by Alana Davis
“No,” I said. “I never thought he had feelings for me. How could he have?” I said, pandering to her. I needed her to believe that I agreed with her, pride be damned. Marilyn was obviously more unstable than even Leon had thought and now I was face to face with this woman’s wrath.
Marilyn said nothing. She studied me with eyes that looked as if they were staring at something far away and alien. I felt like her eyes were dissecting me, trying to see inside me. My skin crawled as those eyes focused in on me, but I refused to turn away.
“Call him,” Marilyn said.
“Marilyn,” I began.
“Call him now!” Marilyn screamed. Her voice broke as she yelled. Rage twisted her face into a distorted parody of the beautiful girl she normally was. My hands began to shake and now I was running on pure adrenaline.
“Alright, let me get my phone,” I said. I got up from the couch and walked over to the door, slowly.
The exit was agonizingly close. I fought back the urge to just run away, but Marilyn was far too unpredictable for that. If I scared her or made her feel threatened, she might do something crazy like shoot me. I would play it cool.
“We were made for each other. Two sides of the same coin. Puzzle pieces joined together. I am the bottom, he is the top. Do you get it?” Marilyn asked wildly. Her voice was becoming more frantic now, more manic. Every word seemed to pulse with a nervous energy that made the sweat on my skin grow cold with fear. Marilyn was breaking down in front of me with a gun in her hand that she had already pointed at me once.
“Yes,” I said, my hands fumbling. I reached into my purse and pulled out the phone. Marilyn was holding the gun up again, pointing it at me. I noticed the gun was shaking slightly.
I pressed the button on my phone to bring it to life and tried my best to steady my hand. I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply, calming myself. I felt the weight on my shoulders lift slightly when I opened my eyes. Don’t panic. Breathe. Everything is going to be fine. I entered the code on the front screen of my phone and brought up the keypad on the digital screen.
“I’m calling him now. Can you stop pointing the gun at me?” I asked calmly. Marilyn lowered the gun, but it was still pointing at me vaguely, albeit not at any vital organs.
I began to bring up Leon’s contact information and then thought it over. If I called Leon and convinced him to come over, what would Marilyn do? She wouldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t hurt me to prove a point to him. I canceled looking up his info and dialed 911 slowly, trying to mock that I was pressing other numbers as well. When the phone began to ring, I lifted it to my ear.
“Give me that,” Marilyn hissed as she walked over and grabbed the phone out of my hand.
Marilyn stared at me and then I saw rage boil over her like a volcano erupting with hot magma. Her voice became sweet as honey when she spoke, a stark contrast to how she actually felt.
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I meant to call a friend.”
“Help me! I’m being—” I yelled, but it was too late. Marilyn had hung up the phone and cut me off by throwing it at me. I raised my arms defensively and the phone bounced off my forearms.
The gun was raised, pointing at me. Before I had time to think, before I had time to even move, I heard Marilyn yell something. Then the sound of the gunshot drowned out her voice. Everything fell away and the world turned dark.
Chapter 18
The music was still on. I could hear a band playing soft, sensual harmonies, the kind of harmonies you could enjoy while having sex with a stranger and a few drinks in you. Thoughts came to me from far away, much like the music, and I wondered where I was.
A searing pain was tearing through my chest, burning a hole through me. It felt like I had been stabbed with a hot iron that entered my chest and exited through my back shoulder. Everything hurt. My head hurt. My chest screamed out with pain. Even my legs seemed to whine with a sore throb. But it was all far away. Distant.
I thought I could hear sirens in the distance, but that could have easily just been the music.
Everything was so distant, so far away, that it was as if it was happening on a television with low volume. When I tried to move myself, nothing seemed to work. All the energy was sucked out of me.
My hand was wet with some fluid. My eyes slowly looked around, noticing the bright lights that were fuzzy and clouded through my blurred vision. I blinked a few times, trying to clear my eyes, but I could only get glimpses of images. When my sight finally found my wet hand, red filled my vision. I managed to open and close my hand slowly, and I saw that red dripped from it as I did so.
Blood, I thought from far away. My hand is covered in blood. But whose blood?
The sirens, eons away, grew louder. I heard doors opening and the sounds of footsteps coming closer, but all I could do was open and close my hand dripping with red. Pairs of legs moved past my vision and surrounded me.
“Dispatch, we’ve got a gunshot victim at...” a man’s voice said before it faded out into a steady hum. Darkness enveloped my vision and I fought it, trying to stay awake, but to no use.
I could see Marilyn standing in front of me. I wanted to run but my legs wouldn’t move. The sound of the gun shot through the office like a crack of lightning and a searing pain tore through me. Blood pooling out across my dress as I dropped to the ground. On my knees, struggling to stay up, I heard Marilyn run out of the office. My phone had been so far away, impossibly far away. I had reached for it before collapsing entirely.
“Jesus, she’s fucking lucky that the woman upstairs heard the shot. If not for that who knows what...”
Hot, white pain exploded through my shoulder. My eyes shot open and then closed again. I was being lifted up and whatever surface I was on jostled me. It felt like a sword of acid tearing through my shoulder, masticating the flesh and burning my skin. Everything was still far away, but the pain had been the exception. The pain had become my world.
Bright lights blinded my eyes. They would only open a crack, but I could see that I was somewhere new. The office was completely gone. Everything was washed white with light and people moved frantically around me. I tried to lift my head and a strap rubbed around my forehead.
“Ma'am,” a woman’s voice said. “You have to stay still, we’re getting you to a hospital. You’ve had a really close call and you’re not out of the woods yet.”
I opened my mouth to speak and no words would come out. I let out a sigh and closed my mouth, my tongue dry and uncomfortable.
The pain was unbearable. If I had any energy, I would have writhed and screamed. It was as if the bullet was continuously tearing through me, eating through the flesh as it entered and exited me. Tears fell down the sides of my face and I closed my eyes, praying to pass out again. Even if I died, it would be better than this pain.
A prick of a needle injecting into my arm caused me to try to open my eyes again, but they seemed to fight me. Soon, a pleasant warmth flowed up my arm and wrapped itself around the pain in my chest and shoulder. It rained down heaven on the white hot pain and it dropped away, a distant memory of the excruciating wound that once was. A fuzziness blanketed my head and I let out a long sigh of relief.
Morphine, I thought, the word coming out of the fog of darkness. Or maybe I had heard somebody say it. Either way, I began to praise the word in my mind, not sure as to what it even really meant. All I knew is that the warmth was associated with the morphine. Morphine was the salvation from the horror of my pain.
A calm, loving embrace of darkness touched me and I welcomed its reprieve. The lights of the ambulance faded away and I was left floating alone, floating down an unknown road to an unknown destination. A woman had told me we were going to a hospital. In the warm darkness, that sounded just fine to me.
I floated, devoid of body and mind. Only the sensation of weightlessness was with me. My mouth hung open, far away, feeling as though it belonged to someone else entirely. From somewhere in the dark
ness, an alarm was going off. The alarm was trying to wake me up. A loud ringing, a siren that screamed for me to flee from the darkness. Bodiless, I was unable to turn away or close my ears to the sound. Soon, it grew so loud that it was the darkness itself.
“We’re moving her to surgery, now!” a different woman’s voice exclaimed. Blinding lights cut through the darkness as my eyes were pried open. A woman dressed in blue scrubs was pointing a flashlight into my left eye and then she pried open the next eye and did the same. I looked at her intently and her face was determined and stoic.
“Miss Facet,” the woman said. A word floated up into my mind and I grasped onto it: doctor. “You’re in good hands. We’re gonna patch you right up.”
“Ok,” I croaked, the syllables coming out slowly and disjointed.
I was moving, strapped to a gurney or some sort of bed. People were yelling all around me, but not angrily. There was a dialogue occurring all around me that I couldn’t understand, yet I knew it was about me. At some point, I felt scissors caress against my skin as they cut through the dress that was soaked with my blood. I randomly thought of the carpet in my office, now stained with the spilled glass of whiskey and my blood. If I could have laughed, I would have.
My eyes opened to slits and I saw people staring down at me, faces clad in hospital masks and hair hidden with blue caps. Everything on them was blue. When a gloved hand lifted above me, I saw a plastic apparatus in the hand that was fastened around my mouth. The people around me clad in blue began to hand each other things and talk in stern, collected voices. In the distance, I could hear classical music.
I breathed in. A dreamless sleep grew with every break that cut out all of my vision and left the sky full dark.
I awoke. My eyes opened half-way and I looked around. Beige walls surrounded me. A machine beeped next to me and I strained to turn my head to look at it. Screens showed numbers that I had no reference for and one machine showed a line that jumped every few seconds with a beep. I saw a number next to the line and figured out that this was my heart-rate.
I moved my head back and it was like moving the Earth itself. It was heavy. All of my limbs were heavy. I was able to lift my arms, but some invisible force pushed against it as nothing ever had before. I felt like newborn babe, without strength and without agility. I opened my mouth and licked my dry lips, breathing in deeply through my nose as I did so. A large yawn escaped me and slowly my jaw closed again.
“Julie,” a woman’s voice said. I looked to my right to the source of the voice and I saw a woman in her early forties standing there, clad in green scrubs and a white jacket. A stethoscope hung around her neck. A badge was clipped to her scrubs that I could not make out.
“How are you feeling? I imagine you’re a little fuzzy from the painkillers.”
“I’m… alright,” I said. As I spoke, I started to grasp onto the meaning of the words as they came out of my mouth. “Am I in the hospital?”
“Yes, you are. You had surgery twelve hours ago that lasted for three hours. You are in the medical ICU. I’m your doctor, Hannah Lexington. I was the head surgeon during your operation.”
The warmth that had been so welcomed in the ambulance was still with me. I could feel the pain of my shoulder, far away, but it wasn’t bothersome. It was so distant that it was though it wasn’t even there.
“How bad is it?” I asked slowly. The morphine dulled the fear, but a wild thought crashed through the wall of opiates and for a moment I was sure that the doctor was going to tell me I was now debilitated.
“The bullet missed your heart by about an inch. It also missed your lungs and all major organs. It entered on your upper chest and exited out just next to your left shoulder blade. You lost a lot of blood, and the tissue around the area sustained a serious trauma, but since the paramedics were called quickly, you were brought here before any further damage from blood loss could occur.”
I searched my mind for the memory of what happened after the shot. Nothing was there. I couldn’t remember the ambulance drive at all, but I knew that I had been brought here by a man and a woman. They had called me lucky.
“How did they know?” I asked, my voice hoarse and thick.
“Apparently the woman above you called it in,” a man’s voice said. I looked around the room and noticed that two men were in the corner by the door. One was sitting in a chair, checking his phone, while the other stood calmly.
“These men are police officers,” the doctor said. “They want to ask you some questions, despite my misgivings about stressing you immediately after you’ve woken up.” The doctor gave the two police officers a disapproving look.
“It’s much better to do this when it’s still fresh in the witness’s mind,” the sitting officer said.
“It’s much better for the patient to get some rest and not be stressed out by reliving the horror she just survived.”
“No, it’s alright,” I said, my voice thick and raspy. “I can answer some questions. I’m a little woozy from the meds, but I want them to at least start working on catching Marilyn as soon as possible.”
“Marilyn?” the standing officer asked.
“Alright,” the doctor interrupted. “I think I’ll stick around and make sure nothing goes awry.” She eyed the two police officers mistrustfully and sat down next to the bed, crossing her legs and watching them intently. I immediately liked this woman.
“First, what did you mean when you said ‘the woman above me’ before?” I asked.
“She’s a graphic artist. She said she was working late on a project and heard an argument break out below her. It was too muffled for her to hear the exact words, but she heard yelling and then she heard a gunshot and then a car peeled out of the parking lot,” said one of the officers, a thick brown mustache below his nose and a huge bald spot on the front of his head.
“It would have been great if she gave us the license plate, but she said she was so terrified that she killed the lights in her office and hid under her desk when she made the call,” the other officer said. He was much younger, probably a rookie. “Understandable, I suppose.”
“That young woman saved your life, it might not be a bad idea to thank her when you get out of here,” the mustached officer said.
When I got out of here, I was going to send that graphic designer to the Caribbean on an all-expenses-paid trip.
“Now, can you tell us what happened?” the mustached officer asked.
“A woman named Marilyn Benedict shot me,” I said. The young officer wrote down the name immediately and then showed it to his partner, who then nodded. When I didn’t continue speaking, the officers looked at one another and exchange a glance that I couldn’t read.
“Please, we know you’re tired and hurt, but tell us about the entire night.”
“I planned on getting some dinner by myself, but I was driving and spotted a nightclub. When I saw it, I decided to stop in for a drink, maybe dance a little bit.”
“What was the name of the club and who owns it?” the young officer asked.
“Leon Christensen, a client of mine, owns it. It’s called the Nova,” I said, my voice shaky. Saying Leon’s name filled me with a feeling of heaviness that caused my shoulder to ache, despite the morphine. The young officer wrote down what I said and then all eyes were back on me.
“In the club, I had a drink or two and I was dancing. It was fun,” I said, remembering how I had gotten lost in the beat. How good the drinks had warmed my belly. How the feel of the dance floor beneath my heels had been wonderful. “I started talking to this guy and we had another drink before we decided to get out of there.”
“Get out of there?” the balding officer said, a hint of something disapproving in his voice.
“Yeah, we left,” I said defensively. The younger officer was writing everything I said furiously. When I said that I had left with a man, I saw a wry smile adorn his face.
“We took his car. Then we decided to go back to my office.”
<
br /> “What was the man’s name?” the younger officer said, looking up from his pad of paper.
“Tom. I didn’t get his last name.”
“So you bring home this guy, this ‘Tom’, and you don’t even get his last name?” the balding officer asked incredulously. “Is this a regular thing for you?”
“We didn’t go back to my place,” I protested. It was a strain to talk and the officer’s tone wasn’t helping. “I said we went back to my office. Try and pay attention.”
The officer’s face turned red with embarrassment or anger. The younger officer suppressed laughter, shook his head and continued to write.
“We were having a drink at my office and listening to some music.”
“Wait, did anybody see you leave the club with this man?” the older officer asked.