Meredith was smiling after I said that.
Luckily, after the last time, she never directly spoke to me again, and the cameraman that was filming kept his camera pointed somewhere else.
Still, I had fucking rivulets of sweat running down my face from the hot fucking lights, and I was shivering by the time we were done.
“I just ask that you sign these calendars.” Meredith grinned. “We’re going to have a little auction ourselves. Did you know that they’re still selling out calendars on that website? We had to special order these.”
I didn’t see the point. It was now September and the end of the year almost. What was the point of a new calendar now?
I looked at the stack of calendars that she wanted us to sign and nearly groaned.
Goddammit.
That was the last thing that I wanted to do.
My entire body felt like a giant throbbing ache.
Fuckin’ A.
I plopped down in the most comfortable chair in the training room and waited for the calendars to be brought to me.
And eventually they were.
I was the last one to finish.
The last one to leave.
And the last one to walk into Walgreen’s an hour after that, ditching my gun belt at the station before I left, knowing that I couldn’t fucking stand to have it on another second.
And of fuckin’ course, the ibuprofen and Tylenol were at the back of the goddamn store.
I’d just picked up two industrial-sized bottles of both medicines when a squeaking shuffle had me glancing up.
Right into the barrel of a shotgun.
Son. Of. A. Bitch.
My heart froze in my chest. The breath stalled in my lungs.
I also mentally cursed myself for not having my gun belt on.
But, with my attention not being as sharp today as it usually was, I decided that having it on might’ve made me an instant target.
“Everybody on the ground!” the man with the shotgun and the squeaking shoe bellowed.
I didn’t waste time getting on the ground.
The pill bottles made a pounding crack as I dropped them and moved to the ground as he aimed the shotgun around the room.
A poor old woman that’d been standing in the prescription line with her walker and a cast up to the top of her thigh whimpered.
“Down!” the man ordered, pointing his gun fully at her.
That was when I realized the man’s eyes were darting around too fast. His movements were twitchy, and his arms had puncture holes in the bends.
Fuck.
A druggie.
A desperate druggie.
Fuck and double fuck.
I took a glance around, ignored my throbbing head, and counted the number of hostages.
There was a woman with a baby in the far corner. She looked vaguely familiar.
In the middle of the aisle I was standing in there were five people that were in line, including the old lady, that were now lying on the floor.
And on the very, very edge, almost hidden underneath the ‘drop off’ prescription counter, was a beautiful ebony-haired woman. Her bright, cornflower blue eyes were staring at the druggie with the shotgun as if she was sizing him up.
Her fingers were clenching and unclenching, and she was opening and closing her eyes as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
Then, right before my eyes, I saw her mouth open, horror wash over her face, and then, “Pew, pew, pew.”
The druggie pivoted toward her and aimed his gun. But not at the pew-pew lady, but at the old lady that was now whimpering in pain.
The pew-pew lady’s eyes squeezed shut as if she wanted to rip the words out of the air and shove them back into her mouth where they belonged.
I army-crawled closer, accidentally causing the pill bottles that I’d dropped to crack with the pills tumbling around inside.
“He’s moving!”
I froze when I heard a woman’s voice—no, a teenager’s voice—from the side of where I was.
I whipped my head to the side and saw a young woman, probably around fourteen or fifteen, standing at the edge of the aisle with a smug look on her face.
The guy with the gun whirled around and faced me.
“Don’t fuckin’ move!” the druggie boomed.
Then, for good measure, he dragged me farther into the open aisle until I was only feet away from the pew-pew chick.
I allowed him to only because I wasn’t sure what the girl had on her. If she had a gun, I didn’t want to try to disarm the shotgun guy and make her take steps to protect the druggie.
But, just as suddenly as he’d had my shirt, he dropped it and once again turned his attention back to the cashier.
Chapter 2
Drunk me has made a lot of friends that sober me has no idea who they are.
-Hastings to Suzanne
Hastings
My first thought upon entering the Walgreens wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there—for once.
Normally, my first thought upon entering a place that would possibly cause me to run into someone was—please, nobody look at me too hard.
But today, that wasn’t my first thought.
My first thought was, holy hell, that man is beautiful.
The ‘man’ was tall, around six-foot-four, muscular, tattooed, had an angular jaw that looked sexy as fuckin’ hell underneath the makings of a five o’clock shadow, and a fuckin’ dimple in his cheek.
I’d walked in with him at the same time, but while his attention had been on the ground as he’d eaten up the distance in the parking lot, mine had been on him.
I’d been so focused on him, in fact, that I’d practically categorized everything there was about him.
He had blonde hair, blue eyes—eyes that I could just barely make out from underneath the brim of a hat with a shamrock on it—and straight white teeth.
He was wearing a plain black polo shirt and black tactical pants with those combat boots that went up to about mid-calf. The uniform of the Kilgore Police Department.
He had a tattoo of a Texas flag on his left arm that went up almost to his elbow, and an American flag on his right that did much the same. Then, on his right bicep, was a very large cross with intricate patterns that disappeared underneath his collared shirt.
I was so busy watching him that I wasn’t paying attention to the rack that I’d somehow found myself in front of until I’d nearly run into it.
Then, before my eyes, all hell broke loose, and I found myself on the floor with my hands covering my face, as a man wielding a shotgun walked in and started waving it around.
The next five minutes were the worst of my life as I felt every piece of control that I’d ever strived for start to unravel before my very eyes.
My training? Gone.
My hard won control? Also gone.
The medication that I took to control it? It was like I’d never taken it in the first place.
With each beat of my heart, I could feel the daggers of despair start to slowly sink into my belly and pull upward.
Then, like a dam breaking, the chains snapped.
“Pew, pew, pew, pew!”
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Luckily, I’d been able to say them quietly enough that the only person’s attention that I caught was the cop’s that was sitting on the ground next to me.
“Don’t fuckin’ move!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to ten, hoping that if I didn’t see it happening, maybe it wasn’t real.
I counted to ten.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
I wasn’t sure of how much time had passed when I opened my eyes, but when I did the cop was closer, and the scene was still playing out in front of me.
“Don’t fuckin’ move!”
The man that was robbing the pharmacy
in front of us aimed his gun at the poor old lady on the floor again.
The one that looked like she’d broken her hip days ago. Or had a knee replacement.
Whatever she had wrong with her, it was utterly painful watching her crawl her way to the floor and try to stay still.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the old lady said in a wobbly, feeble voice. “It just hurts.”
Something inside of my chest clenched and squeezed.
“I don’t fuckin’ care, bitch!”
“Hey, Alston,” his co-conspirator, the young-looking teen that looked like she was all of maybe fifteen, said. “I bet she has some good drugs. My grandma always has the best stuff. Check her purse.”
“That’s a good idea,” Alston, the robber, said. “Check her purse. Check all of their purses. And wallets. Get those, too.”
The girl didn’t look nearly as comfortable with her assigned task as she was at suggesting it.
“O-okay.”
That was when I realized that if I didn’t get rid of my gun and bullets, the girl going through the bags would surely find it.
Luckily, where it was positioned in comparison to my body, meant that I could pull the gun out and set it down on the ground in between me and the wall.
You know, if I wasn’t scared half out of my fuckin’ mind.
And, like an umbrella caving underneath eighty mile an hour winds, my mouth started to make itself known.
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there!” I called.
I’m pretty sure if the cop could get away with kicking me, he would have.
I covered my face with my hand and moaned inwardly.
Outwardly, I said, “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
The cop did kick me that time.
Tears were now pouring out of my eyes as I prayed I would stop.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Inwardly, I pleaded with my brain to stop.
Please, please, please.
But the more scared I got, the worse my Tourette’s became.
I couldn’t help it.
My brain was just wired wrong.
I did things, said things, and ultimately made a fool of myself at the worst, most inopportune times.
It’d been that way since I was a kid.
On my first date with Tule Ross, the head tuba player in the band, he’d leaned in for a kiss and I’d shouted in his face.
On my first time trying to have sex, I screamed at him and made inappropriate comments.
Needless to say, I was not in a good frame of mind right then.
I was unable to control it.
Trust me, I’d tried.
And there were only a few things that were able to calm me down.
Sadly, none of those things were options at this moment in time.
I couldn’t sing a fuckin’ song.
I didn’t think he’d like me running, either. Which was one of the things that I did when the anxiety got too bad, and my Tourette’s started to act up.
“Lady, give me your purse.”
I wouldn’t give her my purse.
I couldn’t.
My hands physically wouldn’t allow me to let go.
And that was when my mouth started to take over.
“Listen here, you little dirty whore fifteen-year-old girl,” I found myself saying. It was as if I was having an out of body experience. “You will back off. You will take your dirty drugged up boyfriend, get out of here, and never look back. You will kick him to the curb the first chance you get, and you will take a fuckin’ shower, because bitch, you stink.”
The words weren’t even past my lips when she reared back and tried to punch me.
But my daddy didn’t raise no fool.
I may have Tourette’s, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t know how to protect myself.
After the first schoolyard bully tried to beat me up in fourth grade because I was different, I’d learned to protect myself. At least, from kids—which this girl most certainly was.
I couldn’t give her my purse.
I had a gun in there.
It wasn’t loaded.
The bullets were in a separate compartment than the gun itself. The magazine was even in a different zippered area.
Altogether, it would take a lot for me to get it going.
But the cop next to me on the other hand?
He could do what he needed with it.
I unzipped my purse and pulled the gun out and placed it on the ground.
The cop’s eyes that were watching me with barely contained anger flicked down, something like understanding rolling through him, causing his face to become blank.
“Get her under control, kid!” the druggie bellowed.
“I’m trying!” the girl snapped. “She’s mean.”
I wasn’t mean.
It wasn’t mean to fight for your life.
What was mean was that she was there in the first place.
“You’re a despicable excuse for a human being,” I snarled as I unzipped the second compartment, pulling out bullets.
The last thing to go was the magazine, and then I pulled my hand back out of my purse and flipped her off.
I couldn’t help it. And if you didn’t notice, I couldn’t help a lot of things.
Like, I couldn’t help the way that my hands latched onto the display case of magnifying glasses that I’d nearly run into earlier when I’d seen the hot cop. I also couldn’t help the way that I pulled them down and pushed the entire case at her all in one go.
She went back quickly and fell flat on her ass beside the old lady, luckily not hurting the old lady any.
The druggie cocked his shotgun and threw an unused shell down onto the ground.
“Fuckin’ A, Darcy!” the druggie snapped.
In the confusion of the magnifying glasses hitting the ground, I used the confusion to shift the gun, bullets, and magazine to the cop on the ground.
It took one move of his big paw-like hand to cover the gun.
It was a tiny little gun. The magazine only big enough to hold five bullets. Six if you counted one in the chamber.
To add to the confusion, the man beside me hooked his foot underneath the closest rack of chips and dips and tugged, causing it to go down, too.
People started to scream as bottles crashed to the ground and broke open.
And, just like that, the shotgun was going off.
But, just as quickly, the shotgun was falling to the ground, as was the druggie, as the police officer shot the man in the arm that was holding the shotgun.
The shotgun fell to the floor next to a construction worker that looked to have a broken foot. Seconds later, he was up on his one leg, hobbling to stand, and he had the shotgun aimed at the druggie who was staring at his arm as if he couldn’t quite process what had happened to him.
“That was a good shot,” I found myself saying moments later as the druggie writhed on the ground.
The cop pushed up off the ground and grunted out a, “I was aiming for his heart. Sights are off on this.”
***
One hour and thirty-six minutes later, I was informed that I was free to go.
My head was pounding, my heart was aching, and I would like nothing more than to get the hell out of that store and never come back.
I hadn’t stopped saying cuss words since the cops had started arriving.
Almost all of those cops being hot as hell, angry looking, and intimidating.
I was stepping out of the aisle that would lead me to the exit when a hand touched my elbow.
I whirled around, stomach churning.
“Should someone like you even be handling a firearm?” the cop asked.
I looked at his name that was embroidered on his shirt.
It read ‘Officer S. Spurlock.’
I swallowed and tried not to look him
in the eye.
“Impulsiveness isn’t one of my downfalls,” I said softly. “Mostly, all of my abnormalities are vocally related. Mild OCD. I do have ADHD—attention deficit hyperactive disorder—but I don’t have problems with wanting to pull a cop’s gun and shoot someone with it—that’s impulsivity.”
He handed me back the bullets that he hadn’t taken the time to load in the magazine, and I took them and put them back in the zippered compartment of my purse.
The gun was confiscated the moment that the on-duty authorities had arrived.
Now that everything was calming down, my verbal diarrhea had calmed to almost manageable levels.
Now that I wasn’t so focused on myself, I could focus on the man that I’d tried not to look too closely at since he’d become aware of me. I started to notice how the man beside me was shaking.
He had a flush to his face, and he was sweating so badly that he looked rough.
But he had his arms crossed across his chest, and he had goosebumps on his arms and neck.
“Are you okay?” I asked cautiously.
He swallowed hard and shook his head. “I came here because I was running a really high fever and I didn’t have any ibuprofen.”
I instantly reached into my purse and pulled the small bottle that I always carried with me out of my purse. Shaking out four, I handed them to him.
He watched me with a grateful look on his face and swallowed them dry.
“Are there any other symptoms along with your fever?” I asked worriedly.
He looked… bad. He also looked like he was getting worse by the second.
“Dizziness, light-headed, headache. The flu is going around work,” he murmured. “I might have it.”
There was no might about it.
The man was sick as a dog, and it showed.
“You should go home,” I suggested.
He wiped his forehead.
“I will,” he said. “I’m just trying to focus long enough to walk out to my bike. But I’m not quite sure I should be riding when I’m so dizzy.”
He was dizzy and he shot someone?
What the hell?
He’d looked so calm and collected lying on the floor next to me.
I hadn’t even realized…
“I’d offer you a ride,” I said. “But I ride a moped.”
His lips twitched. “Looks like it wouldn’t matter. But, thanks anyway.”
Say It Ain't So (SWAT Generation 2.0 Book 9) Page 2