“What do you mean?” His voice was high and full of panic. “You know you wanted me to! Oh God, I shot them. OH GOD!”
“Whoa, Rambo, you might want to put that thing down.” Steve sounded like he was joking. How is was joking? Amelia wondered. She couldn’t ponder it long. She was so sleepy. The pain was disappearing, but this tempting darkness was pulling at her with luscious, dark tentacles. “It doesn’t matter what you think I said. You are in this deep. So you need to stop flipping out and start focusing.”
“Oh, I’ll focus. Give me my money.” Randy’s voice wobbled, high-pitched and frantic, the gun still extended in front of him, not exactly pointing at Steve but not pointing away either. “I’m not doing anything else till you give me the damned money.”
“You’ll get your money. Hold on.” Steve knelt back down in front of the safe and disappeared out of Amelia’s eye line. Her drifting mind wondered what her life was worth to Randy and why Steve didn’t just use the money he was going to pay for his “services” to pay off their debts. Why? That was a question she never seemed to have an answer to in her life. But her pondering didn’t last long. Since she couldn’t see Steve, Amelia watched Randy as he waited for Steve to count his payment, his defenses falling down around him, the gun slowly lowered to his side.
Even in his monochrome outfit, the jeans tapered into a nearly skinny cut, and the black tee shirt rolled at the sleeves and hugged his muscles in a very complimentary way. It was like she was watching a movie rather than real life. Part of her mind said, You’ve been shot . . . Save yourself . . . Save Caleb . . . , but mostly her mind and body were telling her to be still and close her eyes.
“Could you hurry?” Randy bounced on the edge of his toes.
“Keep your cool, dude.” Steve’s voice was steady and sure, and Amelia could see its controlling effect on Randy. “Already have enough messes to clean up thanks to you.”
“I think I cleaned up your mess today,” Randy said, placing the gun down on the desk again and picking up the ski mask. “When do those cameras come back on?”
“The backup generator for the cameras kicks in after fifteen minutes of power loss. That’s what the brochure said anyway. Too bad we didn’t get to test it before you got all trigger happy,” Steve responded, sounding distracted.
“I’m not going down because of your shitty cameras.” Randy slipped on the ski mask and adjusted it over his nose and mouth. “Next time you want to commit insurance fraud, maybe don’t point cameras at your house.” He picked up the gun again and this time pointed it right at where Steve would’ve been crouching. “That’s long enough. It doesn’t take that long to count out twenty grand. I want the money, now.”
It was like the anonymity of the mask gave him some kind of power. The gun didn’t shake this time, and Amelia knew that if Steve didn’t produce a payment soon, he would be added to the list of Randy’s victims.
An unnerving amount of blood surrounded Amelia in a crimson halo, and when she tried to fight all of her instincts to drift asleep and turn to watch Randy, the carpet squished like it did when the front window broke during a storm and flooded the office. Bile burned at the back of her throat as she moved one inch and then another, with no real plan for how she could stop Randy or help Steve.
Then she remembered Caleb. Caleb had come in, right? And then there was the shot. Oh, Caleb, trying to help her, trying to save her, and look what it got him. She was afraid to look but needed to know if her old friend was alive or dead. Amelia cocked her head to one side, the pain in her shoulder returning with the movement. But it was worth it. From that angle, she could see Caleb. He was alive. Relief washed over her, and she spent an extra moment checking his body for injury.
On his side facing her, he didn’t seem to be moving, but he was awake and watching the men argue. Her slight movement caught his eye. Amelia tried to speak, but no sound came out and it was becoming more difficult to breathe, like a pair of steel hands were around her lungs, constricting. Caleb, who had blood on the floor beside him and on his clothes and smeared on his face, seemed more with it than Amelia. He put up one finger to his lips, leaving a line of red. Then he mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t understand very much right now, like why time seemed to be going by in slow motion, and she definitely didn’t understand why Caleb would be apologizing to her. As she closed her eyes to ponder these things and escape into the warmth of the darkness, one more loud bang made her eyes open in a flash, panic flooding through her. Steve. Did Randy shoot Steve?
The darkness fell back away from her eyes, painful like pins and needles after your foot falls asleep. The room came into focus and she did see Randy, and he was very, very close to her now, and though there were a lot of things Amelia didn’t know, what she did know was that Randy was dead. His body lay within arm’s reach, blood pouring out from a wound in the back of his head. It was half-covered by the ski mask but still made her stomach turn. The bile in her throat built to a tipping point, and she couldn’t fight the nausea any longer. It burned in her throat and nose, and the smell as she spit onto the floor made the bile creep up again, threatening to cause another involuntary reaction.
The safe clicked closed, and Amelia could see through the blurring darkness that Steve was not only alive when he emerged from behind the desk, he was also unharmed. He had a large silver gun in his hand, much bigger than the one Randy had been using and that was now resting just a few inches away from Amelia. Steve surveyed the scene and shook his head like he was sincerely sorry that things had gone so horribly wrong. Then he walked over and checked Randy’s pulse, careful to only touch him with two fingers. Steve’s work boots squished with each step, the carpet of the office nearly to the point of saturation from the three injured, dead, or dying.
Without a second thought, Steve stepped over Randy’s body and approached Caleb, who was now lying still on the ground, eyes closed, incredibly pale. After seeing Randy go from living to dead in a matter of seconds, Amelia was scared that Caleb, the only person in the room who hadn’t been involved in some kind of scheme, was already gone. But when Steve leaned down to place his fingers on Caleb’s jugular, checking for a pulse, Caleb’s eyes flashed open and he grabbed onto Steve’s arm like he was trying to pull him down.
“Don’t worry about me. Call 911. Amelia is in bad shape. Save Amelia.” At first she’d thought Caleb was fighting with Steve, but it turned out he was begging him. Amelia was even more confused at Caleb’s pleadings until she remembered that Caleb hadn’t seen everything, getting there just as the shots were fired.