Page 71 of Tough Justice

Deck could barely focus but understood one thing as clearly as if it were written on his forehead. I’m in deep shit.

The growling stopped.

“Cuff ’em!” he heard one of the officers shout.

A moment later, a warm body snuggled against Deck’s left side. Thor. His dog knew something was wrong. Deck hadn’t been injured since he and Thor had become partners, and his K-9 didn’t understand what was happening.

“Shine that light down here,” Tori ordered.

He cracked his eyes open to see a cop plunk down her black medical bag. She opened it and pulled out a small bottle before tearing the wrapper off something else. A syringe. “No,” he muttered, rolling his head from side to side. Whatever was in that bottle, he didn’t want it.

She tipped the bottle upside down, stuck the needle into it, drawing liquid into the syringe.

“What is that?”

“Fentanyl.” She pushed up his sleeve.

“No, dammit!” He reached across his chest with his good arm and grabbed her wrist. “No. Opioids.”

“Deck.” Through the murky haze whittling away at his senses, her voice held a scary-ass sense of urgency and fear. “You need to trust me. You have to stop moving around. This is the right treatment. Please.”

Something wet fell on his cheek. Her tears.

…

“No.” He squeezed her wrist so tightly, pain shot up her arm. “Do not put that in me,” he said through gritted teeth. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His chest rose and fell rapidly with shallow breaths as he struggled to breathe.

She knew his aversion to taking any meds, let alone his zero-tolerance against opioids. This was different. She palpitated one side of his chest. When he grimaced in pain, she was almost certain he’d suffered a punctured lung. Assuming she was right, with every second that passed, air was accumulating in the pleural cavity, putting more pressure on his lung. If they didn’t decompress his chest soon, he could die. She didn’t have the appropriate setup to do it herself. He needed an ambulance, stat.

Her hands began to shake. Now, she had a firsthand understanding of why doctors shouldn’t treat their own family or anyone else they cared about. Because the panic she was experiencing threatened to obliterate her ability to think clearly.

“I can’t stand seeing you in this much pain,” she managed. “I can’t sit by and do nothing.”

His jaw clenched, his face contorting with every breath. “Then leave!”

Tori gasped. He might as well have slapped her. “Where’s that ambulance?” she shouted over her shoulder to no one in particular, trying not to dwell on how much his words had hurt.

When he began writhing with the pain, she set aside her fear and focused on him. “Somebody, help me hold him still.” If he didn’t stop moving around, bone fragments could further lacerate the lung and make it worse.

As two officers moved in to assist, Thor leaped to his feet, growling and barking, snapping his jaws. The two men jumped back.

Oh no. Thor thought the officers were attacking Deck, and she didn’t know how to call him off. “Thor, don’t. Let them help him.” But the dog ignored her, his amber eyes gleaming as he bared his incisors at the other men, his growls getting louder.

Panic and a miserably helpless feeling bubbled up inside her. It had been the same way watching her mother weaken before her eyes then die.

I love him.

Her heart raced with fear. The admission only made her feel more panicked, more hopeless.

“Lady, we can’t go near him,” one cop said. “That dog will tear us apart. We might have to shoot him.”

“Thor!” someone else shouted. Evan. “Release.”

Evan and Brett appeared, stepping into the light. With everything happening around them, she hadn’t heard them drive up.

“Release,” Evan repeated, inching closer to Thor, whose body quivered.

“Careful,” Brett warned.