I’ll make sure one of the A and E nurses calls your friend.”

  A crowd of faces haloed Lucas’s vision. Still, the lights inside the hospital were blinding. He squinted. A wave of nausea roiled through his gut. He tasted the cheese from earlier. Only now it was acidic and pungent, and there was nothing nice and nothing romantic about it.

  He tried to concentrate and listen. He lay there like he was at the center of a tornado, still and unruffled, while all around him everything and everyone rushed by. He had to sign a consent form. He was in so much pain that he’d have given away the rights to his testicles—anything to make it stop.

  Very soon he would be going down to surgery. They’d paged the surgeon. The bullet had hit and shattered Lucas’s collarbone. They had the bleeding under control, but they were worried about the state of his (brachial? Was that what they’d said?) blood vessels. They weren’t sure yet about nerve damage. They needed to investigate.

  He was going to go to sleep now.

  “Count back from one hundred, Mr. Green.”

  “’S Lucas.” He tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”

  Lucas realized he hadn’t actually said the one hundred part. He wondered if it mattered. He said, “Ninety-seven. Nine….”

  No going back now.

  Lucas entered the dark. Moments later he awoke. His eyelids were jammed closed, despite his best efforts to open them. The thin skin of his eyelids looked red and swimmy. Through them, he could see it was light, outside, out there in the land of the living.

  Lucas mumbled, “I need to call Dante.”

  Away, he heard a woman’s voice say, “He’s on his way back.”

  Lucas wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or about him, or whether it was absolutely nothing to do with Lucas at all. He still couldn’t open his eyes.

  He wasn’t sure if the next time that he came around was seconds, minutes, or hours after the last he’d surfaced. His tongue scraped the top of his mouth. He cracked open his eyes and noted that, bizarrely, the ceiling was moving from side to side. A nurse in a dark blue top and trousers walked across Lucas’s line of vision, apparently unfazed by the current break in the laws of physics. He loomed over Lucas with a bearded smile.

  “I expect you’re thirsty,” he said cheerfully. He brought a straw standing in a plastic cup to Lucas’s lips. “Sip it. Don’t gulp. You don’t want to throw it straight back up again.”

  As the water slid like silk over Lucas’s lips and tongue and glided down his throat, he felt little by little that he could breathe again. Though the right side of his face was stiff.

  His increasing consciousness allowed him to further assess his situation, as he waited for the surgeon? Doctor? (It had been hard to pay attention.) Not that he needed a doctor to tell him something wasn’t right with his left arm. He couldn’t move it at all, not even his fingers. It lay limply across his chest, inside a sling. If he hadn’t recognized his fingertips and square fingernails poking out of the edge of the cotton fabric, he could quite easily have believed it belonged to someone else.

  His shoulder was another matter. That throbbed like a motherfucking motherfucker. The painkillers the bearded nurse had injected into the tube going into his right hand were beginning to ease the pain. But still. All was misery.

  Lucas’s memory of last night (he assumed the shit had hit the fan last night) returned. It hadn’t, in truth, gone anywhere.

  The nausea the nurse had warned Lucas about reared its ugly head. It looked awfully like Richard Shaw, an illegal firearm, and a man who’d taken Lucas on a date. Then—and this was the part that had Lucas feeling really sick—Dante had found Lucas’s handset, and then he had found him. How the fuck had he done that? And why?

  And what the hell was Lucas going to say about everything when the police came to see him? Because there was no doubt in his mind that they would.

  Lucas started shaking. It started in his right hand and his knees. The tremor traveled violently inward and upward, with the fervor of some holy roller, to his stomach and his throat. He didn’t have time to call for help. With one gravity-defying retch—fresh pain ripping through his jaw and shoulder—he threw up a bitter gutful of pungent yellow bile and water.

  Over his clean sling and his dead hand.

  Chapter 22

  A NURSE in blue scrubs wearing Christmas tree earrings directed Dante to Lucas’s ward. “He’ll probably sleep most of your visit,” he said.

  Dante didn’t catch the rest. He’d barely slept two hours of last night and the stench of overcooked vegetables and lemon-fresh disinfectant was playing havoc with his gut.

  In the ward, six bodies in various states of repose occupied the six beds. On Dante’s near right, propped on pillows, Lucas lay with his head resting to one side. As the nurse had cautioned, he was asleep.

  Dante put the paper bag, containing a kilo bunch of plump black grapes, on the bedside cabinet next to a plastic jug filled with water. Lucas didn’t stir. Dante stood at the head of the bed, watching over him.

  The right side of Lucas’s face was swollen and mottled with an archipelago of purple bruising. His forehead sported an oval swelling that looked like half a crimson egg lying beneath his skin. His left a
rm lay across his chest in a sling, his hand pointing toward his right shoulder. Heavy padded bandaging covered his left collarbone and shoulder where he’d been shot.

  Dante spent twenty minutes watching Lucas sleep before he sat and ate a few grapes. Another half an hour passed, and Lucas slept on. Occasionally he’d snuffle and look as if he was about to open his eyes. He’d frown and shift his hips or legs, only to settle back into his slumber. Only an hour of evening visiting time remained. Dante was tempted to wake him, but perhaps it was for the best he remained asleep.

  Again and again, Dante had reexamined how he could have done things differently. If not before he’d kissed Lucas good night, then afterward. He shouldn’t have parked his car so far away from the Blue Bell. Hidden in the shadows, he shouldn’t have laughed, like a smug fool, when Lucas had lifted his handset to Shaw. He only wants to film him! To catch him drink-driving. He was never going to kill him. I was wrong!

  Yes, Dante had been wrong. Over and over. Every poor decision had layered itself like cancer upon the previous poor decision, and the final result was this—Lucas lying in a hospital bed, broken to pieces.

  Lucas cracked open one eye and reached out with his right hand. “It’s you.” His voice was scratchy and rough.

  “Lucas.” Dante dragged his chair forward and sat as close to Lucas as he could. He took Dante’s right hand and pressed the fingertips to his lips. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Yes. Water’s up there.”

  Stood next to the bag of grapes and jug of water, was a plastic beaker with a straw in it. Dante half-filled the beaker and directed the straw to Lucas’s dry lips. He made a mental note that tomorrow he would bring him some balm.

  “I got shot.”

  “I know.” Dante closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself. “It looks bad. Worse than I thought. The nurses and doctors wouldn’t give me any details.”

  Lucas cleared his throat and smacked his chapped lips together. Blinking seemed to require a gargantuan effort. “The bullet hit my collarbone and splintered it. The shock waves fractured the whole length. Also, grazed my big….” He squinted at the ceiling while he struggled. “Mmm. Brachial artery. And the nerves.”