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Chapter Thirty-Three
Hunter
It didn’t take long for the sirens to reach him. When Hunter had called 911 and said he thought Vanessa had been drugged and was overdosing, they’d promised to be there immediately, and it looked like they were keeping that promise.
“Hunter?” Opal’s little voice came from under the bed. She peeked up at him through teary eyes. “Is my mommy dead?”
“No, honey.” Hunter gently pulling Opal from under the bed and covered her eyes.
He cradled her against his chest and ran from the room. Had she peeked and seen something she shouldn’t have? He hoped not. The kid had been through enough.
The smell, though. He couldn’t hold her nose and cover her eyes. But the place stunk. There was blood everywhere and the distinctive smell of a body dying—like feces and urine and vomit. He’d smelled it once or twice after a hit, but never in this quantity. He dodged the bodies on the floor and hurried to get Opal outside.
He took the stairs, climbing down them as quickly as was safe. When his feet hit the ground floor and he burst out through the emergency doors, he saw swarms of police and the ambulance.
Someone else must’ve called about the gunshots. Someone in the hotel, maybe. They might even have surveillance. His running caught the cops’ attention and several of them charged at him.
“Freeze!” they shouted.
Hunter stopped. “I have no weapons.” He’d left them all in the room. He walked closer so he was in earshot. “Listen, please. I called 911. There are a lot of dead bodies in there, but the emergency is the woman in the back bedroom—my girlfriend. She’s overdosing and she needs help immediately.”
One of the officers nodded to another and he took off toward the EMTs standing near the ambulance.
“I acted in self-defense,” Hunter continued. “There were a lot of men up there shooting at me and the child and her mother. I killed the men in order to protect them.”
He went to the closest officer. “Take her, please, and get her to help. I have to go check on Vanessa.”
The officer met his eyes. Hunter could only imagine what he saw there. Panic, terror. He didn’t have time to think too much about it. If they weren’t going to chase him down and throw cuffs on him, he had to get to Vanessa.
“I’m going back in to check on her.” Hunter turned and ran for the door, not pausing as he yanked it open and took the stairs two at a time.
By the time he reached the bedroom where she was, EMTs were already there, working. He couldn’t get close to her. As much as he wanted to hold her, he didn’t want to get in the way of anything that would save her life, either. He prayed that they would be able to save her.
He stood back, watching helplessly. They shouted things to each other that Hunter didn’t understand. Codes and long words that sounded too scientific and medical to be anything but medications or processes. It sounded like a loud clatter of words and was a dizzying blur of actions.
They injected something into her arm. Apparently, they expected it to do something different than what it did. They didn’t seem happy. He heard one say that it wasn’t enough, she needed more. What had Jeremy given her and how much? Was he trying to kill her?
“Do you know what she took?” one of them asked him.
“She didn’t take anything. She was forcibly injected with something.” Hunter pointed to the needle lying on the floor by the bed, where it had rolled in the commotion of all that had happened since Jeremy injected her.
The EMT picked up the needle carefully, turned it over in his hand, and held it to the light, then sniffed it. “Test kit,” he said.
“More naloxone,” another called EMT. “We’re losing her.”
Hunter’s mouth ran dry. All he could think was no, no, no, no. She couldn’t die. Not now, not after everything. Not now that Jeremy was dead, and she and Opal were finally and forever free.
The EMT injected the next syringe full of liquid and Hunter held his breath. Vanessa coughed. An eruption of shouts broke out among the EMTs and in seconds, they had loaded her onto a stretcher.
“Vanessa,” he called out as they whisked her from the room, but he doubted she could hear him over everything.
He followed the stretcher out into the hall. Someone had already pushed the button for the elevator and they wheeled her on as they kept working on her. The last thing he saw as the elevator doors closed and she disappeared with the EMTs, was a bag of oxygen being squeezed into her mouth, forcing her to breathe.
He wasn’t going to wait for the next elevator. Hunter ran back to the stairs, this time able to fly down, hanging onto the railing to keep from falling. He could move much faster not carrying Opal. He was out the door in seconds.
His feet took him right to the ambulance, but he was too late. The doors closed and it drove off as he stood there, watching her go, wondering if he’d ever see her alive again.
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