Page 143 of College Town

He caught the wet sheen of tears in Tommy’s eyes, the awful, twisted-up anguish on his face, and then Tommy turned, fumbled open the door, and threw himself out of the car.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said again, as Lawson reached for him, slammed the door, and disappeared into the dark.

34

The world narrows down to a singular point, and that point is Tommy. His bloodless face and his bloody shirt; the way his blood dries tacky in all the creases of Lawson’s hands. Tommy is dying, and Tommy is wearing an NYPD badge, and nothing makes any sense, but how could it? Nothingwillmake any sense ever again if Tommy dies.

He's only dimly aware of what goes on around them. Noah is there, and Noah has a radio he keeps shouting into. When he tries to push Lawson aside, Lawsongrowlsat him, growls like a dog, and Noah doesn’t make a second attempt. Sirens come, and drown out all other sound. There’s an ambulance, and men in blue pants and white shirts who “need to do their job, Lawson,” and so Lawson lets go, finally, and lets the paramedics tend to Tommy. Tommy gets a mask strapped to his face, and a thick wad of sterile bandaging replaces Lawson’s jacket over his wounds. The medics load him into the ambulance, and when Lawson pulls himself inside to ride in back, no one tries to stop him.

They do stop him, though, at the hospital.

“Sir – sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait out here,” a stern-faced nurse tells him as the gurney wheels through a set of swinging doors.

Lawson reaches to brush her aside, and he sees the brown, dried blood on his hands. She does, too, her eyes widening. “Sir, why don’t you–”

“Lawson,” a familiar voice says. “Darling, come here, it’s alright.”

It’s Natalia. She takes his arm and when she tries to tow him away, he finds he doesn’t have enough energy to resist. “I’ll take care of him,” she tells the nurse. “Will you please keep us updated on Tom?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come on, Lawson, this way.”

Without Tommy, he doesn’t care about…anything. He follows. Natalia leads him through a swinging door into a cool, tiled place that smells of bleach. He realizes it’s the women’s restroom when a woman steps out of a stall and does a double-take at him.

“Excuse us,” Natalia tells her brightly, and takes him to one of the sinks.

She pushes up her sleeves and washes his hands for him. He could do it himself, but he doesn’t really want to – that’s Tommy’s blood. If Tommy dies, that’ll be the last tangible piece of him he has. But he doesn’t refuse her when she lathers his fingers and uses her long nails to scrape beneath his. Stands limp and unresisting as a doll as she pats him dry afterward with scratchy brown paper towels.

She leads him back out of the restroom, and down a hallway to a different waiting room, this one quiet and empty. She pushes him down into a chair, steps away. When she steps back, she offers him a can of Coke and a vending machine bag of roasted peanuts.

When he only stares at her, she opens the Coke – pop-hiss– and presses it into his hand. “Drink,” she orders. “It’ll help.”

He takes a sip, and it’s sweet, and fizzy, and he thinks,Will it help Tommy? Will it fix the holes in his stomach if I drink this?

He knows the answer, but he drinks it anyway, and Natalia sits down beside him with a quiet sigh and takes his free hand. “It’ll be okay,” she says, and it’s a kind lie.

Slowly, the sugar in the soda gets his blood pumping again, and some of the fog in his head lifts. Not enough for real panic to take hold of him, but enough that his breathing picks up audibly, and his heart skips several beats.

Natalia squeezes his hand.

His voice is a rusty croak, his throat sore when he speaks, and he realizes that at some point, he was screaming. He screamed long and hard and shredded the inside of his own throat. “Is Tommy a cop?” he croaks out.

He's grateful for the way Nat doesn’t hesitate or try to spin things. She says, simply, “Yes. He’s an undercover detective.”

“Noah?”

“Yes. The same.”

“You?”

“No. I’m an informant. I made a deal so I didn’t go to prison with my father.”

He nods. “Cool.” Then he leans forward and vomits Coke all over the floor.

~*~

Nat goes to the nurse’s station and comes back with a roll of paper towels. She bends as if to clean the mess up herself, but he takes the towels from her and mops up as best he can, feeling like he’s drowning the whole time.

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