Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,58
from her on the phone and the two things she’d caught didn’t make any sense together.
“They don’t know if he’s going to make it.” Katie sobbed into her shoulder. “He’s in surgery now and no one will tell me what’s going on.”
Nora understood how she felt. Corbett’s kids huddled in the corner, sitting listlessly near a duffel bag full of untouched games and electronics. They watched their mother cry while silent tears streamed down their own faces.
The next few hours passed in a blur. Mike showed up and went straight to Katie, offering the comfort Nora didn’t know how to dispense. The Parrish office called at regular intervals, asking for updates she didn’t have. She couldn’t see Corbett. The intensive care unit only allowed family inside and even those visits were doled out in tiny increments by nurses who understood what the doctors wouldn’t say. The facts they did divulge—organs stitched back together, blood pumped in, cranium fractured, brain swelling—kept reducing into a bald and unmistakable summary: Corbett could die. He might die before she ever got to grill him about last night. He might die without knowing how furious she was with him. He might die and never unwind at Ike’s, arguing over pints and making her dissolve into laughter again. Her best friend might die.
Nora needed information. While everyone else sat around hugging each other, Nora found out what she could. According to his intake record, Corbett had been brought in just before midnight last night, a John Doe without any identification, and had barely survived the initial emergency surgeries, flatlining once before they’d stabilized him. The fact that he’d made it this far, everyone said, was supposed to be encouraging, but a strangling fear convulsed around Nora’s throat every time someone exited the ICU.
When the police arrived, Nora hovered in the background as they pieced together the timeline from a distraught Katie.
Corbett had left the tournament somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m. This, Nora had already known. Had, in fact, watched him walk away from the stadium in Logan Russo’s company.
“He had some emergency,” Katie tearfully confirmed. “He said to grab an Uber and not to wait up. So I didn’t. Mike and I shared a ride and I went straight to bed. But when I woke up this morning and he still wasn’t home, I started to worry. He didn’t answer his phone and he wasn’t at Parrish. Finally, I started calling local hospitals. I thought I was overreacting, but then …” She broke down, and Mike stepped in to put an arm around her.
The detectives filled in the blanks. At 11:07 p.m. on Tuesday night, they reported, Minneapolis emergency response received several calls reporting a hit-and-run accident in the Mill District. A few witnesses saw a man running around the corner of a building and directly into the path of an oncoming car. One witness claimed the car swerved onto the sidewalk. Another said the man stumbled into the street first. The exact place of impact couldn’t be determined because there were no tire marks on the street.
“The car didn’t brake?” Katie choked on the question, horror filling her already overflowing eyes.
Witnesses and forensics had agreed. Someone driving a dark sedan crashed into Corbett, threw his body over the top of the hood, and sped around a corner without slowing down. Based on the extent of his injuries, they estimated the vehicle must have been going around thirty-five to forty miles per hour, over the speed limit for downtown but not fast enough to draw attention before or after the impact.
“The driver hasn’t been identified.” One of the detectives answered the unspoken question. He assured them that all precincts were on the lookout for a car matching the eyewitnesses’ descriptions, and they were reviewing surveillance footage to try to ID the vehicle, but were backed up with all the holiday events going on around town. Nora read between the lines: no one was pulling overtime for this.
“What happened to his wallet and phone?” she asked.
“We found them.” The detective produced a clear plastic bag with the items inside and handed it to Katie. “We tracked his phone to a garbage can less than a block away from the scene. Wallet, too, empty of cash. Not sure why they took the phone and just dumped it, unless they were looking for better models.”
“You think he was robbed and then ran into the street?”
“It’s the most plausible scenario based on what we know. Someone holds him up,