Tommy Tom shifted, covering our backs, as he watched me approach the body.
It took less than thirty seconds to confirm that this man was the Walton character I'd seen at the smokehouse. The same one who we were ninety-nine percent positive was the man responsible for assaulting Naomi.
"He's out," I said, categorizing the shit laying around him in a heartbeat. Drugs, painkillers in particular, littered the floor. Saline. Gauze. Betadine. Alcohol. Syringes.
I lifted my foot and kicked the man's shoulder, causing him to moan and roll onto his back. His face was just as fucked up as the body parts I could see.
And that's when I had my suspicions confirmed. "Dog bites on his face. Arms. Chest. Likely some on his legs, too, but it doesn't look like he got that far before he passed out."
Tommy Tom relayed the message to my father and the men that had followed him, and it wasn't two minutes later that they all arrived.
Each of us surrounded the man.
"Seems anti-climactic."
That was said by Aaron, and Truth snorted.
"We don't always have to have shoot outs and car wrecks," Aaron laughed under his breath. "This is actually damn nice. No getting shot at … "
A gunshot rang out, and that was when I realized that he must have pulled a gun, because he was trying with all his might to raise it up and aim for me.
He only succeeded in getting it up about an inch off the floor before it fell again.
"You were saying?" I drawled, taking a step forward and placing my booted foot over the man's wrist and then pressing down with the majority of my weight.
We ignored his whimpering cries, and I twisted my foot viciously, extremely satisfied with the way his wrist snapped.
"Dog bites are funny things," Tommy Tom said, bending down to examine the cuts. "It's crazy how infected they can get."
He picked up a pipe, rusted and covered in something that I couldn't make out, and dragged it across the man's wounds on his arms, ensuring that he would get an infection.
The lacerations were seeping with blood, and I had to force myself not to pick the pipe up and whack the man across the head with it.
He deserved it, but the wounds needed to coincide with the dog bites. If I added any more to them that didn't fit, others might grow suspicious, and there was no way in hell I was implicating myself in this.
I wasn't stooping down to that level.
I had really good intentions, too.
I was going to walk away. I was going to give the man over to my father, the police chief. I was going to go back to that hospital. Force myself to stay away from him until he was in the care of the Mooresville Jail System.
That all flew out the window when the man grinned at me.
"Was gonna enjoy taking your woman."
My eyes dropped to the man on the floor.
He was laying on the floor, broken and bleeding, and yet he still had a fuckin' mouth on him.
He was surrounded by six men who would like nothing better than to separate his face from his body, yet he still had the balls to say words that he knew would piss them off.
I smiled.
Then I kicked him in the face, ensuring he wouldn't be talking any time soon.
Mainly because he had a broken jaw, and likely he would need reconstructive surgery to put it back together again.
"That's enough," my father said. "If you fuck him up anymore, I'll have to do reports, and you know how much I hate paperwork."
I walked off without another word, and went to the hospital where my woman waited.
***
"I don't want him next to my woman," I growled at the doctor. "I don't care how critical he is. You either get him gone off this fuckin' floor, or I'm taking my woman somewhere she'll feel safe."
"Sean," my father started.
I turned and gave my father a look that he couldn't misconstrue.
"No," I seethed. "She's not going to continue to feel scared. She deserves to be somewhere that's going to give her that sense of calm she needs to heal."
My father held up a hand. "What about moving him to the room I saw closest to the nurses' station? That way he still has the medical attention he needs, but he's not so close to her as to cause her any worry." He hesitated. "You want the man healthy, don't you, Son?"
Something about the way my father said that had me smiling.
"Of course, I want him healthy," I said with a straight face. "That'll be perfectly acceptable."
"But, Sir," the nurse in charge said. "That room is occupied … "
I turned my head so my eyes could take her in. She was definitely nervous, but I could tell she didn't want the extra hassle of having to deal with this.