Fallen Idols by J. F. Freedman

they had dumped it. I was lying on my stomach, covered with mud, listening to them ride away. They had the trunk with my stuff and the artifacts from La Chimenea, but at that point none of it mattered, because we had all survived.
    “I waited a few minutes until it was obvious that they weren't returning, then I gathered all my people in the road again and started taking a head count, because I wanted to make sure everyone was accounted for. No one was missing, and miraculously, no one had been shot. We started gathering our stuff they hadn't taken and throwing it back into the vans. Then Manuel said to me,
‘Señora
Gaines, I don't see her.’
    “I wasn't worried about your mom, I knew she could lake care of herself. To be honest, I thought she was right there next to me. But he was right. She wasn't there. And then we heard a low moan. Mom was lying on the ground at the edge of the jungle, a few feet off the road, just deep enough in that we hadn't seen her. She'd been shot in the stomach. I could see the blood oozing out from her, her hands were covering her belly but they were red with her blood. I remembered the second rifle shot and realized that bullet must have hit her.
    “Her color was good and her pulse seemed strong. I pulled her dress up and checked where she'd been shot. It didn't look that bad, the blood wasn't gushing out, just oozing slowly. I thought, we can be at a hospital in an hour. She's going to be okay.
    “We threw everything into the vans and took off and drove like crazy, I had her in the lead van with me, Manuel was driving like Mario Andretti, I was holding her, telling her she was going to be all right, she was telling me she thought it wasn't that bad. We were pushing as hard as we could.”
    He stopped talking for a moment and buried his head in his hands. Then he looked up again.
    “Five minutes before we got to the hospital, she stopped breathing.”
    Walt was exhausted, both from the ordeal he'd been through, and from the remembering and recounting of it. Around him, everyone was devastated.
    “Five minutes,” Walt repeated. “Ten at the most. That's how close we came to saving her.” His voice sounded hollow, distant, like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well.
    “And how far.”

C HICAGO
    L ast call!” Clancy sang out in a weary voice.
    The Pabst Blue Ribbon clock hanging over the backbar, a relic from whoever owned the bar before World War II, read a quarter to one. Weekdays were generally slow after midnight; only half a dozen stragglers, hard-core regulars from the neighborhood, were still hanging on. They ordered up with languid “yos” and fined taps on their glasses.
    This bar, Finnegan's, on the near North Side, was Clancy's second business, the one that paid the bills. From six in the morning until five in the afternoon he was absorbed in his sports-kinesiology practice, his real vocation. That business had grown so quickly that four months ago he had formed a partnership with a couple of other physical therapists and opened a bigger place, the Evanston Sports Rehabilitation Center, a large, airy facility just over the city line. The partners had taken out a sizable loan with the bank—the equipment required to set up a facility like that ran well into six figures—but they were breaking even financially, with the prospect of making seriously good money not too long down the road, and most important, he was doing work that he loved.
    He drew the last beers of the night, poured the final round of drinks. For the past half-hour he'd been methodically going through his shutdown, so that at one on the dot, as soon as he shooed everybody out and turned the neon sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED, he'd be able to finish his cleanup in less than ten minutes, stash the cashbox in the safe, set the alarm, lock the door behind him, pull down the security grate, lock it, and go home to Callie.
    They had been married for eight months now. The ceremony had taken place