Mercy Kill_ A Mystery - Lori Armstrong [28]
No such luck.
I used my last breath to try to force the plastic back out, but it’d formed to my mouth like shrink-wrap.
My lungs were devoid of air. My chest felt full, yet it was empty.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes, nor did a montage of my favorite memories, or a vision of unrealized hopes and dreams. No, my last thought was regret that I hadn’t died in combat, in uniform, as a soldier.
My body twitched. The throbbing in my head abated. Consciousness faded. Then nothing.
I sputtered awake now, like I had then, with big gasping breaths and no freakin’ clue where I was or what’d happened.
Fuck. I pushed back in the darkness of my room, heart jack-hammering, blood pumping hot and fast; clammy sweat coated my brow, my neck, my chest, my belly. Even my toes were damp from pure fear.
As much as I hated combat nightmares, this one was worse. It was a memory, not a fucked-up collection of faraway places, random body parts, death, destruction, and the graphic vileness of war. This had really happened.
I’d died.
Jason Hawley had brought me back to life. He’d dug me out from beneath the pile of bodies and debris, peeled the plastic off my face, and given me mouth-to-mouth. He returned me to the land of the living almost by sheer will.
Of course, I hadn’t known any of it until days later.
For a while I’d considered calling him Jesus, secretly hoping he’d rechristen me Lazarus, but J-Hawk hadn’t found any humor in it.
During my stay in the military hospital, I had plenty of time to relive that night. The term “reliving” something that’d killed me made me crazy. The army sent in shrinks to evaluate my mental state. I’d sent them away after answering the minimum number of questions. The army sent in a clergyman. I’d sent him away, too.
But he was persistent. He kept coming back until I informed him I no longer believed in God because there was no afterlife, no heaven, no hell, no nothing. In the minutes I’d been dead, I hadn’t been shrouded in white mist. I hadn’t felt a sense of ultimate peace. I hadn’t seen the faces of my dearly departed loved ones. I hadn’t heard angelic voices warning me it wasn’t my time. Neither had I heard the devil’s gleeful cackling. Or felt the heat from the fiery pits of hell. None of the near-death experiences I’d seen on TV or heard about was true.
Everything about the afterlife was a big, fat fucking lie.
The clergyman never returned.
I’d mostly blocked the Bali incident from my mind in my day-to-day life. But I was indebted to Jason Hawley in a way no one who’d never lived through a death experience could possibly understand. The only time we’d talked about that night, he said he saved me because he couldn’t have my death on his conscience.
But now his was on mine.
SEVEN
My night had too little sleep and my morning wasn’t starting out better. No coffee. I dressed in my favorite Johnny Cash T-shirt, jeans, turquoise ropers, and my army of one ball cap. I didn’t wear a sidearm, but I brought one along.
Once I hit town, I bypassed the Q-Mart for my morning cup of coffee. Margene, a sweet-natured cashier with a mouth the size of the Grand Canyon, would grill me about finding Jason’s body. I wasn’t in the mood to feed her gossip hunger just to fuel my caffeine addiction.
Shocking, to see John-John’s El Dorado in the parking lot of the sheriff’s department. After I parked, he motioned me over, and I climbed in his passenger seat. The scent of patchouli nearly choked me. “What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t get my text messages?”
I shook my head. He wouldn’t find the humor in my remembering to bring a gun but not my cell phone.
His piercing gaze wasn’t as unsettling as his clipped tone. “Why didn’t you call me last night?”
As Clementine’s owner, John-John should’ve been notified immediately, probably before I called 911. Chalk it up to another instance of handling things myself. “Believe it or not, I was pretty damn frazzled. I waited for the cops to arrive, and it went downhill from there.