And it did its job.
Where the vest was there to protect him.
He’d been shot one time by a .500 Smith & Wesson revolver.
“I need some blood!” I heard a man yell.
I felt dissociated from my body as I walked stiffly into the puddle of his blood and picked up all his stuff.
His vest. His prosthetics. His shirt.
Blood was dripping off of them when I started backing away, pushing myself into the corner of the room.
“Got sinus rhythm,” I heard called.
My eyes went to the man—finally—that had taken my breath away when he’d stopped breathing, and I saw that his eyes were open and searching.
“Pace,” I whispered.
There was no way in hell that he could’ve heard me. None. Not with as much commotion that was going through the small area.
But, miraculously, his eyes turned to me and they smiled.
Even with blood everywhere all over him, he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
But then his eyes widened, and I saw the alarm start to shoot through them.
I was honestly scared to look over my shoulder to see what Pace was seeing.
I dropped down to my butt and pulled my legs up to my chest.
When I shifted my body, the body armor that’d been once covering Pace was now mostly covering me.
And that action was exactly what saved my life.
Gunshots filled the air.
People went down.
I felt something hard hit my chest. Felt the burn. Smelled the gunpowder.
My hand hurt.
Why did my hand hurt?
And was it normal for it to be smoky?
I lifted the vest higher and ducked my head.
Another explosion against my body.
***
Trance
“This is utterly a goddamn joke,” I said as I looked around the ER.
Today, when I’d gotten the call that my daughter’s house had been broken into and that someone had been shot where she’d once laid her head, I’d nearly lost it.
I nearly lost it for a second time as I was pulling into town and my son’s ringtone filled my ear. When I’d answered, Ford had told me that someone had shot Pace.
Now I was marching straight into the emergency room as if I owned the place. As if I had every right to be there.
I looked down the hallway, first one way, then the other, and then spotted my son at the end of it talking to another officer.
Justice, my good friend’s son.
I walked straight up to them and said, “How is he?”
Justice and Ford’s eyes both turned to me.
“Shot in the chest, right underneath his collarbone. He would’ve been fine, perfectly in and out, but a bullet fragment sheared off of the bullet and lodged deeper in his chest. When he moved, the bullet fragment nicked his lung and it collapsed. He…”
A commotion on the other side of the double doors we were standing on had us all three looking in the direction of the yelling.
Justice had his hand on the handle opening the door when a series of loud thuds filled the air, followed shortly by an ‘oh fuck.’
When we rounded the corner, it was to find an officer on his face in the hallway, blood smearing the floor all around him. A nurse was on her knees beside the officer, and Justice freaked.
“Runner, where the fuck is Jackson?” Justice barked.
Runner, who I assumed was the cop on the floor, groaned and turned over.
“He just took a metal fuckin’ clipboard to the face,” the nurse said. “He’s not going to be able to talk right now. But make yourselves useful and follow that combative patient that just ran down the hallway…”
“His gun is gone,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach.
All of us got quiet for a few long seconds, then Ford was running.
He didn’t get there in time.
None of us did before the bullets started sounding.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
I rounded the corner in time to come to a skidding halt.
I’ll never forget the feeling.
I was running toward the shooter who had a handgun in both hands.
In one hand, he was aiming the gun down the hallway, and in the other, he was aiming it into the room, firing at the same time.
There were bodies on the floor all around him.
One of those bodies—Pace—was crawling toward a mass in the corner of the room.
Army crawling through his own blood, as a matter of fact, as the shooter had a showdown with the security guard at the other end of the hallway from where he was standing.
He was bleeding from his head. The gauze that was taped to his chest was soaked through with blood, and he looked so fucked up that I was honestly surprised that he was able to move.
But knowing that Pace wouldn’t be moving right now if that lump in the corner wasn’t important to him, I knew that it was my daughter under there.
I could also see shattered glass and exploded plaster behind the lump, indicating that shots had hit extremely close to her at one point in time.