Inside, Nikitin had moved himself to a couch, where he was lying face down, leaving behind a white sheet with a thumb-sized blood spot. He lifted his head and tried to smile at them as they came through the door with Juarez. Orlov was asleep, but not deeply.
Abramov said, “Masks.”
Nikitin had his ski mask, which he pulled over his head. Abramova got Orlov’s mask from his coat pocket, and as she tried to pull it over his head, he roused, and groaned, and said, in Russian, “This sucks.”
When all four Russians were masked, Titov helped Juarez free her hands and get out of her parka, and said, “I’m going to pull the ski mask off.”
He did that, and Juarez blinked down at the man on the floor, who was wrapped in a blanket. “He is hurt the worst,” Abramova said.
Juarez knelt next to him and peeled off the blanket. Beneath it, Orlov was still partly dressed, though his clothes had been shredded around the wounds. He was more awake now, and he said, “I worry. I don’t hurt enough. Maybe I die.”
“Shut up, we have the doctor to help,” Abramova said.
Juarez: “Help me get his clothes off, the rest of the way off.”
“We have more clothes, it’d be easier to cut them loose,” Abramova said, and she flicked out her switchblade, which made Juarez flinch. She cut Orlov’s clothes from neckline to pants cuffs and peeled them off a piece at a time. Juarez took a moment to examine the entry wounds, then took his blood pressure, grunted, said, “Huh.”
Next, she moved his leg, and found it still articulating—no broken bones, though there might be nerve damage. Orlov was too disoriented to answer questions about it. She rolled him a bit, with Abramova’s help, and pressed on his abdomen with her fingers, moving her hand around, groping, then sat back on her heels.
“I can’t help enough here. If we do nothing, he will die by morning, of shock and blood loss, depending on what’s happening inside,” she said. “If I give him blood, painkillers, and antibiotics, he might live for four or five days and then die of sepsis. If you can get him to a good surgeon, then maybe he will live a normal life span.”
Titov: “Why can’t you—”
“I’m not a surgeon,” Juarez said. “Here’s what I can do: the wounds in his buttocks aren’t serious, except for the blood loss. The bullet that hit his back is very serious. Not as serious as if it hit his liver or spleen, in which case he would have already bled to death, or his spine, whichcould have crippled him. The problem is, it apparently hit his bowel. I believe I can feel the slug, the bullet, with my fingers—it nearly passed through him. Bowel resection is a mess. If I tried to do it, I’d kill him. He’d be dead in two hours.”
Abramova: “What is our best course?”
Nikitin, an outspoken atheist, said, “We could try prayer.”
Juarez ignored him. “Your best course is to take him to a surgeon.”
“We obviously have a problem…”
Juarez: “You said you wouldn’t kill me if I actually can help you.”
“We will not,” Abramova said.
“Then, if I were you, I would take him to a big public hospital and roll him out the car door in the emergency room parking lot and leave him there,” Juarez said. She looked down at Orlov, who was looking up at her with eyes that seemed fogged over. “Big-city hospitals might have several gunshot wounds every night. Hennepin Medical Center, downtown, would work. A place like Kansas City, where I was a resident, the people who were shot would sometimes say not a word. Not a word. No ID on them, no telephone, no nothing. It’s not against the law to get shot, so if a man is not talking, the police have more important things to worry about. They assume it’s down to drugs or gangs and that they’ll never find out what happened. The hospital does the surgery, and a week or two later, the man walks out of the hospital. The only name the hospital knows is the one they gave him. We’d name our cases after towns: John Denver. John Miami, John Nashville, just so we’d know who we were talking about when we reviewed their cases.”
Titov: “What can you do now?”
“Plug the holes, put pressure on them,” Juarez said. “Give himblood, for the blood he has lost. Give him a course of antibiotics. I have painkillers. If he doesn’t get to a surgeon…four days, maybe five.”
“We will think on this,” Abramova said.
They took the medical gear out of the garbage sack, set up a rack, and began transfusing blood.
That underway, Juarez turned to Nikitin, looked at the wounds in his buttocks and asked, “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Any grinding, any catches in your walk?”
“No, but it hurts. A lot.”
“Of course it does, you’ve been shot. Like being hit by a baseball bat, it’s no joke,” Juarez said. She spent a minute manipulating his legs, testing them for bone breaks, then, satisfied, said, “You’ve been lucky.”
“This kind of luck, I should not have it every day,” Nikitin said.
