Where the hell is the EMT?She thought.
There was no time to wait.
Callie slammed the passenger door and ran around to the driver's side. She got in and started the engine and threw the cruiser into reverse. The tires spun in the mud, caught, and the cruiser lurched backward. She swung it around and accelerated down Mountain Lane with the wipers on full. The siren was blaring, and the lights flashing as the rain turned the road to a river.
She passed the first cruiser two miles out. Then another. They were coming the other way, responding to her dispatch call, lights and sirens cutting through the downpour. She didn't stop. She couldn't stop. She pressed the accelerator and the cruiser fishtailed on the wet road and straightened and she held the wheel with both hands and drove.
She glanced at Noah. His head was against the headrest. His mouth was open. His chest rose. Paused. Rose again. The pauses were getting longer.
"Don't you die on me." She looked back at the road. Wiped the blood from her eye with her sleeve. "Don't you die."
She glanced in the rearview mirror. Seraphine was still on the back seat, still unconscious, but her color was better. The Narcan was working on her. It wasn't working on Noah.
Route 73 opened up in front of her. Nothing but straight road. Two lanes. The hospital was twelve minutes away at the speed limit but she wasn’t driving the speed limit. The cruiser screamed through the rain and the trees blurred past.
She looked at Noah again. "Stay with me." She looked at Seraphine. "Both of you. Stay with me."
The hospital appeared through the rain. She didn't slow for the turn into the lot. The cruiser jumped the curb and skidded across the wet pavement and came to a stop at an angle in front of the emergency department doors. She threw it into park and got out and staggered.
The ground tilted. The rain hit her face. The blood was in both eyes now.
She made it through the automatic doors. The lobby was bright, fluorescent, blinding after the dark of the road. There were nurses at the station. Patients in chairs. The ordinary traffic of an emergency room that didn't know what was coming through the door.
"Help!” Her voice cracked. She grabbed the edge of the admissions counter. "I need some help. Now."
They looked up. They saw the blood and moved.
Two nurses came around the counter. A doctor appeared from somewhere. Callie pointed at the cruiser through the glass doors. "Two patients. One in the front, one in the back. Morphine overdose. He's not responding to Naloxone. She's drugged, don't know with what. I gave her Naloxone.”
They ran. Through the doors. Into the rain. Callie turned to follow them and the floor came up to meet her. She caught herself on the wall and pushed off and kept moving. Through the doors. Into the rain one more time. She watched them pull Noahfrom the passenger seat and get him onto a gurney. She watched them reach into the back for Seraphine.
The gurney moved through the doors and the emergency team closed around Noah and the fluorescent lights caught the blue of his lips and the gray of his face and then the doors swung shut behind them and he was gone.
42
Callie stood in front of the bathroom mirror and examined the bandage on the top of her head. White gauze, medical tape, the edges curling slightly where her hair pressed against it. She tilted her head and winced. Not from the pain. From the look of it. She was dressed and ready to leave and the discharge papers were signed and sitting on the bed behind her.
"You should have asked them to do a little more plastic surgery. Might have fixed the rest."
She saw McKenzie in the reflection, leaning in the doorway with a newspaper tucked under his arm and the same crooked grin he wore to every crime scene. She raised her middle finger without turning around.
"No, they told me they broke the tools working on your ugly mug last month," she said.
He smiled. It was their typical banter.
"So how's our boy Sutherland holding up?"
"You not been in to see him yet?"
"I was told he already had multiple visitors. Family. I didn't want to interrupt."
"Manners, McKenzie? That's foreign for you."
He chuckled and walked into the room, tapping the newspaper against his palm. "Ah, like I said before, Thorne. There are many sides to me." He tossed the Adirondack Daily Enterprise onto the bed. Callie scooped it up.
The headline ran across the top of the front page in bold type.
ADIRONDACK NURSE AND DECEASED HUSBAND IDENTIFIED AS KILLERS IN FIVE-YEAR MURDER CASE
