“You got shot.”
I knew that much, but hearing Holman say it out loud was surreal. I looked at him, my eyes asking the questions my brain couldn’t quite formulate.
“In the leg. The bullet grazed the inner part of your calf, sparing the bone, but it still caused a significant amount of blood loss. That’s why you feel so weak. But the doctor says you should make a full recovery.”
I nodded like this was everyday information. Shot in the leg. Lost a lot of blood. Full recovery. I thought of my parents. Had anyone told them what happened? They’d be worried sick. “Mom and Dad . . .”
“They just stepped out for coffee,” Holman said. “They’ll be back soon.”
I closed my eyes and an image of Jack’s face swam beneath my eyelids. Had he been aiming for my leg? Or had he missed? Where was he now? How had I gotten here? I had a million questions, but the energy to ask only one. “What happened?”
“I pretty much saved your life.”
My blank stare told him I was going to need more to go on.
“Well, technically, you saved your own life by screaming. But I helped.”
My brain was processing things so slowly. I struggled to reconcile what he was saying with my last memories before waking up in the hospital. I didn’t remember Holman being at my house . . .
“Actually,” he continued, oblivious to my confusion, “if we are going to give credit to someone or something, we should really give it to the bear claws. As soon as I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I immediately regretted my decision to give them to you. I know you promised not to eat them, but I kept worrying that Coltrane would jump up onto the counter and get them. Even though they were in a box tied with ribbon, I thought it was a possibility. I’ve seen videos on YouTube of dogs unwrapping Hershey’s bars—”
“Holman.”
“What?”
I lifted my arm, which felt like it weighed about seventy-five pounds, and rolled my wrist a couple of times.
“Oh, right. So anyway, I decided to ride my hog over to your place to pick them up, and when I got to your driveway, I heard Coltrane barking his head off and your voice yelling something from inside the house. I looked in through your sidelight window and saw you tied to a chair, screaming bloody murder. I called 911, then I ran back to the Hobbit to get a weapon, but all I had was a flare. As I told you the Hobbit does not have a lot of storage, of course I always make room for a flare because you never know when your hog is going to break down when you’re out riding, you know?”
I really wished he would stop using the word hog, but I didn’t have the energy to ask, so I just nodded.
“The door was unlocked and I crept in while you were screaming; a second later I saw this big guy come running down the hall with a gun in his hand. He was agitated—and for some reason, without pants—and when he raised his gun to shoot at you, I lit the flare and threw it at him a split second before he pulled the trigger. That’s why he missed and shot your leg. He was aiming for your chest.”
A chill spread through me. Jack had tried to kill me and but for the grace of God and Holman’s obsession with doughnuts, I somehow lived through it. “Where is he now?”
“Burn unit. His shoes had some chemicals on them—probably cleaning supplies from work—and when I threw the flare at him they caught fire immediately. It was bad. He was screaming and ran past me out the front door. He only got as far as the stop sign at the end of Salem Street, though. Butter caught him. He wasn’t exactly hard to spot running through the dark streets with two flaming shoes.”
“He killed Arthur—and Bennett,” I started to say.
Holman was already nodding. “I know. A lot has happened since you got shot,” he said. He leaned closer to my bed and his eyes went full bug-out. “I have to tell you something.”
“Okay . . .” I said, suddenly nervous.
“Riley,” he started to say, and then paused. “The thing is, you lost a lot of blood.”
“Okay . . .”
“And even though the bullet went straight through your calf, it hit an artery—not the femoral artery or anything, another one, the popliteal, I think. And you lost a lot of blood.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this but,” he paused. “You’ve been in a coma for six months.”
It felt like someone had injected ice water through my IV. I stared at him for at least ten seconds, my brain unable to process what he was telling me. Could it really have been six months? Was it April instead of October? Had I missed Christmas?
And then Holman started laughing. “I’m just kidding. You’ve only been in here a few hours.”
I was dumbstruck for a moment. But eventually I found my voice. “Why would you make a joke like that?” I gasped.
Holman blanched. “Are you upset?”
“Of course I’m upset!”
“Why?”
“Because you just told me I’d lost six months of my life!”
“But it was only a joke. And everyone says laughter is the best medicine.”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?”
Holman seemed confused by my question. “You’re yelling at me, so no . . .”
“So it wasn’t funny!”
“Well,” he said, lifting one long, bony finger, “humor is a highly subjective construct, so I don’t think it’s fair to say definitively that something is or is not—” He must have seen the outrage on my face and decided to reverse course. “Okay. Sorry. Geez.”
I sighed, already exhausted from our short conversation. “Tell me what happened after I got shot.”
I could tell Holman wanted to continue talking about why his joke had failed. Fortunately he fought
