“I appreciate the heads up.” Sommer got to work with her trauma shears.
Coyote was turning gray on her.
The doctor stepped into view. “Hello, Mr …”
“Call me Coyote.”
“Yes, sir. We have things arranged.” She lifted the saline-saturated gauze to look. “You’re going to take an ambulance ride over to the high school. They’ve got a helicopter that’s going to land there to pick you up to take you to another hospital. Quite the adventure.” She turned to Sommer and lifted a brow.
“Bruised knuckles. I haven’t found secondary wounds.”
“This was a knife?” Dr. Peters asked.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Coyote said. “I was punching some guy in the mouth, and I felt like I pissed myself. When I looked down, I had all this bloody ropey stuff hanging out.”
“IV push, antibiotics,” Dr. Peters told Sommer. “How much pain are you in, Coyote?”
“Pain?”
“Scale of one to ten.”
“Huh,” Coyote said.
“Have you been drinking tonight? Done any recreational drugs?” Dr. Peters asked.
His answer was a glower.
Dr. Peters gave him a tight smile. “Okay, then we’ll get you as comfortable as we can. Your ride should be here soon.”
Sommer turned and walked away with Dr. Peters, who said, “I’m ordering blood work. No pain meds until we get that back. I’d say he has a fair amount in his system already.”
Sommer got back to work.
She felt she was making good time with her checklist. Within ten minutes, she had Coyote cleaned, dressed, IV started, labs drawn, and the doctor consult finished.
She was coming up with a plan to hold Coyote’s intestines on his stomach.
If he passed out, they’d be uncontained.
A wheelchair was rolling by when the patient reached out his burly arm and caught the column. “That you, Coyote, you sonofabitch?”
“It’s me, princess.” Coyote moved to sit up, and Sommer tried to press his shoulders down.
The man’s eye was swollen shut, and it looked like his nose was broken. “I saw what you did, and I’m gonna kill you.”
The patient launched himself out of his wheelchair, his fist chambered for a punch.
Typically, Sommer had a fast-twitch reaction and could duck out of the way.
But with the floor slick with blood where her foot landed, Sommer had to brace her core muscles and tighten her glutes to keep herself upright when Broken Nose’s meaty fist swung at Coyote and caught her chin.
Sommer knew enough from her college kickboxing class that she needed to spin with that strike, or her glass jaw would put her out cold.
Knocked out in the ring was one thing.
Here, she didn’t want her head to be bouncing off the hard surface: broken jaw, whiplash, traumatic brain injury.
Luckily, the survival shot of adrenaline that spiked through her system slowed the world down, and she had the space and time for all those thoughts as she lifted a leg and did a kind of dancerly pirouette so the punch—even from a behemoth of a man—was glancing.
