“Please, Senator.” Julia set aside her coffee so she could guide the senator back to her chair. Bethany Chastain had worked herself into a tizzy. Her chest rose and fell with harsh breaths. She was running her hands through her blond hair until it stood out from her head in frantic tuffs. “Come sit back down and let’s?—”
“I don’t want to sit.” The senator skewered Julia with a killing look. “I want torage!I want to drag God down from Heaven and scream into his face for letting this happen. I want to?—”
Senator Chastain stopped and blinked myopically. Then she grabbed her chest and stumbled forward.
“Senator Chastain?” Julia squeaked in alarm as she caught the woman by her forearms. “Dillan! Help!” she cried when the senator’s full body weight crashed into her.
Bethany Chastain wasn’t a large woman. But she was larger than Julia. And even though Julia worked out regularly, she wasn’t up to the task of holding up another human being who seemed hellbent on crumbling to the floor.
Dillan, forever slow on the uptake, didn’t manage to gain his feet before Julia was forced to her knees, trying her best to control the senator’s descent.
“What the hell?” Dillan asked when hefinallymade it to Julia’s side and was able to catch the senator by the waist.
“I think she fainted,” Julia grunted. “Help me get her on her back.”
With the senator safely on the floor, Julia was able to get a look at the woman. She immediately knew it wasn’t a simple fainting spell.
Something was terribly wrong.
The skin over the senator’s face was mottled and waxy looking. Her eyes were open, but she stared unseeingly at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. And the way her mouth opened and closed reminded Julia of a fish out of water.
Fear and adrenaline spiked through Julia’s bloodstream to have her raising her voice higher than was necessary in the quiet emptiness of the waiting room. “Go get a doctor, Dillan! I think she’s having a heart attack!”
She didn’t wait to see if Dillan did as ordered. Instead she grabbed the senator’s hand and reassuringly patted bones that felt as fragile as snowflakes. Glancing down at their clasped palms, she noted the senator’s liver spots, snarled veins, and enlarged knuckles.
Plastic surgeons had yet to find a good way to address hands. And that’s where Bethany Chastain showed her age.
“Hang on, Senator.” Julie did her best to instill confidence in her voice. “The doctors are coming. You’re going to be fine.”
The senator’s eyes shifted from the ceiling tiles to Julia’s face. In the weeks to come, Julia would recall the fear in the woman’s gaze, the way the senator seemed to beg her without words todosomething.
But there was nothing to be done. And Julia watched helplessly as the senator dragged in one final breath and then let it out in a slow wheeze.
“Oh, god. Oh, no.” She used two fingers against the senator’s throat to check for a pulse. “Don’t do this to me, Senator. Come on!”
When only a thready fluttermet her searching fingertips, she got ready to do chest compressions. But she was saved the effort when two medical professionals burst into the room with flapping stethoscopes and a rattling crash cart.
She stumbled out of the way, tentatively settling onto the edge of her chair as the nurses went to work checking the senator’s vitals.
The nurse with curly black hair and a five-o’clock shadow yelled, “We have V-fib!”
Julia realized Dillan had followed the hospital staff into the room when he dropped into the chair next to her. His voice was a bare whisper, meant only for her ears. “What are the odds?”
She cut him a questioning glance.
“That two of the three eyewitnesses would croak within a few hours of the shooting,” he clarified.
“Senator Chastain isn’t dead,” she hissed in disgust at his lack of feeling for the drama playing out in front of them.
“Looks that way to me,” he muttered, and she turned back in time to watch the nurse with the long, blond ponytail take a pair of scissors to the bodice on the senator’s dress.
There was no such thing as modesty in a medical emergency. And after the bodice was flayed open, the senator’s bra was sliced in two without a second thought.
Julia felt like a voyeur. But she couldn’t look away as the curly-headed nurse fitted an oxygen mask attached to a bellows-like device over the senator’s face and proceeded to blow air into the senator’s unresponsive body. A small, plastic case was placed on the ground next to the prone woman and Julia recognized it immediately for what it was.
Defibrillator.
“We have a pacemaker here!” Nurse Ponytail yelled and she was careful to avoid the device as she placed the defibrillator’s sticky paddles on the senator’s chest.
