Chapter 4 - The Woman by the PharmacyThe ambulance took eleven minutes.
I counted because pain makes you count dumb things. Ceiling lights. Register beeps. The number of times David said “my wife is emotional right now” to anybody who got close enough to hear him.
Security showed up first. Two store guys in black polos who looked like they usually handled shoplifters and busted vending machines, not this. They stood near David and did their best to look official.
He got bolder with them there.
“She’s been having episodes,” he said loudly. “Hormones. She can get dramatic.”
I tried to speak and couldn’t get enough air to do much besides make a broken sound. Wyatt knelt beside me, one knee cracking audibly, and said, “Don’t waste your breath on him.”
Then somebody else pushed through the ring of carts and people.
A woman in navy scrubs.
Early fifties maybe. Heavyset. Brown hair clipped up with one of those plastic jaws. Walgreens bag in one hand.
“I heard pregnant trauma,” she said. “I’m an L&D nurse at Baylor.”
She didn’t wait for permission from anybody. She lowered herself down beside me and put two fingers to my wrist, then one careful hand on the side of my stomach.
“Rachel, right? I’m Denise. Where’s your pain worst?”
“Middle. Low. It got hard. My stomach got hard.”
She nodded like she hated that answer. “Any fluid? Bleeding?”
“I don’t know.”
David stepped in. “She’s fine. The paramedics can handle it.”
Denise didn’t even look at him. “Back up.”
He opened his mouth again.
Wyatt said, “You heard her.”
That should’ve been the end of it.
It wasn’t.
Because right then David’s phone rang.
A different phone.
Not the one in his hand.
The one in his left pocket.
He flinched like he’d been tased.
I heard it because the ringtone was some stupid marimba thing he’d never used before. He fumbled, pulled out a small black phone I had never seen, and tried to silence it.
Denise looked up.
Wyatt looked up.
So did the cashier. So did everybody.
On the screen, for just a second before he turned it, I saw one word.
“Harold.”
David jammed the phone back in his pocket.
Wyatt said, very flat, “You want to tell me why you’ve got a burner phone going off while your pregnant wife is on the floor?”
“It’s a work phone.”
“You already said that about the other one.”
May you like
David’s face did that thing again. Not panic this time. Calculation.
Then he bolted.
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