“You know how to handle one of these?” he asked.
She swallowed and nodded, wanting to do her part. Wanting to rise to the occasion and figuringhow hard can it be?But when he handed her the gun, it slipped through her nervous fingers, clattering to the floor.
A line formed between his eyebrows as he bent to retrieve it. When he pushed to his full height, he frowned down at her. “Okay, little lesson here,” he said. “The next time someone hands you a weapon and asks if you know how to handle it, you say…”
“No?” Her voice was squeaky.
“Class dismissed.” He nodded.
“I didn’t want you to think I was a coward.”
“Sweetheart…” He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “That’s nothing you ever have to worry about.”
Chapter 16
7:37 PM...
Dana had assumed the worst was behind them once Doc cut their ties and they were no longer victims to the whims of their captors.
She’d been wrong.
Thiswas worse. This waswayworse.
So much blood. So much pain. So much suffering.
Back in college, she’d been the first to drive up on the scene of a single vehicle accident. It’d been early in the morning, and a tired third shift worker had fallen asleep behind the wheel, running his car off the road and slamming headlong into a massive oak tree.
She vividly remembered the sight of the bent metal, the smell of the smoking engine, the wheezing breath of the driver when she’d wrenched the door open to help him. He’d had a massive gash across his forehead that’d leaked blood into his dazed eyes. The steering column had crumbled against his chest, pinning him to the driver’s seat.
For twenty-five minutes while she’d waited on the paramedics to arrive, she’d held his hand. For twenty-five minutes, she’d assured him he was going to live, that he wasn’t going to leave his wife a widow and his children fatherless. And for twenty-five minutes, she’d pressed a shammy to his forehead to staunch the flow of blood while simultaneously trying not to throw up at the sight of all that gore.
Hehadsurvived. And Dana would have sworn to anyone who asked her that she’d seen trauma.
But even as gruesome as that wreck had been, it hadn’t come close to the butchery of a bullet.
As a group, they’d made their way upstairs to tend to the wounded men. They’d done it as a group because Doc had insisted on it.
“I’ll need as many hands managing blood loss and wound cleaning as possible,” he’d said while ducking into his room and coming back out with a big, black medical bag. Like something Dana imagined an old-timey doctor might carry.
Within minutes, they’d gathered the thieves into LT and Olivia’s bedroom—it was the largest. They’d lit a dozen candles to give Doc as much light as possible to work by. And they’d closed the door to block out as much of the noise from the storm as they could.
Doc had gone around to each gunman, quickly eyeing their injuries. And then he’d started giving orders in a tone that reminded Dana that all these treasure hunters she’d gotten to know over the past couple of days were actually former military men.
“LT, you and Olivia take Brady,” Doc had said. “Use a QuikClot hemostatic dressing on his bicep and make sure the wound on his shoulder is through-and-through. If it is, QuikClot dressing that too. You might have to use additional gauze to hold it in place, wind it up and over his shoulder and around his chest. If it’s not through-and-through, staunch his bleeding as much as possible and wait for me. I might have to dig out the bullet. As for his head lac, clean it up and butterfly bandage it if you can.”
“John?” He’d turned to where Dana and John had been standing near the door. “You and Dana tend to Will. His wound looks clean, but it’s bleeding pretty good. Use a QuikClot bandage on it and give him twenty milligrams of morphine out of my bag so he’ll stop that caterwauling.”
The manhadbeen carrying on something awful, crying out in pain anytime he was asked to move.
Then Doc had turned to the redheaded man. The one named Fin.Hehad definitely been the worst of the three. Not only was his busted nose five times the size it should’ve been, but also the mangled feature was an awful shade of purple. Blood bubbled from his swollen nostrils every time he dragged in a breath.
Of course, it wasn’t his face that Doc had been concerned about. It’d been the amount of blood he was losing from the wound through his shoulder. Fin’s shirt had been soaked in the stuff. It’d even run down to darken the denim on his jeans.
Doc had put him on the bed, cutting off his shirt to get a better look at his wound. But that’s where Dana had stopped paying attention.
Instead, she’d done as she’d been instructed and turned her concentration on Will. The gunshot wound through the man’s arm hadn’t looked like much from the front—a neat hole about the size of a quarter that leaked triple rivulets of blood. But from the back?
Sweet heavens to Betsy.
