The Color of the Season Read Free Page A

acknowledge his assistance because the suspect was escaping toward a residential area across the street.
    “ Stop! Police !” I shouted.
    To my surprise, just as the shooter reached a low hedge in front of a small bungalow…instead of jumping over it, he halted on the spot and whirled around.
    I trained my gun on him. “ Drop your weapon !”
    He raised both arms out to the side.
    “I said drop your weapon!”
    I blinked a few times to clear my vision in the blur of the rain. Then…
    Crack!
    A searing pain shot through my stomach, just below the bottom of my vest. Then another crack ! I felt my thigh explode.
    Somehow I managed to fire off a few rounds before sinking to the ground. The suspect did the same.
    In that instant, two squad cars came skidding around the corner, sirens wailing and lights flashing.
    Slowly, wearily, finding it difficult to breathe, I lay down on my back in the middle of the street and removed my hat as I stared up at the gray night sky. A cold, hard rain washed over my face. I began to shiver.
    Vaguely, I was aware of the other two units pulling to a halt nearby. I turned my head to watch two officers in raincoats approach the suspect, who was face down in the ditch in front of the hedge.
    Then rapid footsteps, growing closer…
    “Josh, are you okay?”
    I looked up at Gary, a rookie who had offered me a stick of gum in the break room before I’d headed out that night. I nodded my head, but felt woozy. “I think I’m hit.”
    “Yeah,” he replied, glancing uneasily at my abdomen. “Help’s on the way. Hang in there, buddy. You’re going to be fine.”
    Feeling chilled to the bone, I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
    By now Gary was applying pressure to my stomach, which hurt like hell. He shouted over his shoulder, “Need some help over here!”
    I clenched my jaw against the burning agony in my guts and leg, and heard more sirens.
    “Will they be here soon?” I asked with a sickening mixture of panic and dread.
    “Yeah,” Gary replied. “Any second now. Just hang on.”
    “It’s cold,” I whispered. “I should have worn the raincoat.”
    More footsteps. I felt no pain, only relief but was drifting off. It was hard to focus.
    Another cop knelt down beside me.
    I labored to focus on his face.
    “MacIntosh,” I said. “Can you call Carla for me? Tell her I’m sorry about this morning. Tell her I love her. I didn’t mean what I said. I should have walked her to the door.”
    “You can tell her yourself,” MacIntosh replied.
    His patronizing response roused a wave of anger in me.
    “No.” I grabbed his wrist and spoke through clenched teeth. “I need you to promise me… Promise me you’ll tell her, or I swear I’ll knock your head off.”
    “All right, all right,” he replied. “I’ll tell her.”
    That was the last thing I remembered from that day.
    What happened next was strange and incredible. From that moment on, my life became divided into two halves—everything that happened before the shooting, and everything that happened after.

Chapter Seven

    I must have passed out before the ambulance arrived, because I don’t remember any of that. I don’t recall being placed on a stretcher or speeding to the hospital or being wheeled into the ER—which was probably a good thing because with two bullets in me, I would have been in a lot of pain.
    When I finally woke up, there was a team of doctors and nurses crowded around me in an operating room and my stomach was sliced open.
    I’d never seen so much blood. They were suctioning it into a tube.
    At first, I didn’t understand that it was actually me on the table. I felt as if I were watching some random operation from over the shoulder of one of the surgeons.
    Though I felt sorry for the unfortunate individual on the table. He looked like he was in pretty rough shape.
    As the seconds passed, I slowly floated upward until I was hovering close to the ceiling. Only then did I realize that the body on the