A Twist of Hate (19 page)

              “I’ve already used it, or haven’t you seen the extra hole in your girlfriend?” Michael laughed. “Cops don’t scare me. Those idiots won’t do anything except arrest me. Who’ll give a damn if I shoot your little black slut? I’ll plead temporary insanity. I’ll say I got a bad case of affluenza, and I was so delirious I had no idea what I did was wrong. I’ll go to a psych hospital for ninety days, then I’ll go right back home. Hell, I might get a TV movie out of this. Logan Maddox could play you, Cam. Then again, you’re so perfect, you’d have to play yourself.”

              “Are you finished?” Camden asked gravely.

              “I’ll be finished when I put a bullet in her head!” Blood from his torn tongue striped his chin and dripped onto his jacket front.

              Camden held Siobhan’s shivering body closer. “Why are you doing this to her?”

              “She ruined my life! You stood by and let her. Chicks like her are everywhere, like roaches! Where are you gonna find another friend like me, huh?”

              Det. Flynn addressed Michael through a bullhorn. Michael ignored his warnings.

              “Is that what this is all about?” asked Camden. “Punishing me? It worked. Now it’s over.” He stared at Siobhan. Weightless in his arms, she shivered, her skin cold and ashen, her lips a sickening shade of purple. “She needs help, Michael. The best thing you can do for yourself now is to let her go.”

              “I can’t do that,” Michael said simply. “Don’t you get it, Cam? It’s not just that she ruined my life. She’s the best thing, the only thing, I almost had before you. She’s all I can take from you. C’mon.” He gestured toward himself with the gun. “Give her to me.”

              Camden gritted his teeth. “She’s bleeding. She can’t even stand.”

              “She doesn’t need to stand for what I’m gonna to do to her.”

              “I won’t let you hurt her anymore.”

              “How are you going to stop me, Superman?” Michael brought the gun closer to Camden’s head. “This is my kryptonite, and it that means you’ll do whatever I tell you to. Hand her over.”

              As immovable as Mount Rushmore, Camden said, “You’ll have to shoot me first.”

              Michael pressed the nozzle of the gun to Camden’s head. The officers in the distance seemed to learn farther forward, their firearms resolutely trained on Michael.

              “Drop the weapon, Littlefield!” Det. Flynn called through the bullhorn. “This is your final warning!” He directed officers to restrain all the parents and neighbors, who huddled together behind a barrier of cruiser doors.

              Michael cocked his gun. Officers and parents shouted at once, quieting only when Siobhan squirmed out of Camden’s arms.

              Disoriented, she trembled as she set her feet on the grass. Her right leg threatened to give out when she put her weight on it. She clutched Camden’s forearm, forcing herself to remain conscious.

              Her right eye was nearly swollen shut. Her clothing, torn and heavy with blood, hung from her body. She deeply inhaled the cool night air. It cleared her head just enough to allow her to think. She stepped between Camden and the Michael’s gun.

              “Dear God,” muttered Det. Flynn. “What the hell is she doing?”

              “Camden, please go.” She peeled his hands from her and took another small step toward Michael. “Do as he wants.”

              “Yeah, stud,” Michael taunted. “Do what I say. As for what I want…” He grabbed Siobhan by her neck and put the gun to her ribs. He used her as a shield and backed toward the tree house stairs.

              “Camden, go,” Siobhan pleaded.

              “I won’t leave you.” Unflinching, unblinking, Camden kept in step with them.

              “You don’t have to leave, buddy.” Smiling, Michael wrapped Siobhan’s hair around his fist. “I want you to come up with us. This time, you can watch me.”

              Camden’s voice betrayed none of his venomous rage when he said, “I have a question for you, Michael.”

              “Fire away,” Michael said amiably. He pulled Siobhan up the first few steps. She stumbled. He caught her around her waist and roughly dragged her up a few more stairs.

              “Is it true that most homicidal maniacs start by killing small animals?” Camden asked. “Like cats.”

              Michael’s nostrils flared.

              “Chrissie said you killed her cat. Was that your practice run?”

              Siobhan collapsed. Her weight pulled Michael off balance. Camden capitalized on the distraction. He grabbed Michael’s gun hand and smashed it into the railing, dislodging the weapon from his grasp. It fell to the ground with a dull thump. Michael finally let go of Siobhan, who slumped heavily to the stairs.

              Camden had never been in a real fistfight. He’d never had a reason to use his size and strength to harm anyone. With Michael in his grasp, grinning as though he’d pulled off the best prank of his life, Camden went berserk. Three officers struggled to pull him away.

              “Go to the girl!” yelled a fourth officer, who grabbed Michael by his shoulders and slammed him face first onto the ground. “We’ve got him.” Camden, his knuckles open and bleeding, ran to the gurney where paramedics worked on Siobhan.

“Ninety days, Cam!” Michael shouted from the throng of policemen swarming over him, one of whom shoved a knee into his back. He spat out a thick clot of blood and two teeth. “I’ll see you then! I’ll catch both of you!”

Chapter Nine

“I won’t talk about him anymore. Before I agreed to this interview, I told you I would not spend this time talking about an attempted murderer.”

—Siobhan Curran,
Newsline

              “We’ve got an 18-year-old female, gunshot wound to the lower right torso, blood pressure is 80/60 with her IV running wide open.” A short, blond paramedic rattled off Siobhan’s vitals as she and her bulldog-shouldered partner transferred Siobhan to the care of the awaiting Raines-Hartley Hospital emergency trauma team.

              Holding Siobhan’s hand, Camden climbed out of the ambulance, keeping pace with the rush of the doctors and nurses. On the way to an open trauma room, the blonde paramedic listed Siobhan’s visible injuries. “Possible skull fracture and broken nose, multiple lacerations and puncture wounds, broken fingers on the right hand, blunt force trauma to the right eye, massive bleeding, possibly internally…”

              The team transferred Siobhan to an exam table. Dr. Daniel Lowry, a tall blond with the good looks of a Dougherty, opened Siobhan’s blood-soaked tunic and slightly turned her onto one side as he rallied his team. “There’s no exit wound,” he said. “Any word on the bullet?”

              “Jacketed hollow point,” said the officer who followed the ambulance. “The weapon recovered at the scene was a .380 semiautomatic. The bullet in the first kid blew open his shoulder.”

              “This one didn’t detonate,” Dr. Lowry muttered.

              “Yet,” added a nurse.

              “Clear the room,” Dr. Lowry said. “Essential personnel only.”

              The officer took Camden by his upper arm. “C’mon, kid, it’s not safe in here, not ‘til that bullet is recovered.”

              Camden shrugged him off. “I’m not leaving her.” He stood just outside the flurry of activity surrounding Siobhan.

              “What’s her name?” asked Dr. Carl Anthony, a handsome African American with the beginnings of a moustache. He worked furiously opposite Dr. Lowry.

              “Siobhan,” Camden told them.

              “Siobhan, can you hear me?” Dr. Lowry said loudly, separating her eyelids and examining her pupils with a penlight. “Unresponsive.”

              “These are Prescott kids?” asked the charge nurse. She used a pair of scissors with angled blades to cut away Siobhan’s clothing. “What’s that marking on her jaw?”

              “A shoeprint,” said Dr. Lowry. He glanced up at Dr. Anthony. “Things have changed at Prescott since we graduated.”

              Dr. Anthony glanced at Camden, then looked back at Siobhan. “Indeed.”

              “Let’s go, kid,” the officer stated, taking a firmer grip on Camden.

              “My daughter is in there!” Mr. Curran thundered in the corridor. He had been waylaid by a triage nurse when he left the ambulance. An intern and two nurses barred him from entering the trauma room.

              “Respiration’s weakening!” announced a nurse. “And her blood pressure is diving.”

              “She’s bluing out,” Dr. Lowry growled. He shouted an order for a manual respiration kit.

              “What’s the holdup on blood?” Dr. Anthony asked.

              “St. Mary’s is sending it,” a nurse answered. She removed the oxygen tubing from Siobhan’s face and replaced it with a mask fitted with a balloon-shaped bag. Dr. Lowry squeezed the apparatus, manually assisting Siobhan’s breathing. “That pile-up on I-70 tonight wiped out our blood supply.”

              “St. Mary’s is forty minutes away,” Dr. Lowry muttered. “She needs blood now.”

              “I won’t leave her!” Camden struggled against the officer and the male nurse who tried to forcibly remove him.

              “Auto infuse her,” said Dr. Anthony, “that’ll buy us a little time.”

              The alarm sounded on the machine monitoring Siobhan’s blood pressure.

              “She’s crashing!”

              “BP is 60 over 40!”

              “Don’t you leave me!” Camden shouted, thrashing against the men restraining him. “Siobhan!”

              As if in response to her name, Siobhan’s unseeing eyes opened, then slowly closed.

              The doctors caught the small movement. It was most likely coincidence, an involuntary response to a variety of stimulus. It might have been something more. Whatever it was, they wouldn’t ignore it. They were collecting the blood Siobhan was losing and recycling it, to keep her alive. They needed all the help they could get right now. “Let him stay,” Dr. Anthony told the officer.

              Camden moved in close, squeezing between Dr. Anthony and a nurse. He took a knee and leaned in close to Siobhan, holding her hand in both of his, close to his lips. Through the hectic activity around them, he spoke to her, determined to tether her to this world. “You were wrong,” he said softly. “You can beat him. You
can
! Don’t let him win. Don’t let him take you from me.”

              “Her pressure’s still too low but it’s holding steady,” said Dr. Anthony.

              Camden lightly rested his hand on the top of Siobhan’s head. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me,” he begged her.

              “Get her parents in here.” Dr. Lowry yanked off his disposable lab coat. “We can’t wait for blood.”

***

              Mr. Curran, Mr. Cleese, the Livingstons, Mr. Dougherty, and Camden donated blood. The donations were typed and matched, and only Mr. Curran and Camden proved the only compatible donors. They were still sitting in the lab after their donations when a nurse approached Mr. Curran.

              “Mr. Curran, I need some information from you,” said the kindly woman. She rolled a stool to the side of his chair, sat, and laid a reassuring hand on his forearm. Speaking in much lowered tones, she said, “The nature of the attack on your daughter and a cursory visual examination led us to believe that she may have been sexually assaulted.”

              Mr. Curran’s eyelids slowly came together.

              “I know this is hard for you, Mr. Curran, but I need you to stay with me,” said the nurse. He managed a nod. “We found evidence of recent sexual activity.”

              Mr. Curran’s hands tightened into fists. He breathed heavily through his nose. He would have torn the hospital apart, piece by piece, in search of Michael Littlefield, if the nurse’s caring hadn’t calmed him.

              “There was no bruising or abrasions,” the nurse continued. “The tearing we discovered isn’t typical of forcible rape. Are you with me?”

              Mr. Curran sat up. “If she gave in to him, it was because he had a gun on her!”

              “We need to address every possibility, Mr. Curran. This is a matter of collecting accurate information to submit to law enforcement. I understand that you’re her father and she may not have discussed this aspect of her life with you. Perhaps your wife would—”

              “My wife is deceased.”

              “Is your daughter sexually active?” The nurse didn’t miss a beat. “The reason we ask is because most forms of birth control are not one hundred percent reliable. If there’s a possibility, no matter how remote, that Siobhan could be pregnant, we need to know in order to give her proper treatment.”

              Mr. Curran helplessly shook his head.

              “We were very careful,” Camden offered quietly from his side of the room. The nurse turned to him. “We were safe. Siobhan’s on the pill, and we used a condom.”

              “Were you together at any time prior to the assault?” the nurse asked.

              Camden nodded. He stared at the white cork ceiling but all he saw was Siobhan and her unspeakable loveliness when he kissed her goodbye at her window at the start of the day. “It was our first time. Neither of us has ever been with anyone else.”

***

              Listless, Camden leaned against the wall right outside the doors to the surgical studios. He scrubbed his left thumb over the lines and creases of his right palm. After three washings, traces of blood remained on his hands. He wondered whose it was. Brian’s or David’s? Siobhan’s or Michael’s? His own?

              Did it matter?

              He rubbed his hands along the length of his thighs, a futile gesture since blood stiffened his clothes.

              Prescott parents and faculty dominated the waiting room. Mr. Dougherty, Mr. Curran, the Livingstons, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Edwards, and the Kents milled about in stunned silence, unable to ignore or discuss the event that brought them together.

              Mr. Cleese excused himself from the parents. Camden was having an unusual amount of trouble removing the wad of gauze taped in the crook of his left arm. “Perhaps you should sit,” Mr. Cleese suggested.

             
What?
Camden wondered, staring at Mr. Cleese.
Who are you?
The man’s lips moved and issued sound, but for the life of him, Camden had no idea what he’d said.

              Mr. Cleese first thought Camden looked so pale because of the deathly blue-white glow of the hospital’s fluorescent lighting combined with his black clothing. Upon closer inspection, Camden’s complexion was completely gray, and a light sheen of perspiration glazed his face. Mr. Cleese sought out Mr. Dougherty.

              Camden scarcely noticed. He took a few steps to the nearest chair and fell heavily into it. The molded plastic cradled his weary body. He was so tired, more tired than he’d ever been in his life. The day had begun with Siobhan in his arms. Ironically, tragically, it ended the same way. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Michael’s face and his gruesome glee in brutalizing the person Camden most cherished.

              Camden replayed the bits and pieces of the evening, confused as to whether any of it had really happened. The images came to him from a distance, as though he’d stepped outside himself to watch them unfold.

              “It can’t be real,” he mumbled, his words slurred. “It’s too awful to be real.” The heartrending, tooth-rattling scream that had pierced his soul as he ran into his backyard had seemed very real. So had the damp coppery scent that hit him when he’d entered the treehouse.

             
It can’t have been real,
he persisted.

              Parents gathered around him. His hearing was off. He had difficulty making sense of what they were saying. Snippets of their conversation buzzed about his ears, mimicking the dull hum of bumblebees.

             
“…must be in shock…”

              “This is a terrible blow to him, to all of us…”

              “…police want to talk to him…not a good idea right now…”

              “…take him home, Patrick. We’ll call you the minute the kids come out of surgery, and…”

              He hated having decisions made for him, like he was a six-year-old up past bedtime. Brian was still in surgery and Siobhan had just gone in. Camden wasn’t going anywhere until they were in recovery.

              He stood, his head swimming.

             
“…Oh God, the chair…”

              “…is that blood…?”

              “Cam’s hurt…”

              “…he’s going, Patrick. Catch him!”

              Powerless to stop himself, Camden slumped into his father’s arms.

***

              Patrick Dougherty sat at his son’s bedside. He stared blankly at the clear hospital bag containing Camden’s ruined clothing, looking up only when Mr. Curran knocked on the open door.

              “It’s a hard night to be a parent,” Mr. Dougherty said quietly as Mr. Curran entered the dimly lit room.

              “Yes, it is,” Mr. Curran sighed heavily. Siobhan was approaching the end of her second hour of surgery. The bullet had lodged near her right iliac crest after nicking her intestine. The surgeons practiced excruciating delicacy to make sure the hollow-point bullet remained intact.

              Mr. Curran stood over Camden. As much as he thought he should act the part of the angry, offended father, he had no heart for it. Camden had risked his life for Siobhan. Mr. Curran would forgive him just about anything.

              “I had a difficult time after my wife’s death, Patrick,” Mr. Curran said. “Siobhan saw me through it. She’s my strength. She’s the reason for every breath I draw and everything I do. I still have her, and I have Camden to thank for that. You did a fine job with him, Patrick.”

              “I wish I could take credit for the man he’s becoming.” Mr. Dougherty stroked Camden’s hair. “I’m ashamed to say that I’ve had little to do with it. The last time I gave him any genuine attention, he was nine years old and I’d just told him that his mother couldn’t be with us anymore. I keep looking at him, trying to find traces of that little boy.