Disclaimer: I do not own Human Target and intend no copyright infringement.
~ all the good girls ~
Saint Francis Memorial Hospital's ER, late in the evening.
Could there be anything worse?
Anything worse than seeing your only child on a gurney, EMT on top of her, hectically administering CPR while a second one is pressing a respiratory mask to her face, desperately trying to prevent her from suffering brain damage through oxygen deprivation?
Could there be anything worse?
Anything worse than hearing a young doctor curse after one look at your 16 year old daughter's data, then calling for another adrenaline injection and then curse again?
Could there be anything worse?
Anything worse than feeling the hospital's floor vibrate from the pounding feet of people running to save your kid's life? Anything worse than smelling the chemical substances used in the intensive care unit, tasting them on your tongue, hoping with all your heart that one of them will somehow make things right again?
Probably only the ticking of the clock in such a situation, the immeasurably slow movement of time.
This is when you pray.
Or vow vengeance.
"It's a close call", said the doctor after what had seemed to her like an eternity of waiting and staring at corridor walls. "The next 24 hours will be decisive." He paused. "Those pills she took are not harmless in themselves. In combination with alcohol and in that dose… It's a fifty-fifty chance." He paused again, for the first time paying attention to the middle-aged woman's appearance. She looked devastated. Of course she did. Who wouldn't after finding out that your child just tried to take her life?
"Is there anyone we can call?", he asked cautiously.
The woman merely shook her short, graying curls. "There's no one. Her father died in action two years ago. Iraq. She's the only thing I've got left." Thin streams of tears ran down her sunken cheeks.
The doctor touched her shoulder in a gesture of sympathy and walked off.
Knees buckling underneath her, the woman sank into a chair. For a while, she did nothing but cry. Then her posture slowly changed. Her shoulders tensed and her hands clenched into fists.
"Somebody is going to pay for this", she hissed. "Somebody is going to pay."
48 hours later, the telephone of a certain warehouse in the Tenderloin began to ring.