“Maybe after.” They closed in on several mangled vehicles, police cars, and more than a few people bleeding and or wounded.
They pulled in and parked and were directed to an older white man who didn’t look well at all. He sat on the ground, blinking as he absorbed all the chaos. Mack didn’t see any blood, but that didn’t mean the man couldn’t be bleeding internally.
“Sir? Sir, what’s your name? Are you hurt?”
“S-s-tt-ifffn.” He added something unintelligible.
A woman wearing a bandage around her head approached. “Steven, honey, are you okay?”
Reggie intercepted her, checking to find out the woman was the man’s wife. He asked her questions about the patient while Mack continued his assessment, knowing time was of the essence. “Steven, I want you to smile for me, okay?”
Half of Steven’s face drooped, and Mack had a bad feeling they were looking at a stroke victim.
“Okay, now I want you to lift your arms like this.” Mack lifted his arms out by his sides. “And keep them up.”
The man lifted one arm. The other didn’t move.
Shit.
“Reggie, let’s go. We’ve got a stroke.”
Reggie and Mack carefully eased the man onto a gurney and in the back of the ambulance. Then Reggie helped the woman inside the back. “Mack, you want to drive?”
“Got it.”
Mack knew the streets better than Reggie despite what Reggie thought. He called in the stroke and had people waiting when they arrived. They wheeled the man into the hospital and handed off their notes before coming back to help the man’s wife inside.
Mack and Reggie returned to the accident to see several medic units on hand and filled in wherever needed.
Sadly, the man’s stroke seemed to have caused the accident, according to several witnesses, and factored into two families of four who didn’t fare so well. Nor did the woman on the motorcycle, caught between two crashed SUVs, who died on the scene.
“Just think how much worse this might have been with ice on the ground,” Reggie muttered as they finished up.
“Yeah.” Mack sighed, glad Cass hadn’t been there to see such pain and death. And wishing they’d never fought to begin with.Hell. I miss her.
***
Cass missed Mackenzie Revere, asshole extraordinaire. She sat next to Jed, fuming, and recounted exactly what Mack had done wrong, in detail, as they finished up their shift. The night had been surprisingly quiet, for which she was thankful.
And Jed had been a great wall of silence, letting her vent while saying nothing about what he thought. Until she couldn’t take it anymore. “Well? Are you just going to sit there and not talk?”
“Okay, do you want the truth? Or do you just want to stew in your little world of ‘Cass is perfect and Mack’s an ass’?”
“The truth,” she growled.
They sat in the car, watching a neighborhood park that had been reported as the scene of several recent teen fights. They made their presence known, sitting under an overhead streetlight, trying to prevent trouble from happening.
“Well, seems to me like you’ve both been jerks. He clearly has family issues.”
“Yeah, I sensed that. Xavier’s such a dick.”
“Not a news flash,” Jed said drily. “If you talk to the guy for more than ten minutes, you know he’s a good cop and that he’s got enough arrogance to fill Lumen Field.”
She snorted. “Yeah. It was weird him sticking up for me, but acting like by being with Mack, I’d somehow come out contaminated? As if Mack could screw me over just by dating me?”
She said a few more not-so-nice things about Xavier, Mack, and the warped family dinner.
Some time later, Jed groaned. “Fuck, Cass. You’ve been ranting for hours.”
