Page 11 of Forced Into Your Arms
My eyes landed on the woman sitting at the table.
She still had blood on her navy-blue scrubs. A bottle of water sat untouched in front of her, and although she was doing a good job of holding herself together, I noticed the slight shake in her hands before she folded them together in her lap.
She looked up when we walked in, and for a second, neither of us said anything.
“This is Milan Rivers,” Detective Harris said, breaking the silence. “She’s the nurse who rendered aid to your cousin before our officers and doctors got to him.”
Her eyes stayed on me another second before she finally spoke.
“So… you’re his cousin,” she asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“I’m sorry.”
Most days those two simple words would’ve been enough, but today, they didn’t mean a gotdamn thing.
Without responding to it, I pulled out the chair across from her and took a seat. “Before they shot my cousin, what did you hear?”
She let out a slow breath, her eyes dropping to the bottle of water sitting in front of her before she looked back at me.
“I didn’t mean to hear anything,” she said in a whisper. “I was walking into work when I heard two men arguing. At first, I tried to ignore it because it wasn’t any of my business, but the way they were talking…” She shook her head. “Something didn’t feel right.”
I leaned back in my chair without taking my eyes off her.
“What they say?”
“I couldn’t hear everything. They were on the other side of a row of SUVs.” She paused, looking like she was replaying the conversation in her head. “One of them sounded angry. The other one…” She swallowed hard. “He was so calm it gave me chills. Like he already knew how everything was going to end.”
“The calm one,” I said, automatically assuming she was referring to Sam. That niggas stayed calm, no matter what the circumstances were. “What about him? What he say?”
“He said something about Vice finding something out… Then he said he wasn’t covering this shit up for nobody… He never said what he wasn’t covering up, though.”
I clenched my teeth before dragging my top teeth over my bottom lip.
“What else?”
“The guy asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to keep whatever it was to himself...”
Then, I asked, “You sure he said Vice?”
She nodded, taking in a heavy breath and slowly releasing it. “I’m positive. It stood out because… I remember thinking Vice was a strange name.”
“What happened after that?”
“The calm one said fuck them, and that’s when they…” She shook her head and bit down on her bottom lip, unable to finish her sentence.
Nobody said anything for a few seconds, giving her time to pull herself together. For the first time since I’d walked into the room, I saw the fear she’d been trying so hard to keep hidden.
“I turned around just in time to see your cousin stumbling toward me. He was holding his side…” She huffed out a heavy breath. “There was so much blood.”
Nobody said anything because honestly, there wasn’t shit to say.
“I tried to help him.” She looked down at her hands like she could still see his blood on them. “I kept telling him to stay with me until the trauma team got outside.”
“You never heard a name?” I asked.
She slowly shook her head but didn’t give a verbal answer. I studied her for a few seconds. She wasn’t lying. I’d spent too many years reading people not to know the difference. Everything about her said the same thing.
