“Mm-hmm.” Mason glances toward the apartment entrance then back at me. “You want me to go knock on her door for you, or are we pretending this is normal behavior?”
I give him a flat look.
His grin widens immediately. “Right. We’re pretending.”
Across the street, Alice and Jett finish loading the wounded suspect into the ambulance.
Jett notices me watching and points directly at me. “You really should go to the hospital.”
I wave him off. “It’s a graze.”
Alice leans out the back doors. “You got shot.”
“Barely.”
“That’s not how bullets work,” she snaps.
Mason folds his arms. “You know, statistically, I’m inclined to trust the trained paramedics over the bleeding detective when it comes to medical care.”
“I’m fine.”
“That sentence loses credibility when you’re leaking onto the sidewalk.”
I ignore him, partially because they have already cleaned it and stitched it up. But mostly because my attention keeps drifting back toward the apartment building again.
Fourth floor, second window from the left. It’s the only one with a light still on and I can see movement of something small in the window. Maybe a cat or small dog. Interesting.
“She said she was a paramedic,” I say.
Mason blinks once. “That’s your takeaway from all this?”
“She didn’t freeze.”
“No,” he says slowly, “my takeaway was more ‘wow, that woman has absolutely terrible self-preservation instincts.’”
Despite myself, the corner of my mouth twitches because he isn’t entirely wrong. The whole thing keeps replaying in my head anyway. Gunfire erupting across the street. One suspect reaching for a weapon. Me moving toward cover-
Then impact. A sharp burning pain ripping across my arm before I fully register I’ve been hit.
Everything after that blurs together fast, uniforms swarming in, and Mason tackling one shooter to the pavement. More sirens in the distance after the shooting was called in.
And then her bursting out of the apartment building in those tiny shorts, a baggy t-shirt with a college name written across the front that was barely even visible anymore, and a medical bag over her shoulder. Not panicking, just focused like the chaos around her narrowed into something manageable the second she dropped beside me.
She ignored me when I told her to get back inside; her eyes narrowed in on where blood was collecting under my hand.
“Has the shooting been called in yet?” Her voice cuts cleanly through the noise in my memory. Not what a regular civilian would say in that circumstance. Her steady hands grabbed gauze from her bag without her even having to look at what pocket she was opening. Then she had pressure immediately applied to the wound. Direct eye contact and efficient movements.
She was the epitome ofprofessionalism. And every place she touched me lit up like gasoline catching flame. Which is inconvenient at a time like this.
“She was calm,” I concede before I can stop myself.
Mason stares at me for a moment. Then another. “Oh, you’re screwed.”
I look over slowly. “What?”
“You’ve got the look.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
