“Not right now. Didn’t Beaver tell you everything you needed to know?” Being hostile towards him probably wasn’t in my best interest, but I was beyond being reasoned with.
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t tell us much of anything. He wasn’t in the room during most of your attack on Mr. Hale.” The cop’s tone made it sound like it was an unprovoked thing. “So what I need from you is a statement telling me everything that happened from the time you and Mr. Hale stepped into the bar until the point of you being removed from him.”
I felt the all too familiar simmering in my blood. I didn’t like this cop’s tone with me. I was not about to be blamed for kicking the ass of a guy that was assaulting my girl. I was protecting her, saving her from a lifetime of nightmares. If Adam had succeeded in molesting her, I don’t know where we’d be. She would never come back from that one. Hell, I didn’t know if she was going to come back to me even now.
I started my side of the story from the beginning. I told him how I had gone to dinner with Adam, how he was my long time friend from high school, and how we’d gone to the bar for a drink. I gave him all of the gory details of walking in on that fucker using her to get off. I had to stop talking after that part and told him that I didn’t remember much of anything else. If I kept talking, I would be held responsible for going and finding him and finishing what I’d started. I’d been running on pure adrenaline when I’d attacked him, and it was still coursing through my veins. I had no shame or remorse when the cop asked if that was all.
He looked up from his notepad, where he’d been scribbling down everything I’d said as quickly as he could. “Is that all you can tell me about tonight?” He looked at me with a raised brow.
“No. I want that bastard gone. I heard one of the nurses say that he is in ICU and he’s expected to make a full recovery. I don’t want him in this hospital. I want him removed.”
“Mr. Nelson, I can’t do that. We don’t have that kind of authority, and even if we did, we’d have to transfer him to Houston. It’s too far for someone in his condition to travel.”
“I don’t really give a shit if he dies on the way there and chokes on his own blood. I don’t want him so close to her. He almost raped her!” I was beyond close to completely losing it. How did they not understand that Adam even being on the same planet right now was still too close to Kat?
The cop shifted on his feet. His stance became rigid, as if preparing to wrestle with me. “I understand that you are upset, but I’m going to need you to settle down, or I’ll be forced to remove you.”
My eyes narrowed into slits, silently provoking him to touch me and see how far he could get me out of this room and away from Kat. I’d dare the entire hospital staff to take me on right now. I was raging with fury.
“Yeah? Not so sure you want to put your hands on me right now.”
He seemed to be gauging me to figure out if I was serious. He chose a different approach. Sighing, he said, “Listen. I don’t understand what you’re going through right now, but I do know Kat. She watched my kid last year when my wife went into labor and we had nobody else. I want her to be okay along with everybody else in this town. Hell, I can’t say that if I’d seen him doing what you said he was doing, that I wouldn’t have taken a few swings too. But your aggressive attitude towards me and all of the doctors and nurses isn’t helping anybody. Just please, go take a walk. Find a seat and breathe, grab a coffee, or whatever it is you need to do to get your head on straight. She’s going to need you when she wakes up and the way you are right now is only going to frighten her.”
He was right. As much as I hated it, he was right. I turned away and dragged a hand through my hair. A nurse came up beside me and grabbed the hand that was hanging by my side. She was a short, young, blonde woman. Despite taking hold of my hand, she looked up at me with shy, uncertain eyes.
“You’re bleeding. I have a wash station over here in the corner. Can I clean you up to make sure your knuckles are okay?” Her voice was so soft compared to the gruffness of the cop. I looked from her, to Kat, then back to her again.
“She’s okay for right now. We’re just observing her, but she’s not going to wake up anytime soon. And you’ll still be able to see her from over here.”
Finally, someone who understood I wasn’t going far from my girl. “Alright.”
She tugged on my arm and commenced rinsing all the dried blood from my knuckles. A few of them had split open and she told me she needed to bandage them, but I refused, saying I was fine. I think I scared her because she didn’t say another word after that. After a few minutes of holding my hands under water, and her gently scrubbing with some anti-bacterial soap, I was back to standing by Kat’s bedside. The police officer had left the room, probably assuming that his little talk calmed me down. I wasn’t calm. No, in fact, I was far from it. Looking down at her, she was peaceful. All I could see was that bastard pinning her to the wall and the bruises forming on her face.