The glass doors slid open to my right, and I turned my head just in time to see Janine run by and down the hallway toward the examination room. I was up and through the doors after her. We reached the room at the same time, and I blew through the door in front of her.
The treatment table had fallen over, and Mary Barsad, still attached to an ECG monitor, was lying on the floor beside a series of small, glass-doored cabinets. Vic was holding both her hands against the woman’s throat as the pulse of the blood from her carotid artery pushed with Mary’s pulse through my deputy’s fingers in a one-and-a-half-foot arc. Vic was the only one speaking. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
There was blood everywhere, and what appeared to be one of those disposable scalpels was lodged in Mary’s throat with the wrapper still half on. Isaac Bloomfield, who sat on the floor across the room, was tangled in an overturned utility cart with his thick glasses askew.
I grabbed a large roll of gauze from the counter and knelt to wind it around Mary’s neck; then I slid my arms under her back and legs. I used my foot to flip the table back upright and placed her on the flat surface as a fresh stream of blood streaked across my uniform shirt and badge.
Vic continued to apply pressure, but the blood loss was catastrophic. “I turned my head for a split fucking second.” She was literally shaking with anger. “Fuck!”
Mary lay with her head turned to the side, her mouth gulping air like a landed trout. It seemed as though the pulse in the veins at her temples was beginning to still. My voice was loud but sounded far away. “Isaac… I need your help.”
The small man, assisted by Janine, slid up the wall and partially settled his glasses while approaching with hands extended, hands that had saved my own life. I hoped they would save hers.
“Vertebral arteriovenous…” The doc’s face turned only slightly toward the young nurse. “I need a transvascular embolization kit. Quickly, please, Janine.” She slipped past us to the cabinets on the wall as he continued to speak, almost as if he were reminding himself of the procedure. “Neurologic deficits coincident with the fistula should resolve with the reestablishment of flow-” Janine brought back a balloon device as Isaac’s hands took over for mine, and I was stirred by Isaac’s sudden switch to his native Teutonic tongue. “Gottverdammit! ”
I held Mary’s head and looked into her eyes, the blue dulling with each pulse of blood. I knew that we were in a race as to whether the woman would die of blood loss or of suffocation from the mounting hematoma of coagulating blood that was forming in her throat. Isaac called for a number of paralytic drugs to be administered through the IV that Janine had nervously pushed into Mary’s arm.
The choice was brutal but necessary, and for the remainder of the episode, no matter how short that might be, Mary would be aware of what was happening and feel everything as we attempted to save her life.
Isaac took the endotracheal tube and began feeding it into the stricken woman’s mouth. He handed Janine the plastic that was connected to the balloon device and to a one-way valve. With hands shaking, the young nurse screwed a syringe without a needle but full of air into the valve and depressed the plunger on the syringe, effectively holding the tube in place as Isaac listened to Mary’s chest and stomach with a stethoscope.
He nodded, and Janine passed the bulb to me. Isaac looked directly into my blood-spattered face. “Einmal alle fьnf Sekunden.”
I stared back at him and smiled grimly at the concentration camp survivor. “English, Doc.”
Bloomfield swallowed. “Once every five seconds.”
One.
I was now Mary’s lungs.
Two.
Her lips quivered, and she continued to try to gulp air-pushing out silent words past the tube in her throat.
Three.
I allowed Isaac’s hands more access to the wound, and I brushed her bloody hair back from the high cheekbones, driving my eyes into hers. I spoke from only inches away.
Four. “Not today you don’t.”
Isaac continued to dig into the wound with a hemostat in an attempt to find the artery responsible for delivering the bright red blood to her brain, as Vic conceded him her portion of the wound.
Five. I compressed the bulb again.
“Got it.” The old man’s voice was tired but steady. “Clamp, please, Janine.” Mary Barsad would no longer die from blood loss or strangulation. He looked up and through the still-crooked glasses, and maybe because the circumstance had been so dire, it was funny. “She kicked me.”
I smiled, but it didn’t hold for long. “I bet she did.” I looked down. Mary’s eyes were wide with the pupils contracted to tiny tunnels. She was trying to get to a place to which I wasn’t going to let her go.
I’d lost too many, and I wasn’t losing another.
October 30, 1:00 A.M.
I was tired when Vic dropped me off at the motel room in Absalom, but she sat there, lounging against the seat, and watched me. I leaned in the window and met her eyes with my one good one. “You’re driving my truck.”
“Yeah.” She ran the palm of her hand over the leather steering wheel. “Thought I’d see what it felt like.”
“Well, don’t get used to it too soon.”
She paused for a moment, and I had to admit that the big, three-quarter-ton truck suited her. “You want to give me a straight answer this time?”
I turned so that she would see the undamaged side of my face. “What?”
“Have you lost your fucking mind? A tough-man contest?”
I cleared my throat, which made my eye hurt-not a good sign. “I wasn’t an official entry.”
“And that makes it better?”
I fessed up. “I think Henry wanted me to get in a fight.”
“Why?”
“I’m just guessing, but I think it was his way of getting me all unballed-up from Cady, the election, the investigation-”
“And me?”
I nodded, and that hurt, too. “And you.”
“Wily devil, isn’t he?” She snorted and covered her face with her hand. “Unballed-up. Is that a technical term?”
She shimmied over and raised her hand, putting the cool of the back of her fingers against the skin next to the wound on my left cheekbone. It felt really good, and I was carried back to that night in Philadelphia when we’d become intimate in a way with which I was still unsure I was comfortable. As a symptom of that discomfort, I changed the subject to her brother and my daughter. “I assume you’ve gotten the word on the latest from our respective households, both alike in dignity?”
Her eyebrow cocked like a revolver. “I think Romeo’s being a tard, but who am I to stand in the way of true love?”
“So, if they get married, does that mean that we’re-”
“I don’t want to think about it.” She summarily pulled her hand away and rested it on my shoulder. “You know, I’d come in if I wasn’t afraid of blowing your cover.”
“Uh huh.” I folded my forearms on the passenger doorsill. “I’m not so sure I’ve got much of a cover to blow.”
She inclined her head and looked up at me through the open window and her dark lashes. “I could always come in and blow something else.”
I didn’t move for a minute, and I don’t think I’d been at a loss like that since junior high school.
I was saved by a loud crash. Juana had carried out a garbage bag of empty bottles and deposited them onto the boardwalk. She looked over at the two of us with a hand on her hip. “I let your dog out, twice.”
“Thanks.” I leaned against my truck and introduced the two women. “Juana Balcarcel, this is Undersheriff Victoria Moretti-Vic, Juana.”
She started over but then stalled out when she saw me. “ЎAy, mierda!” She took the step down to glance at Vic, but her eyes kept returning to the side of my face. “Are you all right?”
“Yep, I’m okay. How’s my adversary?”
She shook her young head, the dark hair swinging. “He was still unconscious when the EMTs loaded him out with a neck brace, but when he woke up, they gave him the cash, since you weren’t an official entry. I think that made him feel much better.” She reached in and extended a hand to Vic.