He gives me a cockeyed grin. “Relax. I left them alive. They’ll wake up with headaches, some bruises, and a story to tell the next chick they want to pick up. But I couldn’t let them call the cops on us. I’ve got my mom’s business to take care of.”
“Let’s just get to the hospital.”
He nods and settles in to the driver's seat and starts the vehicle. “We should talk about what comes next. After the hospital, that is.”
“What do you mean? I’m still going to help you. It’s the right thing to do. I think. Even if you did nearly kill those guys.”
“When you’re out, call me,” he says, then he says aloud his number. Twice. And has me repeat it to him.
Through the narrow windows set into the ambulance doors, I watch the gas station fade into the distance. The bodies of the two paramedics — little blue dots prone on the pavement — quickly disappear.
I want to answer. Want to give him some smart retort that’ll have him expressing at least some regret for massacring two EMTS and a hapless gas station attendant, but there’s a tremor working its way up my leg and, before I can open my mouth, my whole body shakes with frightening ferocity.
The last words I hear before I black out are: “Shit.”
* * * * *
“You’re lucky.”
My eyelids open reluctantly. My entire body hurts. My foot feels like it was dipped in hot lead. I’m a wreck.
“I don’t feel lucky,” I croak.
I’m in a hospital bed, swaddled in scratchy sheets and shivering because the air-conditioning vent is blowing right on me. There’s a doctor looming over my bed. He looks like he’s in his sixties, with an all-white beard, an all-bald head, spectacles, twinkling blue eyes that shine prismatically through his thick glasses, and a friendly smile.
“If that Good Samaritan hadn’t left you on our doorstep when they did, you would’ve been a goner. So, yeah, I’d say you got lucky.”
As I shake off the shackles of sleep, I start to feel stronger and sit up in bed. My foot still hurts, but the pain no longer throbs up my entire leg. Reluctantly — as if revealing it will suddenly cause my foot to change back to the infected, monstrously painful appendage it was — I pull the blanket back and look down at my foot. It’s wrapped in bandages, but the black lines no longer color my veins, and there’s no redness at all visible anywhere on my leg.
“What happened?”
“Your wound was infected. We gave you a high dose of some very strong antibiotics. Several doses. Enough to break the infection and we gave you some other medicines to get your other symptoms under control. You’ve been out for a long time, but you’re now well out of the woods. So, like I said: lucky.”
Even as I listen, I start to feel better. The pain fades, the chills stop, I feel stronger. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, maybe it’s the doctor’s cheerful bedside manner.
“When can I leave?” I say. Even my voice sounds stronger.
“In a few hours.”
“Are you serious?”
He doesn’t even check the clipboard in his hands. “I am. Your fever’s broke, the infection is gone. The nurse will give you a final evaluation before you leave, and we’ll send some antibiotics home with you — and you are to finish every single one of them. As long as you take it easy for the next few days, monitor your temperature, and stay off your foot, you should be back to normal soon enough.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“Just doing my job, Miss…” He stops, looks at his clipboard, then looks at it again. “Hmm. It seems there’s one more thing for you to do: complete your paperwork. Whoever brought you here left you with no identification of any sort, so please see one of the registrars on the way out and make sure all your information is in order.”
With that, he takes one last look at my chart and then leaves. I let out a relieved sigh and sink back into my scratchy-sheeted bed.
Anonymous. Party to a whole litany of crimes. I’ve crossed all kinds of personal red lines, all in a couple days. And yet, laying here alone, the first thing I think about is getting back to Blaze.
I tell myself it’s for the purpose of solving his mother’s problem. Whoever she is, she’s surely — I hope — more innocent than her son and, judging by Blaze’s reaction and his desperation, she’s likely the victim of some kind of crime. Nobody deserves to suffer like that. Besides, getting back to Blaze is the surest way to stop him from committing more crimes. That’s it. That’s my only motivation for thinking about him. It’s not because he emanates a violently feral sexuality and the kind of impossible cockiness that would make me mad enough to rip my hair out just listening to him, if not for the fact that he’s so strong and so willing to risk his own life that I believe there’s not much he can’t do.
Except maintain a good credit score, that is.
I fall asleep thinking about him. And his problems. Though mostly him.
When I wake up a few hours later, there’s a set of crutches by my bed, the clothes I came in with are sitting on a chair — cleaned and neatly folded — and there’s a note reminding me to see Ms. Carlotta in the registry office before I leave.
I get dressed while hopping on one foot, then prop the crutches under my armpits and hobble to the hospital billing department to find Ms. Carlotta.
It doesn’t take me long to find a frumpy, bespectacled woman in her fifties and the nameplate on her desk that gives her away as the arbiter of my
