I turned my head to stare at Jackson.
And, while I had my gaze off of my mother for all of two seconds, she pulled out a gun and shot me.Chapter 20Today I plan on being as useless as the person that’s supposed to check your order at McDonald’s.
-Text from Oakley to Pace
Oakley
Everything happened fast after Pace’s mother pulled the gun.
“Rana, no!” I cried out.
But it was too late.
Pace, being Pace, tried to intervene, but his mother was dead set on doing what she wanted to do—which was shoot Sergeant Jackson.
She pulled the trigger, and Pace’s body jerked with the force of the bullet ripping through his upper chest.
He went down on his knees almost immediately, the impact of the bullet forcing him down whether he wanted to be there or not. His balance was off, too, and before he had much of a chance to do much of anything, he was flat on his ass looking at his hand which was dotted with red.
Panic coursed through me as I tried to comprehend what had just happened.
That was when Ford—where in the hell had he come from?— hit Rana Vineyard like a battering ram. One second Rana still had the gun pointed in Jackson’s direction, and the next she was on the ground with two hundred and thirty pounds of pissed off Spurlock on top of her.
And let me just tell you, Ford was not nice at all. He didn’t care that Rana was a woman. Not at that moment in time anyway.
He just threw her down and forced her face into the grass as he tried to wrestle the gun out of her hand.
She was a scrappy woman, though, and held onto that gun for all that she was worth, knowing that things hadn’t gone her way.
Jackson, being the asshole that he was, placed his booted foot over her wrist to help.
But, when he did that, all it did was break Rana’s wrist with the force that he’d used.
The gun went off a second time as her finger clenched on the trigger, and Jackson went down for his troubles, taking a bullet to the foot.
I went down on my knees in front of Pace and had the phone in my hand dialing 9-1-1 in the next second.
Ripping my shirt off since it was the only thing I had that I could put pressure on his wound with, I hastily explained to the operator that two cops were shot at my current location and we needed help.
Moments after that, I tossed the phone into the grass beside Pace and pressed my balled up shirt against his chest.
“Fuck,” I breathed as I stared into his eyes.
He was calm.
Really calm.
His eyes were clear and focused, and he was staring straight at me with a look of pure desperation in them.
“I wanted to wait three months and three days to ask you to marry me at your six-month kidney anniversary,” he rasped. “I already have the ring.”
My breath hitched in my chest. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding tired. “I wasn’t going to give you a choice, though. I was just going to tell you to do it.”
My lips twitched. “Do you think that would’ve worked?”
He shrugged, using his bad shoulder, and he winced, his face going deathly pale as shock started to course through him. “I don’t know…do you?”
“I…” I stilled when his breath stopped coming evenly and began coming in choppy short pants.
Seconds after that, he was on his side and was closing his eyes as his breathing paused for a long moment before resuming.
“Pace!” I cried out, my hand going to his face. “Pace, honey. Pace.”
He refused to open his eyes.
And before I could call his name again, I was physically pulled up and backward as the scene around me descended into utter chaos.
There were cops everywhere, as well as a fire engine and two ambulances.
I stared at the world around me as nearly three quarters of the medics and firefighters went down to their knees to help Pace.
“We gotta get him to the hospital,” I heard one of them say. “No breath sounds on the left side. His lung collapsed.”
Ford, who was holding onto me as well as holding me up, pulled me to one of the ambulances. “Go and sit down. They’ll get him in here in a second.”
I did as I was asked and sat quietly in the corner, hoping I didn’t get in the way.
My eyes were all for Pace who was being loaded onto a gurney and carried toward the back of the ambulance.
When he was loaded, I shoved even farther into the corner as they worked on him.
“Lung’s back up,” I heard someone say.
Everything was happening too fast, and my head was spinning.
I felt something touch my calf, and I followed the bloody fingers to the bloody arm, further to the bloody chest. Fingers, an arm, and a chest that I knew so well that it hurt.