“And then get back here as fast as you can!” Colin shouted. “I need your help!”
Evan hurried over to Lester and slapped one cuff on Lester’s wrist and then dragged Lester’s body closer to the rail, slapping the other cuff around a post. Lester moaned, coming to as Evan rushed back. Evan fell to his knees near Margolis, his eyes wide.
“What do I do?”
“Take over the stomach wound… where my hand is. And press hard!”
Though the blood loss was definitely slowing, Margolis’s breathing had grown shallower…
Evan did as he was told and Colin used both hands on the neck wound, and seconds later, Colin heard the first of the sirens. Then a growing chorus of them, and while he willed them to get here faster, all he could think was Don’t die on me. Whatever you do, don’t die…
On the porch, Lester moaned again and his eyes finally blinked open, unfocused.
A sheriff’s deputy was the first to arrive, followed quickly by an officer from the Shallotte police department, both coming to screeching halts in the middle of the street, lights flashing. Both men jumped out of their cars and rushed toward them, guns drawn, uncertain what to do.
“Detective Margolis has been shot!” Colin shouted as they approached. “The guy cuffed to the railing was the one who shot him!” Both the deputy and the officer looked toward the porch and Colin forced a steadiness in his tone. “The gun’s still up there. We can’t let these wounds go. And make sure the ambulance is coming – he’s lost a lot of blood and I’m not sure how much longer he can hold on!”
The officer approached the porch while the deputy ran back to his car and shouted into the radio that an officer was down, demanding that the ambulance hurry. Both Colin and Evan kept their focus on the wounds; Evan had recovered enough for some color to have returned to his cheeks.
Minutes later, the ambulance arrived and a couple of paramedics hopped out and grabbed the stretcher. More sheriff’s deputies had arrived by then, along with additional police officers, the street out front now crowded with vehicles.
When the paramedics finally took over for Colin and Evan, Margolis was looking even worse. He was nonresponsive and barely breathing by the time he was placed on the stretcher. The paramedics were moving quickly; the stretcher was loaded into the back and one of the paramedics hopped behind the wheel while the other stayed with Margolis. By the time it was rolling forward, the ambulance had a police and sheriff escort, sirens blaring, and only then did the world start slowly coming back into focus.
Colin could feel the shakiness in his limbs, the nerves beginning to subside. His hands and wrists were coated with the syrupy feel of drying blood; Evan’s shirt looked as though it had been partially dipped in a vat of red dye. Evan wandered off, bent over, and vomited.
One of the deputies went to his trunk, returning with a couple of plain white T-shirts, and handed one to Colin, the other to Evan. Even before Colin gave his statement, he was already reaching for his phone to call Maria and tell her what had happened.
But as he spoke, all he could think about was Margolis.
Over the next hour, as the sky dimmed and finally went black, an even larger crowd of police officers and sheriff’s deputies had descended on the bungalow, as well as a detective from Wilmington and the county sheriff.
Lester was delusional and argumentative, screaming gibberish and resisting arrest before finally being secured in the back of a squad car and sent on his way to jail.