Page 4 of Shy Girl
Then she disappeared beneath a hulking blur of white and brown.
The clatter of a gun falling to the floor and a shout of pain followed. Two seconds of silence passed before I managed to ask, “J-j-jayson?”
“Fine,” he called. “Call 9-1-1. Tell them what’s happening.”
I reached for the phone in my back pocket and, after three attempts to type in my passcode, I finally got it right. My fingers trembled as I dialed 9-1-1, then waited while the phone rang dully. Another voice came on the line.
“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”
For a moment, it felt as if my tongue was glued to the top of my mouth. My lips would no sooner form the wordsI need helpthan my body could fly. The operator spoke again, her voice pressured.
“Hello?”
Panic and frustration made my mind fuzzy until I forced myself to calm down.
There is no pressure for me to speak.
A third attempt yielded no result, which only compounded my desperation. I knew what I wanted to say, I just couldn't get the words out. Not even a squeak or a sound.
“Hello?”
Finally, like a dam giving way, the words exited my throat. “N-n-need h-h-help,” I cried. “F-frolicking M-m-moose. G-gun!”
The operator rushed to respond, but I ignored her to scramble around the counter. Jayson lay on top of the woman, the gun barely out of reach. I hurried over and kicked it out of the way as he struggled to get a flailing arm under his control. Once she was fully subdued, and screaming like a wild thing into the tile, he glanced up at me.
“You good?”
I nodded.
“Help coming?” he asked, his face a mask of concentration as he held her pinned to the floor.
I nodded.
“Good work, Dag.”
His praise came seconds after the first siren screamed down the street toward us. Red and blue lights whirled outside, seconds away as they barreled down the Main Street in the quiet mountain town of Pineville.
“Wh-what can I d-do?”
“Nothing.” He sent me a quick grin, one that I’d seen on a crappy video years ago when I stole a sneak at the C-tape. “I got this.”
2
Jayson
My boss, a heavyset woman named Kate, glowered at the floor of the Frolicking Moose. A little smudge of blood the shape of a ring lingered on the tile. She canted her head to the side as she studied it, then made a raspberry sound with her lips. The woman I’d tackled had gone down hard, but she struggled even harder. In the process, she knocked her bottom lip and split it in half.
“New drug, they’re saying,” Kate said with aharrumphlike an old bulldog. She shook her head as she attempted to clear the bloodstain with the toe of her shoe. “Something like a cross between an amphetamine with the addictive properties of an opioid. Inhaled, mostly. Reports are coming in from local cities, too. State authorities think it’s isolated to a small cell here. No one else is reporting something similar yet.”
That information ran through my mind.New drug.That’s all we needed. Drugs had been an increasing problem in our quiet mountain town for the last several months. New stuff would only draw more of them here and create more issues. I rubbed my jaw, still a little sore from an errant elbow.
“She was freakishly strong on it,” I said.
“They all are.”
Her dismissive comment nearly set my teeth on edge, but I shoved that off. The high of adrenalin had subsided in the aftermath. The rush seemed to fade faster with each event. Full night had already fallen outside, and after an early morning with a heavy workout, I felt the extent of my fatigue. Not even the cup of coffee I’d finished almost two hours ago seemed to work anymore.
Maybe I was just getting old.
