Watch Me Fall (Ross Siblings, #5)(52)
But the darkness, it was winning. His phone clattered to the pavement. He had time for one last desperate glance at the shining lights inside Dermamania before they blurred before his eyes and blackness pulled him down and didn’t let go.
***
Fucking nicotine fit. Starla fought it for as long as she could, but it had its claws firmly in her, and with all her drama lately, it was worse than usual. She’d been smoking like a freight train, and everyone noticed.
“Damn! You fiend,” Ghost commented as she grabbed her smokes from her purse and headed toward the back. “Your lungs haven’t shriveled up and blown away yet?”
“Go f*ck a cactus,” she told him cheerfully.
Yeah, yeah, she needed to quit. She would. Someday. And someday might come a lot sooner if people would quit hassling her about it, damn. Besides, it was too nice a night to be stuck inside for more than an hour. That was another convenient excuse, and it wasn’t like she was busy tonight or anything. Two of her appointments had canceled on her last minute.
Stepping out the side door facing the parking lot, she pulled a cigarette from her pack with her teeth and glanced up at the sky. What were Jared and the girls doing? She missed them more than she liked to admit to herself. Missed the calming atmosphere at his place. Maybe if she called—
Wait. Why was Brian’s truck still here? Frowning around her cigarette, she glanced down at her watch. He’d left almost ten minutes ago.
When she looked back up for a closer inspection, her cigarette fell from her mouth, forgotten.
A dark shape huddled on the ground just a few feet from one of the security lights, a dark crumpled shape in a pool of red. Red, the only color she could discern in a spectrum of darkness.
“Jesus Christ.”
She reached him at a full run, falling to her knees, heedless of his blood getting on her clothes. “Brian!” she shrieked, wanting to touch him but terrified she shouldn’t move him. He lay mostly on his stomach, and she could see now that the trail of his blood extended for several feet, as if he’d fallen, and he’d crawled…
“Help!” she screamed back toward the shop. She screamed Ghost’s name, she screamed Janelle’s, she screamed until her throat was shredded by her own voice and she thought she might have to get up and go back in there to get help, but she didn’t know if she could walk. They probably couldn’t hear her for the music. Desperately surveying the scene in front of her, though she didn’t want to look, she didn’t…she saw that Brian’s phone rested only inches from his limp hand. It too was covered in his blood. She snatched it up and dialed 911, knowing that she had to find out if he was alive and not wanting to. She didn’t want to know, oh f*cking hell, she didn’t. But the dispatcher would ask if he had a pulse, if he was breathing. How could someone lose this much blood and live?
Closing her eyes, Starla said a prayer to the God her parents insisted was real and placed two searching fingertips on his neck, feeling for a pulse.
She almost fainted in relief when she found one. It was weak and fast, but it was there, and maybe her screams had been heard after all, because the sound of running feet and shouting voices was suddenly all around her. Ghost was there, and she’d never been so relieved to see him in her life. Janelle took Starla by the arms and tried to pull her up and away, but she fought. She’d almost forgotten she had the phone to her ear until a voice sounded. “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
Her inane babbling didn’t make any sense to her own ears, but somehow she managed to choke out the address and request an ambulance, running on complete autopilot as she watched Ghost try to find the source of Brian’s wound.
“Here it is. Fuck. Lower left back. It might be his kidney. Tell them to hurry the f*ck up, Star, or he won’t make it.” He snatched his own T-shirt off over his head and wadded it up, his face a pale nightmarish image of horror. He’s scared—Ghost is scared, and that’s never good, she thought irrationally. “I’m putting pressure on it,” he said.
Her voice shaking, she conveyed all that information to the dispatcher, who kept her on the phone until the distant sound of sirens reached them. She thanked the dispatcher and hung up, her heart pounding in her eardrums.
Max had done this. Max had tried to kill Brian. This couldn’t be random, couldn’t be a coincidence. Because of her mistake, because of her not listening, because of her being a f*cking idiot, her friend, her love—a husband, father, son, and brother—was dying in front of her.
When she found that goddamn motherf*cking piece of shit, she would kill him herself. They wouldn’t be able to stop her. She would gladly face a life in prison to get her hands around his throat.
“Oh, Brian,” she said weakly, staring at his beloved face, so pallid now. At least he wasn’t awake to be in pain. She couldn’t think about the pain he’d just gone through pulling himself across the parking lot, the fear, the desperation he must have felt. How he must have been thinking about Candace and Lyric.
And Candace. What to do about Candace? Starla couldn’t imagine making that call.
No. No call. She needed to be told in person, but not by someone wearing a good portion of her husband’s blood. Starla looked up at Janelle, who stood with her head down and her arms crossed, sobbing with huge, gasping breaths. She’d never seen Janelle cry, ever.
“Jan?” As the ambulance rushed into the parking lot followed by two police cars, Starla found the strength to stand and go to her friend. Janelle all but collapsed in her arms, and somehow she held on to her without falling herself. After a moment of pointlessly trying to comfort her, she said, “Someone has to go tell Candace.”