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“Congratulations, buddy,” Healy says with a sigh. “You owe your life to a thirteen-year-old girl.”
He lets go of John Boy’s throat, pulls his hand away as the man rolls to the side and starts violently coughing. He thinks to himself: this is when you feel better. This is when you start feeling like a good person.
Relief falls strongly enough over Holly that Healy can feel it without having to look in her direction. She sags a bit against the window jamb she’s holding onto and opens her mouth to say something.
John Boy rolls a little further, plunges a hand down the collar of his suit jacket.
“Don’t—!” Healy shouts, warns, alarm slamming through his system like a bulldozer through a rotting building—don’t you dare, don’t do it—
The shot goes off.
Healy braces reflexively, arms coming in front of himself, but no bullet punches through him. Nothing hits Holly either, and that’s the first place his eyes fly afterward, frenzied—she’s cringed away but is still standing, not a scuff on her that he can see—and Healy is already swinging back on reflex, his fist making its home in John Boy’s temple and his knee in the man’s wrist, cracking it loudly and sending the gun flying.
John Boy goes down, stays down, stops moving. Healy doesn’t know if he’s dead or unconscious this go around. Can’t bring himself to give a shit.
He lowers both of his hands, breathing heavily. Checks himself again, just to be sure. He’s still thankfully un-shot, and so is Holly.
“All right,” Healy says, mostly to reassure the kid. “Fucking asshole. We’re okay. Didn’t get anybody.”
But his pulse is still speeding in his veins. But Holly is lifting her head out of the protective circle of her own arms, and her eyes are falling over the edge of the roof, and she’s only just starting to take a breath in when she freezes.
But John Boy hadn’t been aiming anywhere near them to begin with, and that’s weird, isn’t it?
Healy looks back down, following the trail of Holly’s attention, following the line in which John Boy’s slack arm is vaguely pointing. Descending ten feet, twenty, thirty into the spilled asphalt guts of the street.
Into the middle of the burning wreckage, where Holland March is sprawled unmoving.
The image doesn’t compute for a second. Healy blinks. It still doesn’t. He blinks again and waits for March to get up, to stumble to his feet, to let out that nervous, tittering laugh of his and wave up at them, miraculously unharmed despite everything. The film reel lies half-hidden under his body, dented metal in a protective embrace around the secret that might just put an end to all of this. March must have been holding it against his chest when he’d tripped and fallen.
He did it. He got the evidence. So he should be getting up now. Why isn’t he?
A displacement in the air behind him: something like a suit-seam ripping open. “Dad!” Holly screams.
There is a patch of red spreading slowly over the back of March’s cream-colored jacket. It’s a soft sort of hue. March is a soft sort of person. But he’s tougher than he looks, or luckier at least. He said it himself, he might as well be invincible. Now’s the time for him to prove it.
Holly scrambles forward in a blind panic, nearly trips over John Boy’s splayed legs and pitches over the side of the roof. Healy’s hand shoots out to grab her by the arm, yanking her back onto safer ground without thinking. She won’t stop yanking at him, though, looking for all the world like she fully intends on leaping over the ledge if it’ll get her closer to where March is.
“Dad!” she shrieks again. All the determined morality has gone from her voice, the self-confidence of a teenager who’s taken it upon herself to act much more mature than she is. With terror dragging over her face, she looks like a far younger kid. “Dad! Dad! Answer me!”
March does not answer her. He is still lying there facedown in the street. He is still not moving.
And he would never ignore his daughter sounding that afraid. Healy knows that if it’s the one thing he knows about him.
The red nearly covers his whole back now, sticking like caution tape to his skin, puddling on the asphalt below him. Healy thinks about who John Boy must have been aiming at, if not at him. A nauseous kind of vertigo drops the floor out from beneath his feet.
“Oh, shit,” Healy mutters, almost to himself. “Shit, shit. March. Come on. Don’t do this.”
Holly turns to him. Tears are streaming from her eyes, and she shakes his arm desperately. “Mr. Healy! Mr. Healy, do something! Please, w-we have to get help, please—”
“Y-yeah. Yeah.” Healy tries to right himself, to get his own expression under wraps and be the adult in this situation. “It’s gonna be okay, all right, Holly? Let’s get down there. Quick.”
He starts hustling Holly back through the broken window and into the building. She takes off running as soon as she’s through the frame and he lets go of her arm, thankfully gunning for a flight of stairs this time instead of trying to jump two stories.
Healy follows after her no less urgently, sprinting about as fast as his old, creaking legs will take him.
The police are already pulling onto the street by the time Healy bursts out of the main entrance. They reach March’s side about when Holly flings herself onto him, one officer turning immediately to yell for one of the ambulances that had come with them, another setting a hand on Holly’s shoulder and attempting to pull her away from the scene.
He’d meant well, Healy is sure, but Holly goes stop it and smacks his arm away with such raw hysteria that he raises both hands in response and backs away for the time being.
She turns back to her dad, gripping the bloody back of his suit jacket, and the plea rushes out so fast her words start mixing together: “Dad, D-Dad, wake up, you—you have to be okay, please can you wake up, please—”
Healy skids to a stop by the two of them, drops into a crouch at a speed his knees do not find friendly. He can’t find it in himself to care at the moment. His hand settles between Holly’s shaking shoulders, offering a feeble attempt at comfort even as he scans March and his own heart sinks. There’s a lot of blood, maybe too much. When Healy had gotten shot in that diner, his arm had bled, sure, but not like this. And if the hole in March’s back wasn’t enough, the scuffed-up pallor of his skin is making it increasingly obvious that that wasn’t his only injury.
Healy can’t even tell at a glance whether the man is breathing.
He wants to jam his fingers into the side of March’s throat, to feel for himself the strength of the pulse beneath. But there are voices snapping out orders behind them, footsteps jogging close, more qualified hands preparing to take over the duty. Better hands. Cleaner hands. Hands that help instead of hurting. Healy doesn’t—can’t—look away from March’s slack face, or the paleness of his lips, or the gravel digging into his cheek, but he swallows hard and manages to stop himself from reaching out for him.
“Come on, Holly,” he says in an undertone. That same gravel has crept into his voice, like he’s the one gravity is pressing into the broken street. “We gotta back up a bit. They’re gonna help your dad, okay? We gotta give them room to do it.”
Holly resists for a few seconds, clutching at her dad’s ruined clothes and sobbing, but finally she lets Healy tug her away, lets the paramedics swarm in and lift March onto the stretcher they’d brought out with them.
More instructions are barked across the wreckage, pressure applied over the injuries, a young man with beach-blond hair shouting for them to start an emergency transfusion. Someone asks Healy for March’s blood type, and he just stares at them dumbly. Holly scrubs her hand over her eyes and manages to push out, “AB-negative. N-no medical allergies.”
They strap an oxygen mask over March’s face as soon as they get him loaded into the back of the ambulance. Roll his sleeve up and promptly get to sticking a tube in him. Holly chases after him, crowding in next to the stretcher as soon as enough space opens up for her to squeeze her way in. She grasps at his limp hand so hard her knuckles start turning white, stumbling as the vehicle rocks slightly.
“—coming?”
Healy startles. Through the barrage of light and color and sickness, sound filters back in. The beach-blond paramedic has one leg hiked into the ambulance and is looking directly at him.
“Sir,” he repeats. “Are you coming?”
Holly’s head swivels and then she’s looking at him too. She bites her lip, this time doesn’t call out to him. She looks as small and as ashen as her dad does, surrounded by things too big and too real for her body, still holding onto his hand as though her life depends on it.
Healy closes his jaw with a click. He pushes off the bloodstained street and gets into the ambulance.