The number was the county hospital. A woman’s voice asked if I was Daniel Mercer. Asked if my wife was Lauren Mercer. Then she told me there’d been an incident at the Fuel Stop on Route 9.
My hands went cold. I couldn’t feel my legs getting off the couch.
When I got to the ER they wouldn’t let me back at first. A nurse with blood on her sleeve told me Lauren was okay. The baby was okay. But there was a man in surgery and it wasn’t looking good.
I found Lauren in a curtained bay. She had someone else’s blood on her shirt. Her hands were shaking so bad the cup of water kept spilling down her chin. She looked at me and the first thing she said wasn’t “I’m okay” or “the baby’s fine.”
She said, “He just came out of nowhere, Danny.”
It took her twenty minutes to get through it. She kept stopping. Kept pressing her palms against her eyes. But what she described made my stomach fold in half.
A man had walked into that gas station with a gun tucked in his jacket. Nobody noticed at first. Lauren was at the counter paying when he stepped up behind her and pressed it into her lower back. Right where our daughter was.
