Cops and their fucking savior complexes.
How the hell had he gone and out gotten himself involved in another knife-wielding brawl?
Or worse.
Ending up with a gun trained to his forehead and a trigger-happy psycho on the other end of it with nothing to lose but the next twenty-five years locked behind bars.
I could handle a few stab wounds. Digging pieces of metal out of a seizing body while trying to keep it from bleeding out was another story.
A violent clench gripped my gut tight the second I reached the curtain. Voices on the other side of it were low, direct. No panic among them, no hurried hushed whispers while trying to maintain some kind of composure in the face of a life slowly slipping through their fingers.
And no calls for an OR being prepped.
All good signs. Positive, one might argue.
Non-life threatening.
My hand shook as I grabbed onto the fabric of the curtain, holding it tight as I yanked it back hard enough to startle the two nurses on the other side of it. One of them was holding onto asmall tray of instruments for Dr. Jacee to pick through while the other had a bag of saline she was fiddling with, trying to hook it onto the IV stand next to the bed.
Jacee was bent over a man, his fingers poised over a cut that stretched from the left side sternum and ran up to the man’s neck—superficial with hardly any layers of skin showing through the top, an easy patch job, normally only requiring butterfly closures to keep together while the skin knitted itself back together.
But Jacee was always a perfectionist. Preferred going layer by layer and sewing things up to make the scar tissue look pretty with his plastic surgeon background.
When he slowly turned toward me, he had a brow raised, his head tilted slightly down to look at me over the rim of his wire-framed glasses. “Dr. Montgomery. Is there a problem?”
The man on the bed was still breathing but unconscious. Older, white hair that was ashy looking. Longer on top and shorter on the sides. Pieces of it grimy and stuck together with mud from being laid out on the wet ground outside. Loose skin drooped around his mouth and cheekbones. Telltale signs of it losing elasticity with old age.
Not Terran.
Not Terran.
My hand clenched around the curtain hard enough to hurt. “Where’s the cop?”
Dr. Jacee threw me a confused look. “Cop? What cop?”
Irrational amounts of anger hit me like a freight train. “The one that came in with the ambulance.”
Who the fuckelsewould I be talking about?
Three identical looks of confusion were exchanged amongst all of them. A solid four seconds of silence to follow with no answer.
None of which was helping me locate my damn cop.
“Hello?”A sharp clap from my hands had them all jumping again.
“L-Last I saw, they were over at the desk.” The one next to the IV pointed back behind me. “I’d check there first. Maybe Natasha saw where they headed to?”
They.
More than one.
I ripped the curtain back into place the second I moved away from the bed, spinning on my heel to head back toward the main part of the ER.
“What’shisproblem?” one of the nurses muttered, the answer lost amongst the rest of the noise of the hospital as I stalked away from them.
They. That had to mean he was fine. He would’ve been put on a priority like last time. This town was attached to their law enforcement even at a medical level. Injuries from the field were taken as high priority unless a catastrophic event occurred.
Even then, we’d reconfigure. Strategize.
