The blue and red lights flashing through my apartment window were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
When Officer Miller walked into my bedroom, gun drawn, he stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at the hole in the wall. He looked at me, bleeding from the ribs, holding a hammer. He looked at Sarah, shivering on my bed.
Then he looked into the hole, where Elias was rocking back and forth in the shadows.
"Mother of God," Miller whispered.
He didn't ask if Sarah was an adult who was allowed to leave. He holstered his gun and called for paramedics.
They dragged Elias out five minutes later. He didn't fight. He just screamed when they took him outside. The rain was too loud. The sirens were too loud. The world was too much. They had to sedate him just to get him into the cruiser.
Henderson, the landlord, showed up as they were putting up the crime scene tape. He took one look at the hole in the wall—and the structural violation it represented—and turned pale gray. He knew the lawsuits were coming. He knew his "sealed" chase was about to bankrupt him.
I sat on the back bumper of an ambulance, a paramedic taping a bandage over my ribs. Sarah sat next to me, wrapped in a foil blanket, clutching a cup of coffee like it was a lifeline.
"You heard him," she said softly. She wasn't looking at me; she was looking at the dark windows of the duplex. "You heard him breathing."
"Yeah," I said. My voice sounded raspy, foreign to my own ears.
"I thought I was going crazy," she whispered. "I thought it was just... stress. Or the wind."
"It’s never just the wind," I said.
She leaned her head on my shoulder. We sat there for a long time, listening to the static of the police radios and the idling diesel engines. It was noisy. It was chaotic.
It sounded like safety.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.