“I must..have the..phone” he whimpered before losing consciousness completely.

A tickle on his forehead roused Lee, though he was not ready to open his eyes. He assumed that he must be dead; surely nobody could survive a gunshot at point blank range. Only in movies, not in reality he reasoned.

Lee was afraid. Afraid of what he may see when opening his eyes. He had a Christian faith yet had knowingly lived a life of depravity, excess and sin. If he was in the afterlife it was not to be spent in eternal paradise with his dead friends and relatives. It was eternal damnation.

He decided to use his other senses to examine his environment first. The tickle on his forehead was a fly. He could hear it clearly now as it drifted aimlessly around the room. He had become aware that he was in a room; there was no breeze and a sterile smell he readily identified as an industrial surface cleanser. As he become more alert he recalled some further details of his angel. A paramedic, no doubt about that.