A blackness rushed upon him. He closed his eyes and fell face-first to the ground.
EPILOGUE
Beeping. Cold beeping, very cold beeping. Wait, sounds ain’t cold. What the fuck is so cold?
His eyes fluttered open and were stabbed by the harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling. White light. White everything.
Oh yeah, I got shot. Apparently made it to a hospital. Somewhere. Where the hell am I? And why is this room so damn cold?
He turned his head to the right: IV stand, a huge tangle of tubes running from all sorts of panels by the bed and into him. Window with green curtains, drawn.
He swiveled the opposite direction, toward the beeping, which came from the machine by the head of the bed. LED display of numbers he couldn’t comprehend. Behind the machine, in a chair, a mop of hair. Reddish. The hair moved, and McDonough looked up, green eyes tired and a huge bandage on the side of her head. She was too good-looking to look ridiculous, but she almost did.
Shit, did I say that out loud?
“Say what out loud?” McDonough asked.
His mouth was sandpaper-dry. “Nothing,” he croaked. “How long—”
“Most of a day,” she said. “Doc says you’re going to be in a lot of pain and very weak for a while.”
“Doc was right.”
“Yeah, and that’s even with all the morphine they shot you up with.”
“Thank God for morphine. How ’bout you?”
She shrugged and stood. Still in jeans and a ratty T-shirt, ponytail. “I’m OK. A headache that would kill a lumberjack and some stitches, but I’m OK.”
He nodded and stared at the ceiling. “You should learn to stay out of the way of bullets.”
She smirked. “Said the man shot three times.”
He smiled, even though doing so caused a stab of pain in his side. “Hey, one of those doesn’t count—he only grazed me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the one in the hospital bed.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’ll get a nurse,” McDonough said and turned toward the door.
“Wait,” he said through a cough. “Can you get me some water?”
McDonough poured him a plastic cup full from the small aluminum pitcher on a stand at this bedside. He drank it down, and he realized he was so high from the painkillers he could hardly think straight.
“Where’s Rhonda and John?” he asked.
McDonough’s face turned serious. “Rhonda is downstairs, worried sick about you. She wants to see you, though. John’s with her.”
“Good.” He squinted at her. “How did you manage to get away from John?”
She winced and looked ashamed. “I pulled my weapon on him.”
“That’s pretty crazy.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
He shook his head. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“Look who’s talking,” she said.
He turned to look at her. “I owe you one,” he said.
She crossed her arms, brow furrowed. “You don’t owe me shit, Harper. You would have done the same thing.”
“But... ”
“Look, Colt,” she said, her voice low, “that guy had to go down, and if I couldn’t be the one to do it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let you do it alone. Simple as that.”
He locked eyes with her. She was strong, but behind the steady gaze he saw a softness that had not been evident before.
“OK, Molly.” He closed his eyes. “I guess I fucked up your chance at redemption, huh?”
She stared down at him long enough to make him uncomfortable under her gaze. She shook her head. “You killed that son of a bitch. That’ll have to be redemption enough. For both of us.”
He stared back at her. Maybe she was right. He would think about it some more when he wasn’t so tired.
“What about you, though?” he asked. “You must be in the doghouse with your boss.”
She shrugged again. “I resigned. Only thing left for me to do. Like I said, redemption enough.”
He drew a painful breath, let it out. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.” She moved away from the bed. “I’ll get the nurse.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. He stared at the ceiling and tried to force his mind to think of something other than the fact that he was, in all likelihood, soon to be out of a job, even though he knew he didn’t want the job anymore. He marveled at his wounded pride, even through the painkillers.
He heard a very faint click, and the door to his room opened. He rolled his head to the left as Rhonda glided in, her face grim.
He tried to smile, and it must have worked, because she managed a weak smile in return. Her eyes shone in the low light of the room, and she took his hand at the bedside.
His lips felt dry again, but his eyes were stinging, for some reason. He blinked until he could see her clearly.
“Rhonda,” he said with a voice that sounded to him like a growl. “I’m sorry about all this. Are you OK?”
She closed her eyes for a long second, and twin pendants of tears glistened down her cheeks. She nodded, finally, and looked at him with eyes brimming. “You’re something else, Colt Harper,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She tried to laugh, but it came out a gasp. “You’re laying here all shot to pieces and you’re asking me if I’m OK. Yes, all things considered, I’m fine.”
He nodded and lay back on his pillow, exhausted. He stroked her hand with his thumb.
“Thank you,” he said.
She wiped her eyes. “For what?”
“For having faith in me with that shot.”
More tears. “I was terrified, Colt. I was sure we were going to die.”
“Then…why?”
She sighed. “Because if we were going to die at the hands of that…that monster, then we were going to go down fighting. I saw that in your eyes, too. And that look in your eyes scared me as much as that man did. Just like it did the very first time I saw it.”
She leaned over him and locked eyes with him. “But I trusted you. Of course I did. I always have.”
He closed his eyes and felt a wetness on his cheeks.
What did McDonough say? That’ll have to be redemption enough.
He opened his eyes and stared at Rhonda, who smiled now for real.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now get some rest. I’ll get the nurse.”
He closed his eyes again, and she slipped out of the room. He was asleep long before the nurse arrived.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of rural east Mississippi, Phillip Thompson served in combat as a Marine, covered capital murder cases as a journalist, and wrote speeches for top military leaders in the Pentagon. He has worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Mississippi and Virginia, and his journalistic work has been featured in newspapers across the Deep South and the East Coast.
Publishers Weekly described his first novel, Enemy Within, “…as timely as the morning headlines [and] asks some probing questions about national apathy, the abdication of responsibility for one’s own country and the resulting decay of US civil rights.” Thompson’s other novels include A Simple Murder and Deep Blood. His short fiction has appeared in O-Dark-Thirty; The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature; Out of the Gutter Online; Thrills, Kills ’N ’ Chaos; Near to the Knuckle; Yellow Mama; and The Shamus Sampler II. He attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference as a fiction writer in 2003.
He also authored the nonfiction account of his Gulf War combat experience, Into the Storm: A U.S. Marine in the Persian Gulf War.
He lives in Virginia. Find him on Twitter at @olemissgrad38 and online at his blog, “Grace & Violence,” at http://kudzucorner.wordpress.com.
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