Page 5

Most days he didn’t believe that, but this morning he worried that he was making the situation worse.

His teeth clacked together as he snapped his mouth shut and moved to open the register, glad Mrs. Martinez had made it to the back and hopefully locked the door to the office where her husband had been.

As he did, the robber turned his attention away from the guy by the motor oil, who chose that moment to charge him.

Axel hit the floor when they started wrestling over the gun, so when the first shot went off, he didn’t see anything but the tile. There were two more shots before the sirens came, the crash of something falling over, and items hitting the ground, rolling, and exploding.

In the chaos that followed, shattering glass mixed with yelling, it was the cries of pain and groaning that drew Axel from behind the counter.

Through the front window he could see the blue and red lights, but no color was as bright as the puddle of blood slowly creeping across the floor as it oozed out of Ms. Esperanza; a mom who often dropped in with her son to get a treat after school.

A burst gallon of milk lay on the floor beside her, white mixing with crimson, both flowing around the loaf of bread and the bananas she’d dropped.

He couldn’t see the robbers, but he saw Scout crawl forward through the blood and milk to press his t-shirt to her wound, attempting to staunch it.

Brushing his hair back from his eyes, Axel crawled the rest of the way from behind the counter to see one of the robbers lying on the floor, gurgling as he struggled to keep blood from flowing through his fingers from a gash in his neck.

Then he spotted the man in leather, wiping his blade against the side of his jeans to clean the blood off, while outside, officers called out, asking about hostages and if anyone was hurt, as they tried to establish communication with the robbers.

As dry as his mouth was, it took him a moment to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth so he could speak.

“I gotta bounce, kid,” the one in leather told Scout before he rushed to the back, leaving his companion to keep pressure on Ms. Esperanza’s wounds. He’d make a clean getaway as long as there were no officers in the alley, and from the sound of things, they were all out front.

“T-they’re both down, and we need an ambulance,” Axel called out, keeping his head down and his hands held high as officers flooded the room.

The only one who didn’t move was the man holding his t-shirt to Ms. Esperanza’s stomach. As the adrenaline rush slowly began easing back, he could hear Scout speaking to her, telling her that she was going to be okay and that help had arrived.

“We need EMTs in here, now!” one officer barked into his radio.

“Cold,” Ms. Esperanza whispered, her voice weak and edged with pain.

“Yes, ma’am, you’re laying in milk,” Scout told her.

“It’s okay, we can take it from here,” one of the EMTs said, placing his hands over Scout’s until he edged away carefully. “You did good.”

Scout staggered when he stood, and at first, Axel feared that he’d been injured too, until Scout sagged against the counter, trembling and swiping at his cheeks with bloody hands as his tears began to fall.

Not as hard, or as cool and collected as the man in leather, then.

No wonder the bigger one had stepped forward when the robbers had burst through the door.

Whatever their relationship was, the bigger one was clearly protective of Scout, who looked like he was about to collapse on the floor.

“Hey, breathe,” Axel said, taking a chance on touching him because he needed a touchstone too, and some way to make his ears stop ringing.

“Is there anyone in the back?” an officer asked.

Axel felt Scout tense at the question, the desperate look in his eyes one Axel couldn’t ignore.

“Yes, sir, the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Martinez. Mrs. Martinez was up front with me when she spotted a man in an teal car wearing a mask. She called me up front to verify that’s what she was seeing, and I told her to run to the back and warn Mr. Martinez.

“Did you get a look at the car?”

“Four-door, teal, beat to hell, I think it was either a Neon or a Stratus. It was definitely a Dodge.”

“Did you get a look at the license plate?”

“No sir, but the side and rear views would be on the tape,” Axel said. “We have surveillance cameras recording the outside of the store twenty-four seven.”

“Alright, we’ll need to get a look at that footage,” he said before stepping back to give the description over the radio.

“What about the inside?” Another officer asked. “Were there cameras recording in here?”

“No, sir,” Axel replied, steadily running his hand up and down Scout’s arm, which slowed his shaking some. “We just use mirrors and the honor system.”

“Even behind the register?”

“Yes, sir,” Axel replied, pointing one out to him. “Mr. and Mrs. Martinez are good people, and there’s only me and one other employee who works here part-time.”

As if on cue, the couple rushed from the back, Mr. Martinez protectively positioned in front of his wife, a baseball bat still held in his hand.

“ Ay, Dios Mio ,” Mr. Martinez muttered, eyes wide as he took in what was happening around them.

Axel followed his gaze around the room while Mrs. Martinez rushed to Ms. Esperanza’s side, the women speaking in a mix of English and Spanish.

Axel heard her mention her son and Mrs. Martinez’s promise to contact the school immediately so they could get ahold of the emergency contact they had on file.

She held Ms. Esperanza’s hand on the way out to the ambulance, what sounded like a prayer being uttered between them.

On the floor, beside an overturned rack of chips, lay one of the robbers, his mask twisted around, obscuring his vision.

A few feet away lay a dented can of peaches, no doubt responsible for the blood that pooled beneath the man’s head.

No one was working on him, and as Axel watched, the EMTs stopped working on the second robber, who was no longer making those garbled, desperate gasps for air.

“Axel, Axel, are you alright? You weren’t hurt, were you?” Mr. Martinez asked. “I told you before, always give them the money.”

“I-I was working on it,” Axel admitted, glancing back at the open register and the bag of money he’d dropped when he’d hit the floor.

The pair had gotten their asses killed for a couple hundred dollars, at best. It had been that slow of a morning.

“Can you tell us what happened?” an officer asked. “You don’t look like you were involved in the altercation that took place.”

“Because I wasn’t,” Axel explained. “I was on the floor behind the counter. I didn’t see anything.”

“And you, son, did you see what happened?” the officer asked, turning his attention back to Scout.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Scout replied and promptly did so all over the officer’s shoes.

Whether it had been on purpose to stop the questions or he was just that shaken up, Axel couldn’t say.

Not a lot came up, just enough to get the officer to jump back and stop talking.

Then Scout wiped his mouth on his sleeve and locked mismatched eyes with Axel for a moment before addressing the officer.

“I hit the deck too; I didn’t see shit,” Scout said as the cop’s mouth twisted up in a sneer.

“How convenient,” the cop grumbled, before turning on his heel and stalking away.

How convenient indeed, Axel thought as he watched someone cover the dead men. Aside from Ms. Esperanza and the man who’d fled, Scout was the only one who’d been close enough to witness anything, and all he muttered was a flippant remark about an argument over a bag of chips.

Axel snickered, smothering it when the cop whipped around to stare at him.

Oh fuckin’ well. After what they’d just gone through, the only medicine better than laughter was getting pinned to a bed.

Since there were no beds in the store, laughter would just have to do.