Page 63 of Justice for Daesha

“Mom, do you hear yourself?” Benson shouted.

Amos heard a shuffling sound behind him. SRT agents. He was sure of it. “Mrs.Kelso, please, put the gun down. Nobody else has to die,” he warned quietly.

Then he got a look at Marshall’s face. The senator was looking past Amos at the SRT agents and his face contorted. In a broken, gasping voice he whispered, “I… I’m… I think I’m… having a… heart attack.”

“Oh, god, somebody get his nitro!” Benson cried out. “Please! Help him! He has a heart condition!”

The senator was panting. “Oh… pain… not gonna…” His head dropped.

“Mrs.Kelso, we need to get medical help for your husband. Can you let us do that?” As Amos took a step toward her, she lifted her weapon.

It all happened so fast that there was no time to throw up a halt signal. He heard the click of the weapon behind him as it fired, saw Mrs.Kelso drop, heard the sons scream. Everything around him ground to a screeching halt. “NOOOOOO!” he bellowed, but it was too late.

“Suspect down, suspect down,” one of the SRTs called out. “We need medical here STAT!” There was a flurry of footsteps around him, but Amos couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that he hadn’t gotten the one piece of information he needed.

Where was Daesha?

The Kelso brothers were sobbing out loud, and EMTs were rushing in, checking SenatorKelso’s vitals and trying to get a central line in, working over Mrs.Kelso as a pool of blood seeped from the wound in her shoulder. Amos wheeled on the three men. “Where is she!”

“I don’t know!” Benson screamed. “Daesha!” he yelled, but with the racket from all the officers and emergency crews, they couldn’t hear anything.

“Think, damn it! Think! Where would she be?”

He could see Chance panicking. “Um, trunk of the car? Uh, I don’t know! Oh, fuck it all! Where is she?”

“God, we’ve got to find her! Where could she be?” Benson screamed aloud. “Somebody, think! Where could she?”

Bless his heart, it was Ainsley who said quietly, “The freezer.”

Amos spun to stare at him. “Is it operational?”

Ainsley’s hair swayed as he shook his head. “No. It’ll be hotter than an oven in there, and no air moving. If that’s where she is, she may not… It’s back here,” he said and began to run, Amos right on his heels and the other two brothers trailing.

Sure enough, there was a freezer back there. It was the size of two rail cars, and the door was locked tight. Amos pounded on the metal. “DAESHA! Are you in there, baby? It’s me! It’s Amos!”Oh, god, his brain screamed,we can’t be too late!He shrieked across the building, “We need jaws! STAT!”

To his relief, he heard one of the SRTs yell toward the front, “Victim may be in the freezer back there! Get the first responders and their jaws back here!”

Amos could hear feet running and in what seemed like hours but had to only be seconds, two firefighters appeared with the huge contraption in their hands. One yanked a pull cord on a portable generator and the thing roared to life. “Everybody back!” he yelled and headed toward the door.

The door was sealed so tightly that the spreader couldn’t get between the layers of metal, so they attached the cutter, but it couldn’t make a hole large enough to get through. The metal was unusually thick, and there was layer upon layer of some kind of insulating material. Amos tapped the firefighter on the shoulder. “Will it work on the hinges?” he yelled over the device’s din.

“I doubt it, but I’ll try it.” With the spreader back on it, he tried to jam it under a hinge, but there wasn’t room. He reattached the cutter and tried going from the top of the hinge to the bottom. It took a few tries but eventually he managed to cut through it, then attacked the other two huge hinges. When the last one was destroyed, the door pivoted crookedly on the latch and fell, its gaskets too rotted to create the vacuum that it had in its heyday.

It was pitch black inside, but before Amos could yell for a light, the freezer was illuminated with a tactical flashlight one of the SRTs was holding. And there, against the back wall, lay Daesha, quiet and still.Oh, god, we’re too late!Amos’s heart whimpered. “Daesha! Baby, it’s Amos! Wake up!” Even though her skin was dry, she lay in a puddle of sweat and urine, and her pulse was weird and weak. “I need medical!” Before the words were even out of his mouth, a gurney loaded with a trauma bag appeared beside him.

“Step back, sir. We’ll get her.” Two EMTs worked over her, snapping a cervical collar around her neck for safety purposes and sliding her onto a backboard. They lifted her and placed her on the wheeled apparatus, but she never moved. “I’m having trouble getting a line in. No veins. She too dehydrated.” In a split second, Amos heard him say, “Ah. There we go. Let’s roll.” They each grabbed an end of the gurney, lifted it and yanked upward, and the wheels fell to the ground. In mere seconds they were out the door.

As they loaded her into the ambulance, Alex ran up with an older man. “Amos! This is Mr.Wilkerson. Sir, this is AmosFletcher, the agent in charge.”

“My daughter! Where’s my daughter!”

“The EMTs have her, sir. They’re taking her right now.” Amos had every intention of forcing them to let him ride with her, but they were pulling out. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to once again find his little brother.

“Hey. Cruiser’s right here. Alex, take over,” Jack said, and the younger agent lifted his chin in reply. “Let’s go. Both of you. Hurry.”

Amos and LawrenceWilkerson piled into the back of Jack’s cruiser and in seconds, they were racing to catch up with the ambulance. A solitary tear rolled down Amos’s face, and he hoped nobody noticed it, but when he looked up, Jack caught his eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. “She’ll be fine, brother. I’m sure of it.”

“Wish I were,” Amos mumbled.

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