When Rita landed, she and Halle were driven straight to the hospital. They had Flo with them, and Fritz met them there. I’d promised not to leave the hotel room so Fritz could go be with Rita.
◊◊◊
While I waited for news, my mom tracked me down.
After I told her what little I knew about Trip and Craig, she wanted to know about Cuba.
“What happened with your director?” she asked.
“He wanted to demonstrate that the stunt director and I were exaggerating the danger of a gun loaded with blanks. It was the same crap he pulled with the crocodiles.”
Did I just say that?
“What crocodiles?” Mom asked. “You haven’t said anything about crocodiles.”
“We did a scene in a swamp, and they spotted a crocodile. We had to make sure they got rid of the crocs before we could continue with the shoot.”
“Hang on, how many were there?” she asked.
“Uhm, two that I saw,” I admitted.
From there, it was game over. I ended up telling Mom the whole story. Believe me, it would have been a hundred times worse if she’d found out from someone else. I also told her about jumping off the mast and the girl who had gotten money out of me.
There was some vague threat about withholding information. I was glad when Mom finally had to go work with a client.
◊◊◊
My hotel room door lock beeped as it was being opened.
“I don’t care if it might be disturbing. I want to see what happened,” Rita was saying to Fritz.
Halle looked pale, and when she saw me, she crawled onto my lap and laid her head against my shoulder. I tuned out Fritz and Rita’s argument and focused on Halle.
“How is he?” I asked her.
“He made it out of surgery, and they think he’ll make a full recovery. They let us see him for just a moment. It was terrible,” Halle said as she buried her head in my chest and began to cry.
I just held her and let her cry it out. She was a mess and emotionally exhausted. She ended up falling asleep in my arms. I picked her up and put her in one of the bedrooms. When I came out, Rita and Fritz were glaring at each other.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Fritz got the bodycam footage from last night and refuses to show it to me,” Rita said.
“Have you seen it yet?”
“Not yet,” Fritz admitted.
“Rita, let him look at it and decide if you should see it. I don’t think you want to watch anything that will scar you for life. Let him do his job and protect you,” I said.
“No! I want to see what happened,” she insisted.
I grabbed her hand and pulled her into the other bedroom. She fought me every step of the way and called me some names that would have been hurtful if I hadn’t known how much pain she was in. I wrapped her in a bear hug, and she finally calmed down. She began to shudder and then collapsed in my arms. I just held her as she sobbed.
No mother should see her child after he’s been shot. My heart broke for Rita and Halle. Once Rita stopped crying, she began to talk about the hurt of not being able to do anything for him. Trip had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the shoulder. The head shot had just grazed him, and all they did was sew him up. The shoulder was the more serious of the two. They were afraid he would lose some function in his right arm.
When they brought Trip in, he was unconscious. They weren’t sure if it was from the head wound or the loss of blood. He wasn’t entirely out of danger, but the hospital kicked Rita and Halle out because of the sheer volume of people who wanted to be there. They promised to call Rita when he woke up.
When Rita was almost done telling me what happened, Halle came in, and mother and daughter clung to each other. I left them to talk and walked down the hall to see what Fritz knew.
He and Flo were watching the video. By their grim expressions, I could tell it wasn’t good.
“Did you find out what happened to Craig and Kent?” I asked.
“No. But I do know I can’t show this to Rita,” Fritz said.
“Show me.”
If I had a way to roll back time, I would have never had Fritz show me the video.
Andy’s bodycam showed men dancing. It was Latin Night at the Pulse. According to the time stamp on the video, it was 2:02 a.m. when the bartenders announced last call. Moments later, there was gunfire. Everyone took a second to figure out that this was real. You could hear screams, and we saw Andy grab for Trip, but Trip bolted for a door.
I watched as Trip was shot. Andy rushed forward to where he lay, grabbed the back of his shirt, and pulled him towards the door. People were literally pushing others down and jumping over them to get out. Andy could be seen pushing Trip under a table and pulling out his phone to hit the panic button and send his two text messages.
While he did that, the shots continued to ring out.
“Turn it off,” I said, feeling sick.
“Was that an AR-15?” Flo asked.
