CHAPTER FIVE
THERE WAS A low tapping on the door to Darian's room as it opened and a man in a white lab coat peeked through the opening.
"Mr. Lane? I'm Dr. Sheppard. I heard you came back to us."
The door opened wider and the man stepped through. He was tall, taller than most men that Darian had seen in town. His short-cut graying hair told the tale of a man comfortable with his age, although no one could actually guess what that age might be with such a youthful, unlined face.
Darian could hear intelligence in the man's voice that spoke to the years of medical practice he had experienced in his life. It was almost as if this man had stepped right off a medical soap opera, but without all the unneeded drama that would coalesce around such characters.
The doctor smiled down at Darian as he started going through the medical files on his clip board.
"It seems you have had a pretty bad week, Mr. Lane."
"I guess you could say that." Darian responded with a bit of confusion. "Any idea what happened to me and why I am here?"
"Hmmm. You have no memory of the events that landed you in the hospital?" The doctor looked a bit concerned by Darian's response. "What is the last thing you remember, if I may ask?"
Darian tried to concentrate on his last memory, but nothing would come into focus. There was a flash of light and the smell of deli food in the back of his mind, but he couldn't place where it was from or how it all fit together. He vaguely remembered a girl with long black hair, shaved on one side, and a man with strange eyes for a second. He tried to grasp onto this memory and hold it. But it was fleeting and was gone in an instant.
"I don't really remember much of anything, Doc. I remember I had to go somewhere and I was in a hurry. Was I in some kind of car accident? Oh God, I didn't total my Camaro, did I?" Darian could feel his heart starting to race at the thought of losing his beloved car. He had found the old clunker at a junk yard three years earlier and restored it with his own hands.
It was a labor of love that he cherished more than anything else in his life, which wasn't much of anything at that moment. His girlfriend had even left him because he was spending too much time worrying about fixing his Camaro. Oddly enough, he hadn't even taken the time to worry about her leaving.
"No, it wasn't a car accident. You honestly don't remember anything that happened after you left your house?" Dr. Sheppard seemed a bit confused about how to handle something like this. He wanted to just come out and tell Darian that he had been under suspicion of shooting the store clerk and was, in turn, shot himself, but he wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't freak his patient out totally.
"Do you remember going to the gas station?" Dr. Sheppard asked, as he kept looking through the papers in front of him.
"Vaguely." Darian said slowly trying to piece together any kind of memory he could of the gas station. "I think I was trying to buy smokes or something."
Then it hit him. The entirety of that moment in time slammed into him like a freight train. He remembered seeing Lacey trying to bend over to get his smokes and the man walking into the gas station. He remembered her screaming and the smell of the food in the deli. There was the flash as the gun went off and the deafening silence as his ears tried to register the noise. Then the blood. He could smell the blood in the air as he leaned over the counter and saw Lacey lying there.
"Oh, God! No!" Darian yelled. "I was there! I saw that man kill her!" It was all Darian could do to keep from vomiting at the thought of what had transpired. It was as if his worst nightmares had come to life before his very eyes and there was nothing he could do about them.
"The cops showed up and I went outside." Darian's voice was shaking and he wasn't sure he could make it through what happened next. "They shot me."
He heard the words that were coming out of his mouth, but he couldn't believe that he had said them. Desperately, he wanted to wake up and find himself lying in his own bed. He wanted that unnatural warmth that always seemed to fill his bedroom, even with the air conditioning running, to envelope him yet again.
Then he wanted to get up and go into the bathroom to splash water in his face in the hopes of washing off the blood spray that he could still feel hitting him. To this end, he tried moving to the edge of the bed but couldn't get his legs to work.
Dr. Sheppard reached out immediately and grabbed his arm. "That isn't going to be something you want to attempt right now, Mr. Lane."
Darian looked up at him and could tell by the look in his face that there was something very wrong.
"How many times was I shot?" The question was blunt and to the point. Darian knew that he had been shot. Also, he knew that he had been placed in a coma in order to help his body heal. Something else that he had not known until just now was that, at that moment, he couldn't feel his legs from the waist down.
"You were suffering from multiple gunshot wounds when you came in. Most of them were fairly superficial or non-life threatening. But two bullets had lodged themselves in your spine. We had to get you into surgery to remove them. It took about nine hours to safely remove both bullets, but I'm afraid that there was already some damage to your spinal column."
Dr. Sheppard let go of Darian's arm and sat down in the chair next to the bed. "I know this is going to be difficult for you to hear, but you have some paralysis below the waist. The good news is that I believe, with some therapy, you will be able to gain upwards of 90% of your mobility again. You won't be running any marathons or winning a dancing competition, but you should be able to walk again and get on with your life."
Darian lay back in the hospital bed and thought about what was happening to him. The idea of having to go through therapy and rehab in order to learn how to walk again wasn't something he was going to be able to do. He simply didn't have the money for these kinds of medical bills. The trip to the hospital alone was probably enough to bankrupt him, not to mention the surgery and the hospital room that he has been staying in.
"How long have I been in the hospital, Doc?" Darian suddenly realized that he had lost all track of time and wasn't even sure if it was the same year anymore.
"You have been with us for about two weeks, Mr. Lane."
"Please, call me Darian. Mr. Lane was my father, and he died when I was about three."
Darian thought back on his childhood and how crappy it had been all around. His parents died in a car accident when he was three years old, so he didn't immediately understand why he was being given to this other family to be raised or why his parents weren't coming back to get him. He remembered sitting at the window in the front of the house and staring out of it, hoping to see his parents pull up in their car, but they never did.
This was the most confusing time in his life as it would be for any toddler that had just had lost his parents and had life as he knew it suddenly ripped away from him.
He had no other family to speak of. Both of his parents were the only children in their families and his grandparents passed away before he was even born. He had been alone for most of his life and gotten used to the fact that no one would be there for him now. He was passed from one foster family to the next until he was sixteen.
It was then that he had had enough and ran away. He spent most of his teen years living on the streets in various cities and doing whatever he could to make enough money to buy some food and just survive. It wasn't until his friend from high school had found him wandering around three years later in a park that he finally got some control over where his life was going.
His friend's father had a mechanics' shop and took in Darian as a helper. It wasn't very glamorous, but it was enough money to get him a roof over his head and food on the table. Darian had picked up mechanic work rather quickly and, before too long, he was running an entire section of the shop by himself.
When he decided to move to a smaller town, it wasn't because he found a better job or anything, but because he needed to get away from the city and the vices that ran rampant throughout it. He was find
ing it increasingly difficult to pass by addictions that he knew he shouldn't be involved in, but begged him to come out and play anyway.
Darian remembered putting a map up on the wall and throwing a dart at it. Wherever that dart ended up landing was where he would be setting up his new life. He just hoped that his blind throw didn't end up landing him two or three blocks away from where he already was. Thankfully, it didn't. Instead, he ended up fifteen hundred miles away in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
"We have a physical therapist that will be coming to meet with you in the morning, and should be able to help you work through the physical side of things. We also have a resident psychologist that will be working with you to help with the emotional side of the fence if you feel you need someone to talk to."
Dr. Sheppard saw the look in Darian's eyes and could tell that he was thinking more about the money and how he wouldn't be able to pay for any of this. "Don't worry about the bill right now. You need to focus on getting back your life and then we can worry about payments or whatever arrangements you might need to make later on. In fact, there is a good chance that you won't have to worry about money anytime soon, since they caught the guy that robbed the gas station yesterday."
Darian snapped his eyes to the doctor and remembered seeing the whirling blue and black eyes of the man that shot Lacey and knocked him out cold, leaving his gun in Darian's pocket to take the fall for everything. "Are they sure it's the right guy?"
"Well, I would hope so, but you can ask the detective as soon as he gets here. He told me to give him a call when you wake up so that he could speak with you about the case."
Dr. Sheppard stood up and set the clipboard on the foot of the bed and looked back at Darian. "If you feel like you are in too much pain, I want you to go ahead and hit that button over there. You can only push it three times in a four hour period, though, so keep that in mind. It will push a small amount of Demerol into your IV,which should help you out. I want you to get some rest now and I will check in with you tomorrow morning."
Dr. Sheppard walked to the door and opened it. "Try to get some sleep, Darian, and tomorrow we will start getting you back on your feet again." He smiled at Darian, which made him smile back instinctively.
Darian thought about how Sheppard was probably one of the coolest doctors he had ever had to deal with in his life. Most of them simply looked at him and assumed he didn't have the money to pay for the services they thought they were skilled at giving. This usually ended up with him staying at home when he probably should have gone to a doctor, but Darian didn't care.
He felt the stress of what was happening to him slip away as he stared up at the ceiling.
"What the hell have you gotten yourself into this time, Darian?" he said to himself.
He imagined what the detective was going to say to him when he got there. How it was a natural mistake and that the city apologized for any inconveniences he might have endured in being shot multiple times by cops that may have been just a tad overzealous in their job.
Then he thought about how the detective was going to have him sign some documents stating that he took full responsibility for what transpired and wouldn't, in turn, sue the city. He almost laughed at the thought of the money he could end up getting out of a lawsuit. The fact that he was a victim in the robbery and the people that were supposed to help him almost killed him.
Oh yeah, the city, county and whatever other entity had been involved with sending his life spiraling down a rabbit hole were most likely going to have the pleasure of footing his medical bills, along with whatever else he might need in the future.
He wasn't signing a damn thing!