The Recovery Assignment

by Alison Roberts

  The solution was as simple as it was brilliant. Charlotte made some phone calls and an appointment for 7 p.m. that night. She drove a little way out of town, showed the appropriate person her licence and then signed in for thirty minutes’ use of a high-powered gun. She put on her ear-muffs and goggles in the cubicle she was allocated, loaded her gun and checked through the sights to find her target. The torso-shaped target had circles painted on its chest and it seemed a long way away. It had been too long since Charlotte had indulged in the hobby she’d found when doing weapons training for the police force.

  Her first shot hit the target’s head. At least she hadn’t missed just in case someone was watching. Charlotte carefully avoided catching a glance from anyone into the occupied cubicles on either side and tried to ignore the ache in her shoulder from the kick of the gun. A muffled shot came from the person on her left and their target flipped back out of sight for a second to signify that the bullet had gone into dead centre of the marked circles. It was a great shot and Charlotte heard a restrained whoop of delight coming from the marksman. She turned to give her neighbour a congratulatory smile and the man’s eyes widened with something like alarm beneath the goggles.

  ‘Charlie!’

  Lip-reading her own name was easy. Deciding how she felt about running into Hawk so unexpectedly was rather more difficult. Charlotte pulled one side of her earmuffs up as she saw that he was saying something else.

  ‘What?’ It was hardly a friendly greeting but Hawk was smiling.

  ‘I said why didn’t you tell me you liked shooting? I come here all the time and I haven’t had anyone to compete with since Cam left.’

  Oh, no! Now she had to prove herself all over again. So why was she feeling so pleased by the prospect? ‘You’re on, buster,’ she told Hawk. ‘And the loser has to buy the beer.’

  Charlotte lost but only just. Her aim improved steadily until she was hitting the central mark just as often as Hawk but she couldn’t make up the lost ground.

  ‘Your shout,’ he informed her smugly as they handed back their weapons. ‘I like beer.’

  ‘You’re on call,’ Charlotte reminded him. ‘You’ll have to take a rain-check. And it’s just as well because I’m not used to this any more. I’ve got a thundering headache and a very sore shoulder. I’m going to head home for a long soak in a hot bath.’

  Hawk was keeping pace with her as she headed for her car. ‘Are you in a huge hurry?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something I’d like to show you.’

  An odd note in Hawk’s tone earned him a sharp glance. ‘What? Have I done something wrong?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with your work. Not in that sense, anyway.’

  Now Charlotte was curious. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Can’t say,’ Hawk said firmly. ‘It’s something you’ve got to see.’

  The lure of the hot bath receded just a little. ‘Will it take long?’

  ‘Nope. Couple of minutes. And it’s practically on your way home.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ Charlotte could only stare at what was sitting on top of her desk.

  ‘Don’t worry, you can mess things up again. I just cleared a small space.’

  But it wasn’t a small thing. It was huge. Charlotte found she had a lump in her throat and she had to swallow. She glanced up to find Hawk watching her carefully. His expression advertised pride and something a lot more than that. He had done something for her and he wanted her to be pleased.

  Charlotte was more than pleased. She was blown away.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she repeated slowly. ‘This must have cost an absolute fortune, Hawk!’

  ‘It did.’ Hawk tried to sound modest but his face was a dead give-away. ‘I had a few words in the right ears. You would have enjoyed the yarn I spun about poor Stan Jones. The benefits to public relations for the police force did not go unmentioned either.’

  ‘But…’ Charlotte couldn’t resist touching it now, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. ‘This is state of the art, Hawk. It’s got everything!’ She unzipped pockets on the carry case one after the other and then she turned the machine on and found a menu screen. She shook her head as she scrolled through the options.

  ‘Twelve lead ECG, pacing capabilities, non-invasive blood-pressure measurement, oximeter, end-tidal carbon dioxide. It’s even got rhythm analysis.’

  ‘I have no idea what all that stuff means,’ Hawk confessed cheerfully.

  ‘It means that we’ve got a life pack that’s probably better than most of the ambulances in the district carry.’

  ‘Good.’ Hawk sounded smug. ‘I only pick the best.’

  ‘But…’ Charlotte was still stunned. ‘How often are we going to use it?’

  ‘How much is a life worth?’ Hawk countered. His gaze held something indefinable now. ‘Some people are worth whatever it costs,’ he added softly.

  Charlotte had to look away. Was he talking about potential heart-attack victims? Or was he referring to how much money had just been spent on her behalf? A wave of confusion made her stammer a little.

  ‘H-how on earth are we going to fit this into our car?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’ Hawk was fiddling with some files lying beside the life pack on Charlotte’s desk. ‘So…what do you think?’ The edge of a file pushed the vase of fake flower pens and Jamie’s photograph tipped over to lie face down.

  And Charlotte wasn’t even tempted to reach out and pick it up. ‘I think it’s the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done for me, Hawk.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Thank you.’

  There was a moment of silence. An awkward one. If it had been anyone other than Hawk, Charlotte would not have hesitated to give him a hug. But there was no way she could hug Owen Hawkins. It wouldn’t be a friendly gesture of appreciation. It would be something far more dangerous. She didn’t want to touch this man.

  She didn’t dare.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Hawk straightened from where he’d been leaning on her desk beside the life pack. He sounded as awkward as Charlotte felt. ‘Uh…there was something else as well. A favour I wanted to ask.’

  ‘Ah!’ Charlotte tried to recapture some of their usual professional tension. ‘I might have known there was a catch.’

  Hawk’s smile was brief. ‘I wanted to ask you if you could teach me to do CPR properly.’

  ‘Oh…’ Charlotte hadn’t expected that. Hawk wanted something that she could give him? He certainly deserved it. ‘But there are courses you could go on,’ she found herself saying. ‘You could get a qualification if you wanted to.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Hawk said simply. ‘I want you to teach me.’

  ‘No problem, then,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’d be happy to teach you, Hawk. I should be able to rustle up a dummy through Laura.’

  ‘We’d have to find our own time to do it. Evenings, probably.’

  Charlotte had to wet suddenly dry lips. ‘No problem.’ She had to clear her throat again. ‘It’s a great idea, Hawk. And there’s heaps you can learn. Like paediatric resuscitation. A cardiac arrest in a child is often caused by a respiratory arrest happening first, which is different to adults. Potentially, you could have a child with an obstructed airway leading to an arrest at an accident scene that could be saved by good CPR.’ She was babbling. It was time she left.

  A riot of conflicting emotions were trying to gain precedence over each other. Had she really thought she hated Hawk only two days ago? A tiny task that presented itself as a distraction was welcome. Charlotte leaned over her desk and stood Jamie’s photograph upright again. By the time she looked up, Hawk had moved. He was returning to his desk despite it being long after his official knocking off time.

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said politely. ‘But right now I’ve got a report I want to get finished.’

  ‘I’ll get out of your way, then,’ Charlotte told him. She paused at the door. ‘Thanks again, Hawk.’

  ‘You’re we
lcome.’ Hawk still sounded oddly polite.

  ‘I hope we get a chance to play with it soon. Kind of,’ she added. What would Hawk think if he knew she was looking forward to another situation like Mr Jones had caused? ‘Not that it’s likely,’ she continued. ‘I haven’t had a chance for much fluffing lately, have I?’

  ‘No.’ Hawk smiled but his gaze remained on his computer screen. ‘Still, you never know what’s around the corner, do you?’ He wasn’t expecting a response. His fingers were busily tapping keys already.

  Charlotte took the hint and fled.

  Her dreams that night were a jigsaw of medical emergencies. Hawk was present in more than one of them, carrying a life-saving defibrillator that filled Charlotte with an overwhelming sense of relief. There were snatches of other overwhelming emotions concerning Owen Hawkins as well, yet Charlotte felt that she had slept well for the first time in many days. She awoke to find the tension had gone. She felt rested, calm and ready for anything. She was looking forward to getting back to work today.

  It was just as well she had recharged her batteries. She needed every ounce of energy and alertness she could summon when she and Hawk were despatched that afternoon to another major incident.

  ‘What is it with us and trucks lately?’ Charlotte had to raise her voice over the sound of the siren as they sped towards the outskirts of the city.

  ‘They’re big and heavy. They tend to squash things they hit.’

  ‘And they use up too much of the road. Like that sheep truck—it was halfway into the car’s lane.’ Charlotte slowed the car a little as they approached a bend. ‘How many vehicles has this one collected?’

  ‘It’s squashed one under the front and a couple of others have piled into the back of it.’

  A fine, misty rain had made road conditions slippery. Failing to heed the speed the advisory sign recommended for taking a bend in such conditions, a car had skidded, turned clockwise 180 degrees and ended up in the lane of opposing traffic. A truck driver had done his best to brake but had been unable to prevent the collision. His front wheels had gone over the back of the car, crushing the left-hand side beneath the heavy vehicle, and had then shunted it some distance along the road. Another car had crashed into the rear of a bus as it had braked and they in turn had been rear-ended by a delivery van.

  The scene was chaotic. Injured car passengers included a couple of hysterical teenage girls. The driver of the car under the front of the furniture truck was still alive but badly injured, and it had taken some time for the fire service to cut access to the victim. Her passenger would have to remain where he was, buried in the crushed side of the car still under the wheels of the truck. The ambulance service was stretched to deal with the multi-casualty incident and Hawk took one look at the scene as they arrived and turned to Charlotte.

  ‘See where you’re needed most,’ he told her. ‘I’ll start the scene investigation.’

  Charlotte was needed most at the car. She found Laura trying to stabilise the critically injured driver and she was clearly having difficulty. The suction gear beside her was full of blood. A discarded endotracheal tube was also covered in blood and Laura was holding a smaller size of tube as she peered past the light her laryngoscope provided.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ she was saying in dismay. ‘And there’s no way I can get even this tube in. Her trachea’s crushed.’

  The stridor Charlotte could hear as the injured woman struggled to breathe was alarming. If they couldn’t achieve some airway protection there was no way they could keep her alive long enough to reach the hospital. A rescue helicopter with further back-up was approaching to land just over the road in the vacant parking lot of a factory but it would take several minutes for them to be able to offer assistance.

  Laura’s partner was someone Charlotte didn’t recognise and he was less qualified than Tim. He shook his head as he held the bag mask over the patient’s face again.

  ‘I’m not getting any air in,’ he said grimly. ‘Her airway’s totally obstructed.’ He reached for the suction unit again and inserted the end piece into the woman’s mouth. A fresh flow of blood entered the tubing to take the level in the reservoir up with alarming speed.

  ‘Try a cricothyroid puncture,’ Charlotte advised Laura.

  ‘I’ve never done one.’ Laura bit her lip. ‘Not for real.’

  ‘I’m not even qualified to try.’ Tim’s replacement for the shift sounded equally anxious.

  They both looked at Charlotte. ‘I’ve done a few,’ she admitted. ‘OK. I’ll have one more go at intubation and if that fails we’ll go for a cric.’

  Hawk passed close to the trio of ambulance officers a minute or so later. He could see that the situation was extremely tense and he heard Charlotte sounding very grim.

  ‘There’s subcutaneous emphysema all over her neck. Hand me that 12-gauge cannula, Laura. Have you attached the 10 mil syringe with 3 mil of saline in it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Laura sounded as though she had supreme confidence in what Charlotte was doing. ‘Here you go.’

  Hawk stopped dead in his tracks as he saw what Charlotte was doing. She had already been feeling the patient’s neck carefully. Now she was pushing the large needle directly into the front of the woman’s neck.

  ‘I’m aspirating with the syringe as I go,’ he heard her say to her companions. ‘I’ll either aspirate air bubbles or blood or I’ll feel a break in resistance as I cross the tracheal wall.’

  Hawk couldn’t move. The next few seconds were far too tense.

  ‘Yes!’ Charlotte sounded delighted. ‘Air bubbles. Now I’m advancing the cannula and we’ll confirm placement with an empty syringe.’

  ‘What size?’ Laura’s hand hovered over the kit close to Charlotte as she knelt beside the unconscious woman.

  ‘Another 10 will be fine. Have you got that Y-connector attached to the oxygen tubing, Pete?’

  ‘All set to go. Fifteen litres?’

  ‘Yep.’ Charlotte reached for the new gear. ‘Let’s get some air into her.’

  The helicopter had landed by now and brightly suited and helmeted paramedics were advancing on the scene, rolling a stretcher between them. Hawk moved away. There was no room for extra bodies in this area and too much for him to do elsewhere. He was surprised when Charlotte joined him a minute later. A few spots of blood on her white shirt were the only indications of the dramatic procedure she had just completed.

  ‘It’s under control,’ she told Hawk. ‘They’re just getting her packaged for transport. There’s only minor stuff from the other vehicles and there’ll be plenty of ambulance staff to deal with them once the chopper gets away. I’m all yours.’

  He wished.

  ‘What were you doing to that woman?’ Hawk needed to dispel that errant thought as quickly as possible. ‘It looked pretty serious.’

  ‘It was. She was already hypovolaemic from her injuries and she would have died from hypoxia pretty damned quickly if we hadn’t done something.’

  Hawk gave Charlotte a blank look and she smiled. ‘Sorry. Serious blood loss and lack of oxygen. She’d crushed her trachea…’ Charlotte stroked the front of her own neck to indicate the area she was talking about. ‘There was no way we could get a tube in to get her breathing properly because there was too much tissue damage and bleeding. The obstruction was enough to make using a bag mask ineffective as well.’

  Hawk was finding it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. He was still staring at her neck. He wanted to stroke it himself. Shaking his head to clear the increasingly unwelcome distractions, he moved off. Charlotte kept pace with him as he marched along the road.

  ‘What I did was a needle cricothyroidotomy. It’s like a temporary tracheotomy. Even a needle can allow enough oxygen to get in under pressure to keep someone alive long enough to do a proper surgical airway.’

  ‘That’s cool.’ Hawk was focussed again now. He wasn’t even annoyed with himself any more. The distraction of his desire for Charlotte had
been only momentary. A brief flash that could be put aside until a more suitable time.

  ‘Look at that.’ A learner’s plate card was lying on the road surface not far from the woman’s car. ‘She was driving, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yep.’ Charlotte shook her head. ‘Her passenger isn’t going anywhere and he certainly didn’t have a chance to change seats.’

  ‘Friction marks,’ Hawk pointed out. The lines wiggled in a bizarre pattern. ‘The car’s been shunted. They’re post-impact marks.’

  Charlotte nodded. She turned her head for a moment to watch the helicopter take off.

  ‘We’ll have to get a crane in to lift the truck off the car. We’re going to be here for a while.’

  Charlotte nodded again. ‘I’ll get the paint and my sketch book.’

  It was well over an hour before the truck got lifted from the car and then towed away. The total devastation of the vehicle provoked a soft curse from Hawk. The steering-wheel of the truck had been directly over the passenger seat of the car. The windscreen and roof of the vehicle were flattened to the same level as the bonnet on that side. The body of the passenger was barely visible amidst the crushed metal and it took the fire service another thirty minutes to extricate the body of the unfortunate man.

  Then the wreck could be lifted by the crane and both Hawk and Charlotte peered at the underside of the car.

  ‘There’s severe rim damage on the front right wheel.’

  Hawk nodded. ‘And look at this scraping under the petrol tank. You’re lucky we didn’t have a fire while you were trying to work beside it.’

  ‘I doubt that a fire would have lasted long in this weather. Freezing, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’ve got just about enough information for now. Let’s get back to the office and see what we’re missing. I think anything else we’re going to need will still be here in the morning.’

  Reviewing all the digital photographs on the computer was the last task they did that day but it was well past the time they should have gone home, and their office was an oasis of light in an otherwise dark department. Charlotte stretched her shoulders back as she sat in front of the computer. Then she rubbed her shoulder.