The doors into the ER hissed open again and Paul emerged, accompanied by another nurse. On his face was the look Russ knew from Vietnam—the face of someone who has just seen his buddy blown away beside him. A mix of shock, fear, and terrible comprehension. “Paul!” he called out. The oversized man looked up. “Clare’s gone to get her car. I’ll follow you to the airport.” Paul nodded, as if speech was too much of an effort right then.
One EMT had finished strapping Emil in and was jumping out of the back of the ambulance when Clare screeched in behind the wheel of her little white-and-red Shelby Cobra. She waved to Paul, who lumbered over and squeezed himself into the tiny passenger seat. The EMT slammed and sealed the door and dashed to the cab of the ambulance. It began moving before the cab door had swung shut.
Russ and the ambulance both kept their lights flashing all the way to the fire station. He couldn’t shake the image of Emil’s ground-meat face. They had never been more than professional friends—he had precious few real friends for someone who had come back to his hometown, Russ realized—but in the five years he had headed up the department, he had spent a lot of time with Emil Dvorak—in the ME’s office, at the hospital, in courthouse hallways. He thought about the pathologist’s razor-sharp wit, his orderly office, full of thick books and opera CDs, his addiction to Sunday-morning political debates. The damage to that fragile brain when Emil’s skull had been pounded again and again—bile rose in Russ’s throat, threatening to choke him. He followed the ambulance across the intersection and into the fire station’s parking lot. Lights blazed from the station bays, burnishing the garaged fire trucks and emergency vehicles, glittering off the blaze-reflective strips on the life-flight helicopter, which was hunkered down in the middle of the asphalt. Several firefighters stood inside their bays, watching. He followed Clare’s car to the farthest corner of the lot, where the firefighters’ cars were parked.
The life-flight team—a paramedic, a nurse, and a pilot—jogged over to the ambulance to help the EMTs off-load Emil on his spine board. Clare leaped from her driver’s seat and paused while Paul wriggled his way out of the passenger side. Russ joined them, a little apart from the medical team, which was carefully transferring Emil into the helicopter.
“Paul,” he said, “I wanted to ask you—what was Emil doing tonight?” One of the nurses hoisted the IV high as they smoothly lifted the board into the belly of the chopper. “Do you know where he was? Who he was with?”
Paul kept his gaze fixed on the figure disappearing into the helicopter. He rubbed his hands up and down, up and down along the seam of his shorts. “He had dinner with some friends of ours. Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler. At their bed-and-breakfast, the Stuyvesant Inn. He was going to come straight home….” his voice trailed off.
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll be talking with them tomorrow. We’re going to get whoever did this.” Russ knew that was cold comfort when measured against Emil’s broken body in the helicopter. Paul looked at him, his eyes wide and red-rimmed.
“Paul,” Clare said, “it’s time. The pilot’s going to warm up the engines now.”
The pilot had been tying down straps by the door and didn’t look as if he was headed for the cockpit, but Clare was the one who had flown these monsters in the army, not Russ, so he walked with them to the open door. Sure enough, the pilot disappeared, and a second later, he heard the unpleasant whine of turbines kicking in.
Paul stepped forward. Stopped. “The dogs,” he said to Clare. “Did I ask you about taking care of the dogs?”
“You did.” She rubbed his arm. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll collect them and take them to the kennel. Don’t worry about them.”
“C’mon, sir,” the paramedic said, jumping from the chopper. “Time to go.” He held out a helmet to Paul and helped the big man strap it on correctly, then pointed out the stepping bar and straps where Paul could climb up into an empty jump seat. The IV bag trembled where it hung from a hook in the ceiling and the flight suit–clad nurse bent over Emil to adjust something.
Paul turned toward Clare, his brown hair and beard sticking out improbably from beneath the helmet. “Clare,” he said too loudly, “I’ve never been one for religion, but Emil is Catholic…he was…”
Clare stepped close and spoke directly to his face, enabling Paul to see her lips moving, an aid to hearing inside the bulky helmet. “I’ll pray for him,” she said in a normal tone of voice. “I’ll pray for both of you.” She squeezed his hand. “Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to reach out to God the Comforter if you feel the urge. You can always go back to being an agnostic after Emil is well. I won’t tell on you.”
“Sir, we have to go!” The EMT beckoned Paul urgently. Paul hoisted himself into the belly of the chopper as Clare and Russ backed away. Above them, the rotors began to circle slowly, then faster and faster, until the hard-edged chop of the blades challenged the turbines’ whine. Clare stopped in front of the nose of the ambulance. The hair fallen from her knot danced in the updraft, strands the color of honey, caramel, and maple syrup. Russ was caught by the look on her face.
“You miss this, don’t you?” he yelled over the noise. She shrugged, never taking her eyes from the helicopter. He could feel the vibrations through the soles of his shoes. Looking inside the cockpit, he saw the outline of the pilot, dimmed and warped behind the reflective smoke-colored Plexiglas. The beat of the rotors increased to a sound he still heard sometimes in nightmares. And then the skids left the ground, bumped, rose, hovering half a foot off the parking lot, and the chopper was away, its fat insect body rising smoothly and improbably into the darkness over Glens Falls.
They both looked up into the sky. A freshening wind sprang up, and from the mountains Russ could hear a distant rumble. “Is it safe for them to fly with a storm coming on?” he asked her.
“Mmm. They’re headed south, in front of the leading edge. They’ll stay ahead of it with no problem.” Another gust sent a scrap of paper skittering across the asphalt. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“I hate helicopters,” he said.
She looked at him with surprise. Over her shoulder, there was a tapping from the ambulance windshield and the driver leaned out of his window. “Would you folks mind stepping out of the way? I’ve got to get back to the hospital. My shift’s just starting.”
Russ and Clare retreated to their parked cars. Russ waved as the ambulance pulled away.
“You hate helicopters, the machines, or you hate riding in them?” Clare asked, crossing her arms over her wilted black blouse.
“I don’t know. Both, I guess. I had a bad experience in one.” His brain caught up with his eyeballs. “Shit! I wanted to talk to the doctor! ’Scuse my French.”
“I was listening while he spoke with Paul. I think I got the gist of things. Dr. Dvorak has a lot of fractured ribs, a fractured skull, internal bleeding…. It sounds like someone kicked the crap out of him.” She glanced up at him. “Excuse my French. What happened to him? Why on earth would anyone try to murder the county’s pathologist?”
He shook his head. “That may be it right there. He’s been our medical examiner for ten years now. I don’t think he was ever involved in a capital case, but I’m sure he’s had a hand in sending lots of men to Comstock. Maybe he gave evidence against someone’s brother or buddy. Maybe someone he put away has been released without managing to rehabilitate himself into a model citizen.”
Clare glowered at him. “Don’t start in with that. If we made more services available to support prisoners—” She huffed and waved her hands. “Never mind. That scenario seems a little far-fetched. I mean, suppose you were this guy, just released and slavering for vengeance?”