"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 5

Just then, a knock on the door ended their conversation and both a young red headed doctor and an older, slightly overweight greying police officer with five o'clock shadow and hard lines in his face walked into the room. "Mr. Ramsay?" the cop asked, reaching out to shake Josh's hand left hand in an awkward, but friendly greeting, as though the two were simply meeting for coffee at a local diner. 

Josh narrowed his eyes a bit, but nodded and set his cell phone down as he grasped, then quickly released the officer's hand, resting his own back down against his hip. "Yeah, that's me." 

"I'm here to talk to you about what happened three nights ago," the officer stated, making a fairly obvious effort to put Josh at ease as he unsnapped his shirt pocket and pulled out a small pad of paper and a pen. "It seems that you were pretty beat up there. Protocol states that anyone who comes in here in your condition gets the royal treatment, and you deserve that much based on everything it looks like you've got goin' on under those bandages. Can you tell me what you remember about how you came to be here in a hospital?" He moved between Matt and the bed to sit down in the seat that Matt had vacated and leaned forward, waiting for Josh's response. 

"Yeah, um... I'd love to fuckin' tell you, but I just don't remember anything." The singer flickered his eyes from the cop to the doctor and over to Matt, looking for any sign that would prod his memory, but finding none. Not that he'd actually expected that; it was just a small hope.  

"Not a thing?" The officer transferred both the pen and pad to the same hand and lowered them, holding them against his knee. "I mean, you don't remember a single detail?" 

Josh risked dizziness again and shook his head. "Just pain." 

"You don't remember maybe possibly getting into a fight? Maybe visiting a bar and overdoing it a little?" 

"Josh doesn't drink," Matt interjected from his new place in the room. 

The singer shrugged in response and shook his head in agreement. "Not in a long time." 

"Well, okay," the officer said with a slightly skeptical tone, as though he'd heard the excuse before and had a different script memorized based on the multitude of excuses an answers his subjects may give. "It's fine that you can't recall anything just yet, but we won't get anywhere like this." The cop slipped one of his business cards out from his jacket pocket and handed it over to Josh. "In cases like yours, it's normal not to remember much, if anything. Trauma, shock, the works. But, you'll have to give me a call when you remember some specifics. Even the small things that might not seem like much sometimes make all the difference. Anything would help." 

The officer stood and flipped the notebook closed with a loud clap, slipping it back into his pocket along with the pen. He lowered his hand to rest it on his hip, inadvertently pulling Josh's gaze down to the gun that rested in a shiny black leather holster strapped to the belt against his side.  

Between the noise and the shine of the metal, everything came back to the singer in one fell swoop. He could smell the soda that he was drinking when he discovered the robber in his home. He could taste the blood as it drained down the back of his throat after the stranger had hit him across the face. The sound of the man's footsteps on the floor, the bright light of the setting sun through the windows, the crack of the bullet as it left the pistol that he hadn't thought he'd heard the first time - it all registered in fractions of a second and he could see it all play out in front of him. In that moment, he was right back there all over again, cowering on the floor and begging for his life. 

Intuitively, Josh raised his left arm to cover his face half a second later. "No! No!" he screamed, this time not recognizing his own voice. His body trembled as he tried to hide under the blankets, knowing that they wouldn't keep him safe from being shot a second time, but also not knowing what else to do. "No! Don't! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!!"