Any Day Now - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,52

four eggs,” I said. “I have turkey, some bread, and I think cheese. I can make a stale sandwich.”

She rolled her eyes and disappeared from the kitchen, only to reappear sans King, with a large box in her hand.

“I have this panini maker,” she said. “Let’s try it out. Then it doesn’t matter if the bread is stale.”

I was halfway through opening the box when my phone sounded, indicating a SWAT call.

“Son of a bitch,” I growled, knowing that I wouldn’t be eating anytime soon.

“What is it?” she asked worriedly.

I pulled my phone out with the hand that wasn’t covered in butter.

“Fuck.”

“What?” she asked softly.

I repeated myself.

“Fuck,” I said once I read the message for a second time. “There’s an active shooter situation at the hospital. I’ve got to go.”

Amelia leaned forward to read the message over my shoulder.

“You’ve gotta go,” she whispered. “Be safe.”

I leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to her mouth before hoofing it out of the house and to my cruiser.

Lights and sirens on, I hurried to the station and to the back of the lot where quite a few other vehicles had already started gathering.

Nathan and Sammy got out of their vehicles just as I was putting my cruiser in park.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked as I jogged to catch up with them.

Sammy held the door for me and we all went inside, heading straight to our lockers and stripping almost fully out of our clothes. The only thing to stay on me were my socks, my undershirt, my Kevlar vest, and my underwear.

Nathan was in much the same state that I was in, but Sammy, having come from the gym, was down to just boxers. Sweaty boxers that looked a little too soaked in sweat to be comfortable to wear for the next however many hours.

“Heard that some guy threatened a nurse after they took their mom away to an ICU floor after she started having a heart attack. The guy obviously wasn’t listening to a word the nurse said because after she left, he finally paid enough attention to know that she wasn’t coming back. He gets pissed and talks to some nurses who say that he can’t go visit her on that floor because it’s the ICU. So he storms off. Only, he’s dumb enough to say he’s going home and getting his AR-15 and bringing it back up there to shoot the doctors and nurses that allowed his mother to get sicker. And he didn’t just say this to someone, he actually posted this shit on social media,” Sammy said. “Fucking moron. Anyway, he’s on the ICU floor wanting to get in but the hospital is on lockdown. They have him trapped in between the elevators at the ICU floor and the ICU entrance.”

I groaned as I finished getting dressed.

“This is just perfect,” I said. “I haven’t eaten shit all day, and now we gotta deal with this.”

‘This shit’ really was shit.

When we arrived, the man had literally lost his shit.

And when I say literally, I meant he was walking around with shit on his ass.

Apparently in the time that he’d been trapped in there, he hadn’t been very happy.

To kill two birds with one stone, he’d decided to take a shit, and then throw that shit at the camera in the ceiling.

We watched the replay of the entire event.

“What are you going to do?” the security guard, an ex-cop in his mid-fifties, asked.

“We’re gonna hope he doesn’t touch us when we take him down,” Saint muttered under his breath.

A-fucking-men.

That was the last motherfuckin’ thing that I wanted to deal with.

“Elevators have been closed down?” I asked.

“They have,” the cop confirmed. “We have the elevators stopped on the fourth floor. Nobody up or down. The entire hospital is on lockdown.”

I nodded. “We can access the area via the elevator shaft. We wouldn’t need much of a gap, either. Just enough of a gap that we can bang him.”

And by ‘bang’ I meant a stun grenade that was a non-lethal form of taking the guy down.

“We can have a few people waiting outside the doors. Once you get that done, we can restrain him.” Bourne paused. “Anybody got any of those ugly yellow gowns? I’m not touching that motherfucker.”

There were a chorus of chuckles as everyone agreed with him.

“Agreed,” Booth muttered. “I will deal with a lot of stuff from someone, but their shit isn’t one of them.”

“Says the man that’s having another baby,” Nathan murmured. “Better get