We had three of Colt’s men in the ER, all of them handcuffed to gurneys. But Colt pushed me straight past the two with bullet wounds and only stopped when we reached the man in the tan jacket I’d seen Seth protecting. He had bandages wrapped around the upper part of his head. “What’s the matter with him?” demanded Colt.
The man snapped to attention and tried to blindly find the source of the voice. “Colt?”
“He was right next to the car when it exploded,” I said. “A few burns to the face, some burns to the corneas.”
“You saying he’s blind?” The muzzle of Colt’s gun rubbed impatiently at the base of my scalp.
“No. The burns are only light. The bandages can come off in another day.”
“Get him out of those handcuffs. I’m taking him with me.”
I nodded. I just wanted Colt out of the ER.
But at that second, a yell broke the quiet. “Freeze!” All of us whipped around. Shit! It was Lloyd. He was standing there, gun drawn. Tired and strung out and worried about Earl and staring straight at the guy who shot him.
“No!” I yelled. I put my hands up, pleading. “Wait! We can do this peacefully. They’re leaving!” My heart was hammering against my ribs. Beckett. Taylor. Two nurses and me. All of us were between Lloyd and Colt, right in the firing line. And all around us were patients and other staff. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
“Put your gun down!” yelled Lloyd. He was silhouetted by the moonlight coming in through the windows and I could see his finger tensed on the trigger.
Colt’s gun stayed rock-steady against the back of my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Seth slowly raising his gun to protect his father. “No!” I yelled. “We can’t have any shooting in h—”
I think Lloyd fired first, when he saw Seth raise his gun. Then Colt’s gun was jerked away from my head and he was firing, too. Time slowed down. It seemed to take an eternity for me to reach Beckett and tackle her to the floor, covering her body with mine. Colt was standing right over us, the spent shell casings falling like rain, the detonation of each shot slamming painfully into our eardrums.
Seth had his gun raised, ready to support his dad, but when he saw Taylor still standing, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to the floor.
Another cop heard the shots and ran to join Lloyd. More bullets slashed through the air above us, some so close I could feel the wind as they passed. I crushed Beckett to the tiles as hard as I could, that soft copper hair against my lips, the scent of her and feel of her filling my senses.
And that’s when I knew. The thought of her being snatched away from me scared me more than anything I’d ever known. I had to be with her.
In my mind, I hugged Chrissy and Rachel as hard as I could...and then I finally let them slip away.
For a second, I thought we’d be ripped apart. That’s what I’d been scared of, this whole time, that if I let them go, they’d be gone, whipped away from me and lost in the blackness. But they just floated there, close enough for my fingertips to brush theirs. They weren’t going anywhere. But now I could rise up, grab hold of Beckett—I drew in a long, shuddering breath—and be free.
It felt amazing. Tears were welling up behind my closed lids. I pressed myself to Beckett as tight as possible. Why did I wait so long? Colt’s assault rifle roared again, bullets slashing mercilessly through the air above us. What if I never get to tell her?
A scream, from behind Lloyd. I opened my eyes and saw one of the nurses stagger and fall as a bullet clipped her leg. I looked beyond her and realized with a sickening lurch that the cops were standing in front of the exam area, where the rooms only have curtains for fronts. And Colt had backed up against the patient area. “Stop!” I yelled. But my voice was lost under the gunfire.
Colt grunted as one of the cops hit him in the leg. He fell to one knee, slapped a new magazine into his gun—
“No!” I yelled.
Colt sprayed the whole area around the cops with bullets. The cops ran for cover and I saw the curtains twitch and flap as bullets slashed straight through the exam rooms. Then the cops returned fire and I heard shots go right past Colt and into the patient bed area. Oh Jesus. It was Main Street all over again but ten times worse: this was our home, this was where we lived. Everyone in the firing line was either someone I worked with or a patient who was already critical. God, Rebecca was in one of those beds!
Colt stopped to change magazine again, snarling at Seth to cover him. But Seth was still shielding Taylor with his body. The cops pushed forward and Colt finally had to break and run, heading for the stairwell. One cop gave chase. Lloyd tore Seth away from Taylor, slammed him to the floor and handcuffed him. Taylor half-sat up and stared at him, her eyes brimming with tears. Seth didn’t resist, just stared at the floor.
I scrambled to my feet and checked Beckett, but neither of us were hurt. I clutched her to my chest in relief. “Somebody turn the lights on!” I yelled.
The cop chasing Colt yelled to Lloyd, “He’s heading for the basement! I’m going after him!” Lloyd raced to join him and they disappeared down the stairs.
The lights flickered on, painfully bright after the darkness. After the deafening gunfire, it seemed weirdly quiet. Then, as my ears recovered, I started to hear the sobbing, the whimpers of pain. God, there were bullet holes everywhere. “Who got shot?” I yelled, looking frantically around. “Who got shot?!”
43
Colt
EACH STAGGERING STEP down the concrete stairs sent a bolt of white-hot pain up my thigh. Blood was pumping steadily through my pants: moving was making it worse.
But the cops were right on my ass. And I wasn’t going to get caught, not when I was this close. I owed it to my wife. The CGF was our family’s legacy.
Our family. I still couldn’t believe the fire I’d seen in Seth’s eyes when I’d threatened to shoot his little blonde doctor. He’d finally stood up to me: I was almost proud. It meant the blonde was dangerous, of course. I should have killed her there and then. But I’d been weak. I couldn’t do it to him. I knew what it was like to lose someone you were crazy about. Deborah made me feel the exact same way, from the day we met right up until the end.
Deborah. Thanks to the government, she’d died alone while I rotted in a cage, unable to hold her.
They’d pay.
I gritted my teeth and struggled on down the stairs. The basement throbbed with the sound of a generator. There were drums of spare fuel and, at the far end, a gate that led through to the basement parking garage and freedom.
Footsteps pounded down the steps behind me. The cops. They’d cut me down before I was halfway across the parking garage.
I unscrewed the cap on one of the drums of fuel and heaved it over. Fuel glugged and spread over the concrete floor, sloshing up around the remaining drums. I fired two shots at the ground just as the cops arrived. On the second one, I saw a spark and then the spilled fuel erupted into flames. The cops dodged back, cursing, their way blocked. And I ran.
I’d failed to get our pilot back. Now I needed to get him and Seth. But I had a plan.
That red-headed surgeon...she was going to help me fix everything.
44
Amy
THE FIRST PERSON I checked was Rebecca. She was okay, thank God. But as we raced around checking each room, we found more and more injured. A man who’d been brought in earlier in the day, injured by flying glass, had been hit in the stomach by a stray round that cut straight through Exam One and Exam Three before hitting him in Exam Five. We were lucky the other exam rooms had been empty.
One of the bar staff from Krüger’s Tavern, who’d only come to the ER to donate blood and then had volunteered to stay and comfort the injured, had been hit in the arm. The bullet had gone straight through and she’d be okay but she was white-faced and shaking. What did I do wrong, her eyes asked me. I was only trying to help.
Of the staff, one nurse had been shot in the leg and another was unconscious after a bull
et had grazed her temple: if she’d been standing even an inch to her left, she’d be dead. It was terrifying: all this from one gun battle that had lasted less than a minute. Lina and Adele had been in the ER but they were both okay. “Find Krista,” I begged Lina. “We need her.”
Lloyd returned from the basement. Colt must have gotten away, I realized in despair. He looked around wide-eyed at the disaster he’d helped wreak. “I was just—Oh God, I was just trying to—” He looked at me. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded. “It’s okay. Just help us.” And I put him to work fetching supplies.
Corrigan and I worked frantically to save the guy who’d been hit in the stomach. I could feel him looking at me and, whenever I glanced up, the look in his eyes took my breath away. Something had changed. He was bursting, desperate to tell me something and my chest kept switching between light and fluttery and cold and dark as I thought about what it might be. When we finally finished and stabilized the guy, he suddenly grabbed my wrist. Opened his mouth to speak—
“How could you?” yelled Taylor behind me.
I squeezed Corrigan’s hand. Later. Then I spun around to look. Taylor had been working on the nurse who’d been shot in the leg, desperately trying to save as much of the muscle as she could, and now she’d finally lost it and was railing at Seth, who was sitting handcuffed on the floor. “These are my friends!”
Seth stared at the floor. From the utter misery on his face, he was as horrified by the devastation as she was, and being torn apart by guilt from his part in all this.
“Look at me!” she snapped, tears in her eyes.
Corrigan patted her on the back and then walked over to Seth and hoisted him to his feet by the collar, then slammed him against the wall. Seth kept his eyes on the floor. “Time you told us what the fuck is going on.” His voice was low and dangerously cold. “We’ve got a whole ER full of injuries because of your dad. There are people lying dead tonight because of your dad. The only reason I’m not pounding your head against the wall right now is because you saved her—”—he jerked his thumb at Taylor—“—twice.”
Seth finally lifted his head and looked at Taylor. I’ve never known anyone look so utterly trapped. “Why do you follow him?” I blurted.
Seth kept his eyes on Taylor but he answered my question. “Because he’s my dad,” he said hopelessly.
I thought back to what Earl had told us about Colt’s life. His wife had died while he was in jail. So not only had Seth grown up without a dad from...what, the age of seven? He’d also had to go through losing his mom, all on his own. For twenty years, all he’d heard from his dad’s far-right buddies was how his dad was this legendary figure, practically a folk hero. When his dad finally got out of jail and asked for his loyalty, of course Seth had grabbed at that last chance to be a family. I thought about how much I loved my dad. Wouldn’t I have done the same?
“Just tell us what’s going on,” I said more gently. “What were you stealing?”
I wasn’t expecting him to give me a straight answer. But Taylor’s tear-filled eyes did what no amount of threats from Corrigan could have. Seth finally weakened. “Gold,” he said.
“What?” It was ridiculous. Gold? In our tiny bank?
Seth let out a long sigh. “Back in the Eighties, the government wanted to make sure they still had cash reserves after a Soviet nuclear attack. So they hid stashes of gold bullion in remote locations around the country. Fifty million per location. No one is meant to know where they are. Not even the bank managers. They tell the bank it’s part of some Federal program to reinforce their vault, get them to close for a weekend, dig up the vault floor and bury the gold underneath.”
“How did your dad know the gold was there?” asked Corrigan.
“One of the construction workers who hid the gold was sent to jail,” said Seth. “Became friends with my dad. And eventually, he talked.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. That’s why they’d broken into the mining company: drills to get into the vault, jackhammers to dig up the floor. But: “What are the explosives for?”
Seth looked at me, his face blank. “What explosives?”
I exchanged looks with Corrigan. Whatever they were for, Colt hadn’t shared that part with his son.
“And him?” asked Corrigan, pointing at the guy in the tan jacket. “Why is he so important?”
“He’s a helicopter pilot,” said Seth. “He was meant to fly us out of here.”
It was a near-perfect crime. With the phone lines down and the cell tower destroyed, Colt and his men would be long gone before the state police even heard about the robbery. And with fifty million dollars, Colt could build a far-right militia that went far beyond Colorado. The thought of that man in control of an army made me want to throw up.
Corrigan drew me close. “It’ll be okay,” he said. He lowered his voice so that Seth couldn’t hear him. “Colt and his men didn’t even wear masks. We know who they are! Even if they do escape, the FBI will hunt them down. Colt is going back to jail.”
I nodded again but...something didn’t feel right. Colt was smart. Why had he and his men been so careless, these last few days, when they could have easily hidden their faces?
Corrigan pulled me into a hug. “We got lucky,” he said firmly. “Everyone’s going to be okay. For four gunshot wounds, that’s pretty amazing.” He looked at Taylor, worried. “How are you holding up?”
Taylor took a deep breath. The poor girl was too emotionally worn out to speak, but she bravely gave him a thumbs-up.
Corrigan took my hands in his and pulled me close. “I need to talk to you,” he told me. I’d never heard his voice so solemn. But there was a thread of tension there, too: God, yes, he really needed to talk to me. I nodded and looked around for somewhere private. “Let’s go—”
“Can someone get me some more gauze?” asked Adele, turning from a patient. “Got my hands full.”
“I’ll get it,” I said. I made an apologetic face at Corrigan. He nodded, but kept hold of my hands and only reluctantly let them go when our arms were at full extension.
Normally it would be a nurse’s job to run back and forth with supplies, but we were way beyond titles and stations now: everyone was helping out. I was a long, long way from my cozy burrow of the OR...but for the first time, I felt as if I was part of a team.
I pushed open the door to the supply room and stopped dead in my tracks. There were two bullet holes in the wall. Krista was lying on the floor, two bullet wounds in her chest and a lake of blood on the floor around her.
I fell to my knees beside her. “HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
45
Amy
“GET THE crash cart!” I yelled. I was kneeling astride Krista on a gurney, desperately pumping her chest as Corrigan pushed us full speed down the hallway. I was yelling orders at nurses as we passed them. “All the blood you have! She’s B negative!” I knew her blood group because we’d both donated blood at the same session, the first week I’d arrived in Mount Mercy. And then she’d taken me to Krüger’s and I’d got wasted on two tequila shots because the blood loss made me even more of a lightweight than normal and she’d helped me home and—
Krista!
We crashed through the door into the ER and Corrigan started to slow down but I shook my head. “No, her heart’s damaged! I need her upstairs in the OR, now!”
“We have to get her breathing first—”
I lost it. “Goddamn it, Dominic, don’t argue with me!” Tears were running down my face. “She has one chance and that’s to get her on bypass right now while I fix her heart!”
He looked me in the eye...and nodded. “Okay. You’re the surgeon.” And he pushed us towards the elevator.
“Lina! Adele! I need you too!” I yelled. They ran into the elevator with us, loaded with blood bags and pulling the crash cart.
The elevator doors started to close. I kept the chest compressions going, my hands slick with my best friend’s blood.
The elevator doors stopped, still a foot open. Bartell stood there, his arm blocking the door. “What are you doing?” I screamed, almost hysterical. “We have to get her upstairs!”
“There’s a fire.” He was pale-faced and sweating.
“What?!”
“It started with the generator fuel in the basement: Colt started it to cover his escape. We thought we could put it out with extinguishers but it’s spreading. Firefighters are on their way but we have to evacuate the hospital.”
I shook my head. He opened his mouth to argue. “I don’t operate on her right now, she dies!” I snapped tearfully. “Get everyone else out. We’re going upstairs.” I glanced around at the others but they all nodded: they were with me.
Bartell sighed, nodded and withdrew his arm.
Upstairs, we rushed Krista into the OR and scrambled to get her onto a heart bypass machine and a ventilator. “Gown up,” I told Corrigan. “I need you to assist.”
“I never—” he began.
“I’ll tell you what to do.”
And we went to work. But when I opened her up, I felt sick. She was a mess. The first bullet had clipped her heart, but at least it had passed straight through. The second one had hit a rib, spraying bone fragments into her organs, and then tumbled through her body, tearing into a lung and slicing an artery. I saw injuries every day, but this was brutal. “I don’t know if I can fix this,” I said, my voice going tight and quavery. “There’s too much damage. It’s—” Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t focus. I could barely think. This was my friend! She should be standing next to me, assisting, not lying on the table all—all—
“Hey,” said Corrigan from behind his surgical mask.
I looked up at him.
You can’t touch, when you’re in surgery. Your gloved hands have to remain sterile. So he couldn’t wrap me up in his arms or put his lips next to my ear. He couldn’t smooth his hand down my back to calm me or put his finger under my chin to keep me looking at him. He could only look me in the eye. But it felt as if he was doing all those things.
Mount Mercy Page 18
