Chapter 20: Hands Up

"Because I count," Brice said.

He said it flat, and he kept his hand on the towel.

"That's the whole job. I don't get to pick who."

Then the helicopter was down in a storm of sand, and two medics took Lance from us.

He kept his eyes on me until the door closed.

He came to the clinic six days later.

It was a Thursday, ten past noon, and the waiting room was full.

A woman with a beagle in a cone.

A teenage boy holding a shoebox with a sparrow in it.

An old man with a cat carrier on his knees.

Rhonda was at the front desk with her glasses on her head, and I was at the counter in my clinic scrubs, writing a dosage on a chart.

The bell over the door rang.

I looked up.

Lance stood in the doorway in a long white cooling vest with ice packs hanging off it.

The monitor on his ankle blinked green.

Behind him on the sidewalk, a deputy leaned against a patrol car, watching with his arms crossed.

I put the pen down.

"You're not supposed to be within five hundred feet of me."

"I know," Lance said.

His voice was thin and flat.

"I have a deputy. He said I could come in if I stayed by the door. He said if you say leave, I leave."

Rhonda stood up behind the desk.

"Say it, honey," she said. "I'll hold the door for him."

I didn't say it.

I wanted to see what he would do.

Lance came one step inside.

Then he did a thing I had never seen him do in three years.

He got down on his knees on the linoleum.

The beagle woman gasped.

The boy with the sparrow went completely still.

"Lorena," he said. "Please."

"Get up."

"I can't. I mean I won't." His voice cracked. "I read the whole list. I made my lawyer read it out loud to me twice."

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