Jacked (Trent Brothers #1)(185)
I yank my pants back up one hip and try to keep my balance. Good thing I’m pissing into a wide open ditch on the side of the road, because I can’t aim for shit this morning. I realized I went too far last night when the town drunk had to nudge me to inform me it was last call.
If Old Man Doherty is more sober than you are at closing time, you’re probably in for a world of liver damage and hangover pain.
When I’m done hosing down a fair amount of weeds along the highway, I climb into the back of the truck. Dean slides the window open and his face sticks out, clean-shaven and so damn good. The kid’s like the Boy Scouts and Superman and Leave it to Beaver all rolled into one upstanding hulk. It makes my soul darken just looking at all that upstandingness.
“What the hell is it now, Dean?” I moan as I grab an IV set up and a bag of saline. I hook myself up without so much as a wince, used to this routine, and settle back, an arm over my eyes.
“Are you riding back there?” he asks.
Even his voice is like some radio announcer’s. Good f*cking god, could they have paired me with anyone more obnoxiously eager to do his best every day to keep physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight… I did make it to a few Boy Scout meetings during my tattered youth. Mostly because Billy Santos’s sister was hot as hell, and his mother led the troop, so Sierra Santos tagged along.
Once Mama Bear Santos caught me with my tongue down her daughter’s throat, I was out of the scouting life for good.
“No, Dean. I’m riding up front with you. This is a hologram of me lying back here. Just trying to keep you on your toes.” How the hell long does this IV take to work? I need to rehydrate. My head is pulsing.
Dean starts the engine and pulls out. I rock back and forth, and it makes me smile. He’s driving like a dick because he knows it will shake me up. So Superman has a shitty side. I like it.
“Look, you can drink all you want on your own time. But you shouldn’t show up to work drunk. People depend on us, Warren. We have lives on the line.” He makes the speech like he’s been practicing it in his head since I forced him to pull over so I could take a wiz.
I slow clap. “That’s it, man. Keep it coming. I have this feeling your speeches are going to be exactly as much help as my guidance counselor’s feel-good posters in high school. That speech you just made? It’s the equivalent of that one poster with the kitten on the tree branch that said, ‘Hang in there!’ Both of ‘em just about changed my life.”
“Screw off, Warren. You may think this is just some big joke, but I take this seriously.” I look up. He’s staring straight out the windshield, and—damn—even the back of his head looks serious.
“I’ll tell you what. When you’ve been on this job more than a week, you come back and talk to me about serious.” Talk to me after you work your first code. Talk to me once you watch someone you love die. I feel the sludge of churning acid burn at the back of my throat, but I swallow it down.
“This call? The two of us showing up five minutes late might mean we’re too late to help. Did you ever think of that?” he demands, his hands squeezing that steering wheel the way I know he wants to squeeze my throat.
“I might have,” I say, closing my eyes and breathing easy through my nose. “If it wasn’t a call to the Fenwick’s.”
I can see him itching like hell to ask me, but his pride won’t let him. I chuckle and lean back, glad to let him stew. He thinks he invented this game, but he doesn’t even have a clue how to play. And the Fenwick’s will be a nice introduction to ‘Get Off Your Fucking High Horse 101.’
Dean keeps the lights and sirens going the whole way there, then pulls into the tiny driveway of the Fenwick’s’ home so sharply it feels like he’s taken part of the curb with him. He flings open the backdoors and glares at me.
“You have to get off the stretcher, Warren. We need it for the call.” He nudges my boot, but I don’t budge.
“We don’t need the stretcher, because this call is gonna be bullshit,” I say. He tosses a pair of gloves onto my lap and shoves a pair into his back pocket.
“You don’t know that. Dispatch said ‘unknown medical emergency.’ Someone could have had a stroke. Or fallen. Get off the damn stretcher,” Dean yips. He yanks at the heart monitor on the bench seat and slings the medical bag over his shoulder. “You want people dying on your watch, fine. But I’m going inside, even if I have to carry the patient out on my back.”
“There’s no patient!” I yell after him, but he’s already slammed the heavy door to the back of the truck.
I grab a four-by-four and tear it open with my teeth, yank the IV from my arm and press the gauze square to my skin as I heave myself off the stretcher and follow Dean across the pristinely manicured lawn.
The front door, made of heavy, ornately carved oak, flings open with a bang.
And Chelsea Fenwick is standing there in a nearly identical version of the next-to-nothing dress she was wearing last night at the bar, holding a glass of tea, looking like every southern boy’s fantasy.
“Well, well, well,” she says, nibbling on the end of her straw. “Talk about full service. I asked for you, Caleb, and they sent two handsome men in uniform.”
“You requested him? You can’t request medics, ma’am,” Dean says, his cheeks a deep, frustrated red. “Where is the patient?”