“You told me you bought a place off of Antelope Road. I found a gas station on Antelope Road and asked if anyone matching your description has moved to the area in the last year and the guy working the counter pointed me in your direction. Russell says hi, by the way.”
“He’s an idiot. Should have kept his big mouth shut.”
“Andrew, my girlfriend has a bullet hole in her shoulder. We need to come in and take a look at it.”
“And you had to drive all of the way from the South Bay to do that?”
“We didn’t have much of a choice,” Parkowski said, getting a little annoyed despite having a weapon pointed at her. “Mike and I have been on the run all day from a group of people who seem to want us dead. We’ve been on the go, nonstop, since noon. Please, just let us come inside.”
“Ok,” Chang said. The gun lowered for a second, then went back up. “So you led them here?”
“No, we lost them somewhere back around San Bernardino,” DePresti said.
The shotgun finally went down, and stayed there, pointed at the dusty desert soil. “Philly, you shouldn’t have come here.”
“We didn’t have any other options.”
The other man sighed. “Ok, come on in. Grace, is it? Let me take a look at your shoulder.”
Parkowski opened the car door and took a few uneasy steps, the first she had taken since they had gotten into the Subaru on the Manhattan Beach residential streets. It was only a few hours ago, but felt like an entire other lifetime.
DePresti rushed over to help her, as did Chang. “Easy, easy now,” her boyfriend said. “Let’s get you inside.”
The two men carefully helped her inside the small house. It only had a few rooms, and was dimly lit, so Parkowski couldn’t see much.
They took her to a tiny eat-in kitchen with some cheap-looking furniture. There, she got her first look at Chang. He was short, maybe an inch shorter than her, and his left arm had a full sleeve tattoo. Chang’s black hair had started to recede. However, his most striking feature was his jaw. He had a serious look practically embedded onto his countenance, his chin jutting out at all times. She almost shuddered thinking about how easily he had pointed a weapon at them just a few moments ago.
“What were they shooting at you?” he asked her quietly as he took a look at Parkowski’s shoulder.
DePresti answered for her. “MP-5s, and on three separate occasions. Thankfully they were only accurate the last time. She says she took a clean through-and-through, but I haven’t been able to confirm.”
“And you were able to evade them?”
“My Grand Theft Auto skills were finally put to good use.”
Chang slowly removed the bandage. “Ma’am, you are one lucky lady,” he said. “This is as neat of a hole as I’ve ever seen.” He took a look at the back. “Mike, we won’t even need to cauterize it. We’ll just clean it, wrap it, and it should heal itself.”
DePresti tried to say something, but Chang spoke over him. “Let’s do it now, and then I’ll get you guys to a bed to rest. I can stand watch overnight and we can talk in the morning.”
Parkowski started to feel weak. She nodded in DePresti’s direction.
She wasn’t sure if he saw her, but he agreed. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks for taking us in.”
Chang laughed, the first sign that he had a sense of humor. “I just want to hear the story, man. Two normies like you, one of you with bullet wounds, it has to be one hell of a trip.”
He went into the small kitchen and got out a bottle of antiseptic from one of the upper cabinets, then returned to Parkowski. “Sorry, but this is going to sting,” he said.
Parkowski nodded again. “Just do it,” she said weakly.
Chang handed it to DePresti, who poured a little on Parkowski’s bullet wound.
It hurt like hell. It hurt even more than when she had been shot.
Parkowski screamed.
DePresti grabbed her hand and handed the bottle to Chang. “It’s ok, it’s ok,” he said as the other man put the bottle down and quickly put a new strip of gauze over her shoulder.
She barely remembered the next few minutes.
The two men wrapped some kind of bandage over the gauze and then DePresti half-carried, half-dragged her to a small bedroom located near the house’s main door. He put her into a queen-sized bed and pulled up the covers.
Parkowski passed out moments later.
She woke up at the crack of dawn to the sound of a rooster crowing.
Parkowski sat up in the bed’s stiff sheets. Her shoulder still hurt but it was more of a dull, throbbing pain rather than the acute hurt she felt yesterday.
Using her good arm, Parkowski got herself out of bed and started looking for her boyfriend or Chang.
The house looked even smaller in the daylight than it had the night before. There were only four rooms: the eat-in kitchen, a sitting room, and two bedrooms, plus a full bathroom, with the bare minimum of furniture in each of them. There were no decorations on the walls, no signs that any particular person lived there. It almost seemed unoccupied.
An old-school analog clock over the back door told her it was six o’clock. She was starving. Parkowski hadn’t eaten a meal since lunch yesterday.
