Pins and Needles

by A. J. Thomas

  Nate had chased the man to the edge of the building, but now he stood there, staring into the empty street lined with quiet houses beyond the shop. Sean thought he heard a car nearby, but with the Gulf Freeway just a couple of blocks away, it was impossible to tell where it was. He tried to catch his breath and ended up coughing more.

  Nate turned to him, his expression set in a thin-lipped grimace. The adrenaline faded, and panic set in as Sean saw blood dripping from Nate’s hand.

  “Jesus, you should have stayed put. That fucker was fast.”

  “Where?” Sean gasped, his voice hoarse.

  “I don’t know,” Nate said. “That way….” He gestured to the intersection.

  He reached out to check on Nate’s hand, but staggered and had to catch himself using the wall and his cane to hold his weight.

  “Where are you hurt?” Nate asked. Sean waved him off and leaned against the cinder-block wall instead. “I don’t need….” He coughed again. “I don’t need your help. Other way around.”

  “He tried to strangle you,” Nate pointed out. “You’re hurt.”

  “Your hand?”

  “Huh?” Nate looked down at his jacket, noticing the blood soaking his right sleeve for the first time. There were long gashes across his thumb, forefinger, and palm. “That’s odd.”

  “Adrenaline crashes, you’ll feel it.” Sean gasped.

  “Shit. Okay—we need to call Hawk, file a police report, and go to the hospital.”

  Sean held up his phone. The screen lit up, showing the still-connected call to 9-1-1. “Hospital.”

  “Are you okay?” Nate asked, nodding to Sean’s hand.

  “Not deep,” Sean said, swallowing again.

  “Oh God, if he cut your hand….” Nate gaped at him, his eyes wide. “He wasn’t trying to strangle you, he was trying to slit your throat. We need to call the police.”

  Sean nodded vaguely at the shopping center behind them. There were already sirens approaching. “Cops,” Sean rasped, rubbing at his neck. “What?”

  “Right, you already called the police.”

  “Psycho with a knife, hospital….” He stopped to catch his breath—forcing the words out was painful.

  “We’re going together. It wasn’t me he tried to kill,” Nate pointed out.

  “Whatever. Water. Doctor.” Sean reached for Nate’s hand.

  Nate pulled his hand away and cradled it against his chest.

  “Let me see?” Sean asked, his voice too hoarse to sound gentle. “You were worried enough about me to chase that guy. Let me worry about you,” he said, his voice cracking and finally failing as he managed the last word.

  There was a hint of a smile on Nate’s face. “Fine.”

  Chapter 11

  HAWK SETTLED into the chair beside Sean, managed to stay there for a grand total of twenty seconds, then got up and began pacing through the tiny ER bay again. They’d been there for going on two hours, and most of that time had been spent in the waiting room. Hawk had bandaged the back of Sean’s hand and found some gauze for Nate, but there was no question that Nate needed stitches.

  Hawk had never been very good at sitting still.

  “Is he always like this?” Nate asked Sean.

  “Yeah,” Sean croaked. Ice water and ibuprofen had helped him string more than a few words together, but it still hurt to talk. “Annoyed the hell out of my nurses when I was in the ICU.”

  “Fine, I get it,” Hawk said, sitting down again. “I’ve never understood why it has to take so long to see a fucking doctor,” he grumbled.

  “There are only so many beds.” Sean tried to be diplomatic. He’d fallen asleep in the waiting room, and would have gladly slept in the chair beside Nate’s bed if Hawk would just calm the hell down.

  “You should be in one of them,” Nate said to him. “Your eyes are red.”

  Sean almost rolled his eyes. “I’m not dead. The cut on my hand isn’t gaping, and I can breathe just fine now.” He paused and swallowed another gulp of water so he wouldn’t start coughing again. “They can’t do anything for bruises, anyway.”

  “His hand’s cut to ribbons, and they ain’t doing a damn thing about that,” Hawk growled.

  Sean glanced at Nate to make sure he wasn’t taking Hawk too seriously, but there was a fond smile fixed on his face. “Anesthetic kicked in?”

  “Yeah,” Nate said. “It’s still throbbing, though. I know that doesn’t make any sense—since it’s numb, I shouldn’t be able to feel anything—but I do.”

  “My left foot still hurts. Sometimes it itches. Every damn morning I wake up because it feels numb. It was incinerated along with other medical waste five months ago, but it still hurts. Nerves are funny like that.”

  Nate stared at him as if he wasn’t quite sure if Sean was joking. He wasn’t sure himself, but when he smiled, Nate chuckled. “I’m sorry,” Nate said. “Guess I should remember it can always be worse.”

  “Don’t start that again.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Delany?” a nurse popped her head through the curtain. “There’s an Emmitt Delany up at the front desk asking for permission to come back and visit. We can only allow a maximum of two visitors in the ER at a time.”

  Hawk nodded and got up.

  “What?” Nate looked more angry than surprised. “No! I don’t want you to go. How did he even find out I was here, anyway? I didn’t call him.”

  Sean shook his head. “Not me. I thought about texting your brother, but I was worried that’d be weird. He gave me his number when Tonya got hurt, to let him know if I wanted him to bring back food with the coffee.”

  “You don’t have to worry about texting Steve, he’s cool. But my dad….” Nate looked at him with a pained expression.

  “I wouldn’t have worried about texting your dad. If I’d had his number, I would have called him—weird or not.”

  Nate flashed him a reluctant smile. “But you don’t have his number.”

  “The easiest way to find out is to ask him. Which means we should go,” he said, wishing he could kiss Nate. He settled for hobbling to the bed and messing up Nate’s hair. It fell back into place, perfect as always.

  “Fine, he can come back,” Nate told the nurse. “But Sean, would you stay? There’s no getting out of it, but I’d rather be miserable with you.” It was quieter than a whisper, and hearing it made Sean’s throat feel tight.

  He looked at Hawk, who smiled and nodded once. “I need some coffee anyway. Or I might go take a nap out in the waiting room, who knows. Are you going to stay back here?”

  “You sure you want me to stay?” Sean asked. “I can wait out front, if you want. I won’t go far,” he promised. He held up his cane and smirked. “Besides, even if I tried to make a break for it, I doubt I’d get more than two blocks before you’re stitched up and discharged.”

  “Between the painkillers and the local anesthetic, I’m… not capable of censoring myself enough to face my dad alone. Plus, I don’t particularly want to let you out of my sight. Not ever, if I can get away with it.”

  Sean shook his head, painfully aware of the fact that he was blushing.

  Hawk nudged Sean in the arm and cocked his head toward the exit, then sniffled dramatically. “Go ahead and stay,” he said with a cheesy grin. “I’ll go send forlorn text messages to Marci about my little guy growing up.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Hey, does that mean you’re finally ready to tell me how your evening went?”

  “You’re not that grown up yet,” Hawk said immediately. “Maybe when you’re…. Ah, never mind. You’re never going to be that grown up.”

  Sean tried not to laugh, but it came out as a hacking cough. “Damn. Now I’m sorry for interrupting.”

  “Don’t be sorry for calling me for something important. Although, if you wouldn’t mind, can we try to make it through the rest of the week without having to spend another night here? Maybe we could change it up and you could call me to change a tire or come bail you out of jail?”
<
br />   “No promises.”

  Sean returned to the padded seat next to Nate’s gurney, trying not to look at Nate’s hand. They had shoved Nate’s sleeve up to his elbow and pumped his hand full of lidocaine. The entire thing was swollen, and the lacerations were open and exposed to the air, waiting to be cleaned.

  “You okay?” Nate asked, focusing on him when Nate was sitting there with gaping wounds in his own skin.

  “I’m fine,” he lied. “I should be fine, anyway. I deal with blood every day. I had to change the bandages on my right leg once they finally let me out. But it’s….”

  “Different when there’s exposed subdermal tissue?”

  He cringed and nodded.

  “Nate?” The older man from the courthouse pulled the curtain aside. Here, late at night in the middle of the emergency room, he didn’t look as confident or collected as he had before. He was still meticulously dressed, but his tweed jacket was open and his tie was loose and wrinkled. “My God, what happened to you? And is this… your client from the CPG case? Young man, are those eyeball tattoos?”

  Nate snorted. “Eyeball tattoos? Is that even a thing?”

  “Technically, yes,” Sean admitted. “People have been tattooing everything imaginable for most of human history, and eyeball tattoos have unfortunately happened. I think I’m going to preemptively add it to the list if I ever get home.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  “But I don’t have eyeball tattoos. The triage nurse said I’ve got broken capillaries. It’s normal with strangulation victims, but it’ll go away eventually.”

  “Strangulation?” the old man squeaked.

  “Some guy jumped me. Nate tried to help and managed to chase the guy off, but… well, he tried to block a knife with his bare hands.”

  “You what?” Emmitt Delany gaped. “You… what?”

  “I stopped someone from slitting Sean’s throat,” Nate said, his tone remarkably calm. “Better this than the alternative. What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” Emmitt huffed and dragged the chair Hawk had just vacated over to the bed. “You’re my child. You can’t expect me to find out you’re in the hospital and then sit at home waiting to hear from you.”

  “I’m more curious about how you heard I was here. I didn’t tell you.”

  “Oh, you’re still on the firm’s insurance, have been since you were born. It rolled over from dependent to employee coverage, but my contact information is still on your policy. I got an email notification about a new insurance claim being processed, with all kinds of information about how to get retroactive approval for ambulance services, so I became a tad concerned.”

  “Hey, he does it too!” Sean said, pointing at Emmitt.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The worse something gets, the more you both use understatements. If Nate says there’s a serious problem, it means that there’s actually nothing to worry about and he’s just mentioning it because he’s got to say something. If he ever says everything is absolutely fine, I’m going to start prepping for the apocalypse.”

  “I’m not that bad,” Nate argued.

  “How are you both so ridiculously calm about this? And why haven’t those wounds been treated yet? And what, just so I can be absolutely clear on what’s going on here, is your client doing with you at the hospital in the middle of the night?”

  Nate glanced in Sean’s direction, both eyebrows raised.

  “Your call,” Sean said. He grabbed the printer paper Hawk had scrounged from the nurse’s station. It wasn’t a sketchbook, but it was something to draw on that didn’t require him to scratch designs into random pieces of furniture. He had already sketched an easy landscape, something simple to focus on to relieve his anxiety a little.

  “Would you excuse us, Mr. Wilkinson? I need to talk to my son.”

  “No.” Nate’s smile dissolved. “Sean stays. Dad, thank you for reminding me I need to get my own insurance. Hang on to whatever bills they send, and I’ll deal with them—but for now, you should go home. You’ve got a house full of guests to entertain.”

  “And how do you intend to get home? Surely you can’t expect your client to stay here to drive you home?”

  Sean wanted to laugh. From the way Nate snorted, he guessed he wasn’t the only one having a difficult time. He added a leafy tree to his landscape and some birds over the horizon.

  “And why is that funny?”

  “My car is at his place. A CPG car destroyed his Jeep in a hit-and-run two nights ago,” Nate explained. “And Hawk came here on a motorcycle, so Sean and I were planning to share a cab once I get stitched up, anyway.”

  “A Confederated Petroleum car? The company that’s a party to his tort claim?”

  “Would have killed him if he’d been in the passenger seat. The police detective actually rolled her eyes when Sean said he still thought this shit was a coincidence after the attack tonight.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was a coincidence, just that it’s possible. Hawk’s isn’t exactly in a safe part of town.”

  “And in the decade you’ve lived there, how many problems have there been with robberies, assaults, and break-ins?”

  “Well, actually—”

  “Ones you or Hawk are responsible for don’t count,” Nate added quickly.

  “Oh. None, then.”

  Emmitt sputtered, his worried expression turning hard. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “It is, but it’s one of those jokes that’s only funny because it’s true,” Sean explained, enjoying Nate’s smile more than he probably should have. “Let’s see…. The only break-in in the shopping center was one I perpetrated when I was twelve. As for the assaults, I often don’t know when to keep my mouth shut, particularly when I have nothing to lose. I’ve worked in a tattoo studio since I was a kid, and it’s a profitable shop, so Hawk—” Another coughing fit hit as his throat tightened again. He reached for the bottle of water he’d left on the floor, took a couple sips, and coughed more. “Sorry. Hawk lets us be picky about our clientele. Sometimes the clientele I’m picky about turn out to be huge motherfuckers who don’t like a fifteen-year-old trying to kick them out. Or an eighteen-year-old, but I was bigger by then.”

  “I assume this Hawk is your father?” Emmitt asked, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Aren’t you an engineer? I’ve read about your case in the paper and the public filings from the Clerk and Recorder’s Office. I’m sure it said you were an engineer.”

  “That too, yeah. But….” He tilted his head to the side. The landscape he’d drawn was simple lines, with no depth or shading. It looked more like a page from a children’s coloring book than anything. He moved his pen to the center of the sun he’d doodled in the corner and scribbled out a simple chemical equation for the conversion of hydrogen into helium in a sustained fusion reaction. He added some straight rays of sunlight and then equations to calculate the energy lost from the sun as light passed through the atmosphere. “I’ve always found,” he said, adding an equation for the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen within the leaves of the tree, “that art and science are really just different reflections of reality. Different ways of appreciating the same thing, of understanding the world and showing it to others.” He added equations to the entire landscape, including the forces of thrust and lift for the birds in flight. “See?” He handed Emmitt the drawing. “It’s all one and the same.”

  Emmitt stared at the paper, a hint of a smile on his lips. “This is….”

  “A drawing of a tree, birds, and a bunny.”

  “That is awesome,” Nate said, craning his neck to see the drawing.

  “You and your brother both,” Emmitt grumbled. “How hard is it to find a nice liberal arts major?”

  Nate’s mouth dropped open. “That’s what you’re concerned about here?”

  Sean was pretty sure he was missing something.

  “Hardly. You aren
’t going to take my advice and bring the firm in on this, are you? Your….” Emmitt pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, we’re going to stick with client for this conversation. Your client appears to be in very real danger, and you still think you’ve got a handle on this case? Have you filed a police report? Contacted the US Attorney’s office to discuss the fact that CPG is engaged in witness tampering and coercion? Taken any steps to keep him safe until this goes to trial?”

  “Do you think I’m that incompetent? I’ve done both, and they’re assigning a federal investigator. Opening arguments start in two weeks, but Sean was going to….” Nate stopped abruptly and squeezed his eyes shut. “Nice try.”

  “Are you okay?” Sean asked, leaning forward.

  “He’s bound by attorney-client privilege,” Emmitt explained casually. “Usually it means an attorney can’t be forced to disclose anything incriminating a client might tell them, but it also carries a burden of confidentiality. He’s prohibited from discussing the details of your case with anyone without your consent.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re working for Confederated Petroleum. You’re not, are you?”

  “No, I’m not working for them. And the fact that you even feel the need to ask that tells me that there is far more to this case than is obvious from the outside. I want to help you, and I want my son to survive this disaster. If Nathan would get over his injured pride, I could be working for you. It seems all the more important now, since he’s decided to risk his life trying to keep you safe.”

  Sean’s first instinct was to defend Nate’s ability to handle his case, but Nate was sitting in the hospital with his hand cut apart because of him. Whether CPG actually intended to kill him rather than let him collect on their settlement offer, or Bruce was just panicking about the trial looming before them, he didn’t dare guess. But Nate was right. He could believe the car accident was a coincidence, but the CPG logo had been obvious in the still shots taken from the gas station surveillance cameras and from the pictures Nate had taken. He was having a harder time accepting that the man who attacked him had chosen him at random, particularly because Nate, with his expensive clothes, pricey watch, and wallet that contained actual money, would have been a better target for any thief.