Page 140 of College Town

He fires.

Ray fires.

The two sounds overlap one another, the cannon and the firecracker.Boom.Crack.

Dirt explodes just to Ray’s left, and Ray keeps walking.

Tommy falls.

Lawson has never fired a gun before, never been to a range, never even held one. But the principle, he thinks, is pretty simple. Aim, pull the trigger. Belatedly, he hopes the damn thing doesn’t have a safety, and if it does, he hopes it isn’t on.

Ray is right beside him, ignoring him, heading for Tommy.

Lawson aims as best he can, and pulls.

Ray’s head kicks violently to the side, and beyond him, blood and flesh shower as if sprayed from a high-pressure hose. Lawson watches just long enough to know that, as Ray topples, he isn’t going to get back up again.

Time starts again.

He runs.

Gravels bites through his pants and into his knees as she slides down to kneel beside Tommy. “Where – what are – Tommy?Tommy.” He wants to touch, and doesn’t know where; he wants to help; he wants to do something, but his hands flutter like nervous birds and he can barely choke out the words around the hot, throbbing lump of his heart in his throat. “Tommy, are you…?”

He's not dead, which was his immediate thought when he watched him tip backward. It doesn’t matter if Lawson goes away for murder if Tommy’s dead.

But Tommy’s not dead – not yet. Both hands are clutched tight to his stomach where the bullets went in, where his shirt is red and getting redder by the second. His legs are utterly still, but his torso is heaving, twisting, like it’s trying to escape the awful thing that’s happened to it.

He's breathing, sucking in great, wheezing gasps of air, his face white with shock, his eyes huge, his pupils tiny pinpricks beneath the washed-out glare of the sun. “I – I don’t – I can’t–” he tries to say, and one of his hands fumbles up to grip at Lawson’s forearm, hot and slippery with blood.

He's not dead, but he’sdying, and Lawson has todo something.

“Okay,” he says, and ruthlessly shoves all of his emotions to the side. They can’t help him here. Love won’t keep Tommy alive.

Pressure. He has to apply pressure.

“It’s okay,” he says with a calmness he doesn’t feel. “Baby, it’s okay, I’m right here. Hold on.”

With hands made steady by necessity, he pulls Tommy’s tie loose and then thumbs open his shirt buttons, one by one. Something gold and metallic catches his eye, but he keeps going, until he has to pry Tommy’s hand off the wound. Wounds, plural. Two of them, both below the hard line of his last rib, and the harder, strange black vest he wears beneath his shirt. Close together. They…

No, don’t think about it. Not now.

Lawson tears one half of the fine, lawn dress shirt loose with a sharp yank, bundles it up, and then presses it over the pulsing, bloody mess of Tommy’s stomach. Then he shrugs out of his own Carhartt jacket and adds it as well. Presses hard – hard enough that Tommy whimpers and closes his eyes.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry. I have to get the bleeding to stop.”

While he leans the weight of his upper body against the wad of rapidly-soaking fabric, his gaze is drawn again toward Tommy’s chest, and that brilliant flash of gold. Lawson looks at it, and he recognizes it, but refuses to believe what he’s seeing. This is Tommy. Tommy the mob boss. Tommy who got him to sell heroin to college kids. Who gets chauffeured around in Lincolns, and is engaged to a bratva princess, and just shot two men through the back window of one of his own cars.

All of that’s true, but the thing around his neck, dangling off a silver chain, is a leather-backed police badge. NYPD.

The whoop and scream of sirens pricks the air, and draws nearer. Did he call the police and doesn’t remember? Were cops tailing them all along?

Tommy’s eyes spring open on a gasp. His face is very white, and waxy. Lawson presses harder on the makeshift bandage.

“I –Law,” Tommy chokes out, and coughs. “I have to – to tell you–”

“Lawson!” someone shouts. Footsteps bound over the gravel, heading toward them, but Lawson doesn’t look. He puts all his effort into applying pressure, and he holds Tommy’s glassy gaze.

“What? You have to tell me what?”

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