Preppy: The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater, Part Three
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“Don’t jump,” I said, taking a step toward her. I tried to keep my voice as calm as possible, hiding the fear pitting in the depths of my stomach. Dre turned to me and smiled. I gasped when she leapt up to sit on the very top of the thin and rusted railing. My heart leaped into my throat and I step between her legs, wrapping my arms around her waist and resting my head against her tits. Holding her to me. Holding her onto the tower. “Don’t leave me,” I told her. “Don’t leave us. Bo misses you. I miss you.” I felt the vibration of her laugh and looked up into her bruised but beautiful face. Her smile was big although her bottom teeth were coated in red.
“Save me, Preppy,” she said, her voice an eerie echo that doesn’t sound like it’s coming from her mouth, but from the air around us. Her lips weren’t even moving.
“I did save you,” I argue. “At least I tried to save you. It’s up to the doctors now.” I held her tighter, but it’s not tight enough. It never was.
She shook her head and pressed her index finger to my lips, which I kissed on instinct. “No, you still have some saving to do. It’s not over yet. Not yet.” She touched my face and suddenly I was awash in an image. A doctor leaning over me and I realize it’s not me at all. I’m seeing him through Dre’s eyes. The doctor laughs when she tries to cough out her words. Questioning what he was doing and why. “Save me,” she said to me again, and the image of the doctor is gone. I’m back looking into the dark eyes of the only woman I’d ever loved. The breeze is now a wind. Leaves and pine needles from nearby trees cyclone around us, creating a wall of debris and a noise that sounds like a train clattering against the tracks.
“But...” I started to argue. I was cut off when she leaned back over the rail, pulling me with her. She’s falling and I fell right along with her, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Right before we reach the ground she shows me the backside of her hand, which has some sort of sticker on it. No, it’s a tattoo. A cheesy yellow smiley face. As the wind rips through my hair and the ground grows closer and closer I recognized the tattoo. A flood of memory I didn’t know I had rushes forward, playing like a movie in front of my eyes.
The truth won’t save us because it’s too late.
We crashed into the ground.
****
My eyes popped open and I inhaled sharply like I’d been drowning and someone had given me CPR. I was back in Dre’s hospital room and my eyes immediately landed on the doctor who was leaning over Dre. He had a needle in his hand, fidgeting with her tubes. He looked up at me with a smile that faded the second he saw the recognition in my eyes. “You look familiar,” he said, gulping nervously and pushing back on the sleeves of his white coat, revealing the stupid tattoo on his hand that gave away his identity.
I stood from my chair, reluctantly dropping Dre’s hand gently back to the bed. “I should look familiar.” I looked around the room. “I died here once,” I said, not recognizing my own voice that was deep dark and deadly, full of the anger pulling in my veins. Doctor Gonna-Be-Dead-Soon straightened his posture and was shuffling backward toward the door when Bear and King appeared in the doorway. Right away they noticed the look on my face and all it took was a tip of my chin for them to push the doctor back into the room and slam the door shut behind them. He fell to the ground and scurried into the corner like the scared fucking rat he was. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“What’s up?” King asked as casually as if he was wondering if I wanted to go grab a bite to eat. He points to the doctor.
I bend down on the floor over the doctor and grab him by the throat. “So you hand me over to the fucking lunatic biker, you try and make it seem like I was dead, you try to kill me, my wife, and you killed my fucking mother?”
The doctor frantically shook his head.
“It’s a little too late for denial now,” I tell him.
“No, I mean yes. I did that. Everything but kill your mom. Grace. It was the cancer. Not me. I swear!” he shouted. “At first I just did some paperwork for him. Patched him up a while back at his house when he got cut or shot. He paid me cash.” The doctor shook his head. “I was losing my house. I didn’t want to do all those other things for him. I had no choice!”
“You had to? Why?”
“Because...he had my sister. She was one of their biker whores. Their BBB’s.” He waved at Bear’s leather cut. “I just wanted to take her home. Keep her safe. Chop said if I didn’t do what I asked of him he’d kill her and then me.”
“That never happened though,” Bear said. It wasn’t a question.
The doctor shook his head. “No, that bastard killed her and the rest of them before he could keep his promise and give her back to me.” He sighed.
“So when I showed back up you figured you had to take me out yourself? Finish the job? Then my wife?” I shook my head and kicked him in the ribs. “You piece of shit coward.”
“I didn’t know what else to do!” he cried. When he tried to stand up King pushed him back down onto the floor and his head crashed against the wall, knocking him out cold. “Oops,” he said.
“She needs help,” I said when Dre’s monitors started beeping and blinking. “I don’t know what he might have done to her.” I ran out into the hall and almost crashed into the nurse that gave me Bo’s information months before. “I need your help,” I told her, pulling her into the room. She took a second to assess the situation but we didn’t have a second. “Please.”
“He tried to kill her,” I said, offering the quickest explanation I could. I opened his coat pocket and pulled out the needle and little glass tube thing. “He might have given this to her,” I said to her. She took them from my hands but continued to look down at the doctor on the floor. “Please. What is this?” I asked, snapping her out of her shock.
She looked down and turned over the little glass bottle. She sniffed it and scrunched up her nose. She pushed it back into my hands, ran toward a cabinet in the hall and came back with a pair of gloves and another two bottles with different colored labels than the one she just tossed onto the bed by Dre’s feet.
The nurse took the flashlight and peeled open Dre’s eyelids, shining it into each pupil. She gave Dre two injections into the port on the back of her hand.