One Blood

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Eight

 

Monday

Lake City, LA

 

Fat Pat watched the kid sprint down the corridor. The lanky bastard ran in a zig-zag pattern like it was going to stop him from catching a bullet.

Fat Pat tried to take another shot but the gun jammed. Cursing, Fat Pat took off down the hall. He had to get his hands on that kid. In his haste, Fat Pat tripped over some wires and belly-flopped on the linoleum floor. The weapon flew out of his hand and discharged when it hit the ground.

The sound was louder than a grenade going off in an aluminum trash can.

The kid stopped dead in his tracks when the gun went off. He patted his body to see if he’d been hit anywhere, then ran back to retrieve the gun, which had come to a rest midway between the two of them.

Fat Pat watched helplessly as the kid picked up the gun with a quivering arm and aimed it at his head.

“Hey kid, put the gun down, man. You ain’t gonna shoot nobody. Come on, man, I’ll take you wherever you wanna go. We can get a doctor and I’ll get you back home…”

“What about Shorty?”

“What the hell you talkin’ ‘bout?”

 The tremor in the kid’s hand was gone. “Ya’ll think you can just kill whoever you want,” the kid said, tears streaming down his face. “Now I see how it works. You take a gun like this, point it at some defenseless person and you’ve got the power, right? Killing helpless little kids…that make you feel like a man?”

“I ain’t kill nobody, man!”

“Who’s the man now, huh?” The kid was less than ten paces away from Fat Pat.

“Please,” Fat Pat pleaded. He wondered if he could outmaneuver a speeding bullet.

The kid’s arm relaxed slightly as he lowered his eyes from his target. For a second, Fat Pat thought he might avoid Trump and Salsa’s fate, but then those eyes came up blazing with resolve.

“It’s funny, you know,” the kid said without a trace of humor in his voice. “All my life I’ve thought I was different than Lincoln. Now here I am with this gun and I think I know exactly what he was feeling that day.”

A nurse appeared in the hallway behind the kid. “Hey!” she yelled.

As the kid turned to look at the nurse, Fat Pat made his move. He grabbed the barrel of the gun and tried to wrestle it out of the kid’s hand. Fat Pat’s fingers flirted with the trigger as he inverted the gun toward the kid’s chest.

The nurse hit Fat Pat over the head with something hard and he lost his grip on the gun. As he fell backwards, he watched the barrel swing back toward his chest.

The kid stumbled backward as well, and when his back hit the wall, his finger squeezed the trigger.

The bullet sliced through Fat Pat’s sizeable gut, exiting out the other side. The pain was intense, like being stabbed with a molten hot fireplace poker. His heartbeat drummed in his head as he slid down the wall. Fat Pat coughed violently and pus-filled blood dribbled down his chin.

The nurse stared at him in horror; the kid’s expression was a blank mask of shock.

Fat Pat wondered if this was how Salsa and Trump had lived their last moments—thinking about how nothing they’d ever done in their entire lives had meant anything. He struggled to get up.

Several men burst through the Employees Only entrance.

Fat Pat watched them approach in slow motion, guns drawn. He waited for another bullet barrage that never came. These were the strangest looking cops he’d ever seen, with their slicked-back hair and dark suits.

Must be undercover.

The cops trained their weapons on the kid and commanded him to drop the gun. The kid stared back at them like they spoke a foreign language.

Fat Pat shut his eyes as a cold wave washed over him. When he opened them, the men were slapping handcuffs on the kid. The nurse lay on the floor beside him, in her own pool of blood.

Fat Pat stared at the unconscious girl in the hospital hallway as he slowly bled to death. He knew this was it, but still felt glad he wasn’t going wherever they were taking the kid. He’d spent enough time in the streets to know that whoever those guys were, they were very bad news.