A stern “copy that” came in over the radio from each responder. With her already-gloved hands wrapped around the bright yellow push bar on the gurney she and Luke had taken out of the ambo just in case, Quinn measured her breaths, in and out. Her stomach pitched at the idea that the guy who had done all this damage was still out there.
You know this feeling you have right now? This fear of dying? I want you to remember this feeling…remember it…remember…
Quinn’s blood froze, taking her limbs along for the ride. Clammy fingers of dread ghosted up her spine, chilling her skin despite the already-warm late spring morning, and she swiveled a sharp three-sixty over her surroundings, unable to shake the feeling of being watched.
“Quinn?” Luke’s voice, quiet with just a tinge of concern, broke past the sudden rush of adrenaline making her shaky. “Hey, are you okay?”
God, she was losing it. “Yeah. Yes.” She drummed up a weak smile, feeling surprised when the gesture actually seemed to work on both her and Luke. “I’m a little jumpy,” she admitted, giving the smoldering storefront and the growing crowd of onlookers one last careful perusal before turning to look at him fully. “But it sounds like this woman needs help. I’m good to take the call. Really.”
“Okay,” he said. His belief in her bolstered her confidence another notch, and she cemented her focus. Running through her mental checklists and listening closely to the exchanges on the two-way, she let the routine of the job she’d always relied on calm her as Kellan located the woman in the kitchen and Hawkins and Gates cleared a safe path for him to fall out.
Go. Go now. Do your job. Take care of this woman.
Quinn and Luke met Kellan halfway over the worn, silvery boards lining the pier’s main drag. “Found her in the kitchen, away from most of the smoke. She’s breathing and conscious, but out of it,” he said.
“Let’s get her on the gurney so we can see what we’re dealing with,” Quinn instructed. Her muscle memory won out in the throw-down against her jitters at being back in North Point, and she reached out to do her part in securing the woman, her brain immediately launching into a rapid trauma assessment.
“Strong pulse. Good breath sounds. Multiple facial contusions and lacerations.” Quinn’s pulse kicked, and she reached for the C-collar she’d thankfully grabbed out of the rig when they’d unloaded the gurney. Stabilizing the woman’s spine was a precaution, but with the beating she’d obviously taken, it wasn’t one Quinn was willing to overlook. “No obvious deformity to the extremities.” At least they had that on their side.
“Copy that.” Luke got the leads into place while she got the C-collar around the woman’s neck and shifted into her line of sight. Kellan hadn’t been wrong—she was definitely dazed, her blinks slow and sluggish as she clearly tried to track what was going on around her. Not unusual for a little smoke inhalation with a whole lot of shock on top.
“Ma’am? I’m here to help you. My name is Quinn, and I’m a paramedic with the Remington Fire Department. Can you tell me your name?”
“Her name is Carmen.” The revelation—from Kellan, of all people—whoa-Nellied Quinn into place. But then he went for broke in the holy-shit department when he reached for the two-way on the shoulder of his turnout gear and said, “Walker to Command, requesting dispatch call Detective Moreno from the Thirty-Third to the scene immediately.”
“Ugh,” Carmen moaned, as if the words had broken through some sort of haze. “She’s gonna…be a pain in my ass over this, pretty boy. It was just a stupid smash and grab.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kellan said, the look on his face tough even though his voice was softer than Quinn had ever heard it. “She’s coming anyway. Now behave while Quinn and Luke take care of you. I’ve got a fire to help knock down.”
He was gone before Quinn could ask how the hell he knew a woman who worked at Three Brothers or why Isabella would need to haul herself to North Point for a robbery call on a Sunday morning, but it was just as well. Quinn had bigger fish to fry; namely making sure Carmen didn’t have any bigger injuries lurking beneath her superficial cuts and bruises.
“Okay, Carmen,” she said, checking the woman’s vitals as they flashed over the monitor. BP and heart rate were a little elevated, but considering the circumstances, that was pretty damned understandable. “Can you tell me if anything hurts?”
“I got the crap kicked out of me, Blondie. Of course shit hurts.”
“She’s just trying to help you,” Luke interjected with a frown, but Quinn had treated enough people to know that everyone reacted differently to pain.
And fear.
“It’s okay, Carmen. I get it,” Quinn said, because she really freaking did. “I’m just trying to figure out how to fix you up and get you out of here, alright?”
That bought her a pause. “Can you take this neck thing off?” Carmen reached blindly for the C-collar, her body tense and her frown on full display. “It’s too fucking tight.”
“Tell you what.” Quinn eyeballed the group of onlookers, which had more than doubled since they’d arrived with lights and sirens blazing. “Let’s get you to the ambulance so we can do an extended workup with a little more privacy. Then we’ll talk about the C-collar. Good?”
Another pause, and man, she was tough. “Fine. Whatever will get me out of here, chica.”
Because Three Brothers faced the pier directly, Quinn hadn’t been able to park the ambulance as close to the place as she normally might. The crowd of looky-lous extended out to where all the emergency vehicles were parked nearly a block away, and God—even on a Sunday morning, a robbery/assault/arson trifecta would bring folks out of the woodwork.
Quinn shook off the prickle on the back of her neck and did her part in getting Carmen into the back of the rig with care. While they left one of the rear doors open, the mostly enclosed space offered them enough quiet to do a full workup.
“Okay. What do you see?” she asked Luke, who didn’t hesitate to do an assessment.
“Patient is conscious and alert.” He rattled off her vitals from the monitor. “Moderate contusion to the left orbit. Superficial lacerations to the mouth and chin. Deeper lac over the left eye.”
Yeah, that one was going to need stitches. If Quinn was a betting woman, she’d say four. Maybe five. “Good. What else?”
“No signs of head or neck trauma,” Luke said after double-checking for both. His penlight clicked on. “Pupils are equal and reactive.”
“Even better.”
Quinn went through a handful of questions with Carmen, ranging from where they were and what day it was (“I’m in the back of a damned ambulance and it’s Sunday. I should have listened to mi abeula and gone to church.”) to whether she’d lost consciousness or felt any numbness, tingling, or sensations of electrical activity anywhere in her body (“If I was, don’t you think I’d lead with that? I watch Grey’s Anatomy. I’m not stupid.”) Finally, after they’d rolled her on her side to get an unimpeded view of her spine, Quinn set down the tablet where she’d been charting all of Carmen’s info and looked at the woman.
“Good news. You passed with flying colors. The C-collar can come off.”
“I told you I’m fine,” Carmen said, her words loaded with sharp edges even though a whole lot of gratitude snuck into her dark brown stare as Quinn removed the C-collar and propped up the gurney so the woman could see what was going on.
“Mmm. You don’t have a spinal injury, but I’m not sure about fine. You’ve got some pretty nasty bruises on your ribs that will require X-rays, and that cut over your eye is going to need to be stitched up.”
Before Carmen could let loose with the argument her expression said she was working up, a familiar female voice sounded off from the rear door of the ambulance.
“Jesus, Carmen. Are you okay?” Isabella looked from Carmen to Quinn to Luke, likely gauging everyone’s reaction to the question.
Carmen’s eyes widened with uncharacteristic vulnerability for just a flash of a second
. Then she released a heavy sigh. “Dios mìo, here we go. The only thing that would be worse is if you’d brought—”
“Carmen, what the hell happened?” Hollister asked, nudging past Isabella to get a good look inside the back of the rig.
And just like that, Quinn’s what-the-fuck-o-meter was pegged out.
“Okay, I’ve gotta ask. What is going on here? Are you two responding to the nine-one-one call for this robbery?”
Isabella and Hollister were both holstered up with their badges in plain view on their hips, so all signs pointed to yes. But this seemed like a pretty small-time call for the most elite police unit in the city. Quinn had seen enough big-time calls to know.
Isabella shifted her weight on the asphalt, exchanging a look with Hollister that Quinn couldn’t read but she knew she didn’t like. “It’s complicated,” the detective said. “But yes, Hollister and I would like to get a statement from Carmen. As long as she’s okay to do that.”
Now it was Quinn’s turn to swap stares with Luke. “Medically, we can do the rest of her workup and monitor her while you talk, as long as she remains stable. But Luke and I have to stay in the rig with her, just in case her vitals change.”
It didn’t look like Isabella’s first choice, but ultimately, she didn’t refuse. She pulled herself into the back of the ambulance with Hollister on her boot heels, both of them sliding in next to Luke on the bench seat while Quinn held tight to her spot in the single chair across from them.
“Hey, girl,” Isabella said. Before she could get any further, Carmen unleashed a string of angry rapid-fire Spanish in reply, and damn, Quinn had thought she was ballsy in English. She didn’t need an interpreter to know Carmen was spitting nails over something.
“Okay, okay, okay.” Isabella held up a hand. “I hear you, and I know you want to leave, but we’ve got to do this, chica. You know Liam and I need to know what happened.”
“Oh, is that whole first-name thing supposed to make me all warm and fuzzy so I’ll feel better about spilling my guts, here? Liam,” she added, arching a brow at Hollister.
A flush drifted over his face beneath the auburn stubble peppering his jawline, and funny, Quinn had never seen the detective blush before. “We’re trying to do you a solid, Carmen. So can you just give us a rundown so we can do our job and find the bastard who did this to you, please?”
She crossed her arms over the front of her body-hugging black and white top, wincing before she could achieve the full knot. “Fine. I closed last night, but Luis wasn’t here. Not that he ever is. Make somebody a manager and they think they don’t have to show up anymore. Anyway”—Carmen paused to let Luke tape a gauze pad over the cut on her brow—“I didn’t want to take the cash to the bank’s night-drop box by myself, so I left it in the safe and came back this morning to get it. This cabrón, I guess he was following me, or waiting, or whatever. But I didn’t see him until he’d kicked in the back door and started trashing the place.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” Hollister asked, and Carmen’s laugh in reply held no joy.
“Dude didn’t exactly make small talk, you know? I only saw him for a second before he went all MMA on me.”
A muscle tightened at the hinge of Luke’s jaw, and Hollister wore a matching expression. “Anything you can remember would be helpful,” the detective tried again. “Was he black? White? Tall? Skinny?”
“Black,” Carmen said, then followed it with, “I’m almost positive, but I guess he could’ve been Hispanic, too. Definitely not white. I think he was tall, but it was hard to tell, and everybody’s taller than me. He was wearing a baseball hat with a hoodie over it. Both dark. Maybe gray? I don’t know for sure.”
“Okay, that’s good.” Isabella paused to ask Quinn to radio the details in to dispatch to help the uniformed officers with their search. “Someone saw a guy who might fit that description running out of here at the same time your nine-one-one call came in.”
“That description fits half the guys in North Point,” Carmen muttered, but Isabella shook her head.
“With any luck, the unis we have looking right now will find the one guy who did this. So what happened after he kicked in the door?”
Carmen shrugged, her shoulders shushing against the sheet covering the gurney behind them. “He didn’t waste any time. He dragged me out of the office and started smacking me around, asking me weird questions. I fought back as much as I could.”
The defensive scrapes and bruises on her knuckles certainly backed that up. “After, like, the ninth time I told him he was talking crazy, he finally stopped hitting me,” Carmen continued. “Then he grabbed the money I’d taken from the safe, smashed up some stuff in the dining room, and lit something on fire, I guess. I didn’t come out of the kitchen to see for sure. I was just glad he left.”
Quinn’s chest tightened at the thought of Carmen being assaulted by someone bigger than her, someone stronger, and Isabella looked equally unhappy about it.
“You said he asked you weird questions. Like what?” she asked, and Carmen frowned hard enough to stain her split lip a shade of fresh crimson.
“Questions about the guy you two were asking me about the other day,” she said quietly. “Damien what’s-his-face.”
Luke’s chin whipped up at the same time Quinn’s heart ricocheted off her sternum. “Does this assault have something to do with our case?” he asked.
Hollister held up a hand. “The chances of that are extremely low.”
“But not impossible,” Quinn said. After all, Damien wasn’t exactly a garden variety name. Damiens who were linked to nasty crimes in North Point? Even less common.
Oh God. Oh God. If Ice knew she and Luke had gone to the Thirty-Third…
“Look, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Isabella’s calm, cool voice broke through Quinn’s rising panic, but just barely. “Carmen, I need you to think really hard, okay? Can you tell me exactly what this guy said?”
“He kept trying to intimidate me, you know? Yelling, asking how I really knew Damien, what I really told the cops and why I lied to that stupid puta Cherise last night. Every time I told him I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, he’d hit me harder. Call me a liar. But it’s like I already told you. I don’t know nobody named Damien.”
“Wait. Hold up.” Hollister’s hazel eyes narrowed, and he leaned in a little farther over the bench seat. “Who’s Cherise?”
A noise of frustration crossed Carmen’s lips, and although Quinn tried as hard as she could to process the conversation, she couldn’t get much past the fear slinging its way through her system.
“Cherise is some junkie who turns tricks for Ricky Benton. Or she used to. I don’t know about now,” Carmen said. “I never used to hang with her much. Too skanky. But she came in to the pizzeria last night, all nice and shit, trying to talk about old times.”
She clamped down on her lip even though it looked like the move hurt, and Isabella’s normally titanium-reinforced gaze softened.
“Nobody here is judging you, Carmen.”
“I get it,” Carmen snapped, dragging the back of her hand over her bleeding lip. But not even the fear pooling in her belly was enough to keep Quinn from reaching for a gauze pad and silently tucking it between the woman’s fingers.
“Thank you,” Carmen whispered. The softness lasted for less than a breath. “So Cherise comes by last night and offers me some blow. I said no, by the way. Then she’s all going on about this guy Damien, and don’t I know him from back in the day, didn’t she hear me talking to my new friends about him when she was in here the other night. Stupid shit. I told her to stop shooting up so much. I don’t know what the hell she was talking about.”
Hollister’s frame went rigid, his chin snapping up. “Oh, shit. Cherise wouldn’t happen to be the skinny blonde who was sitting by the door in the pizzeria when Moreno and I were here the other night, would she?”
“Yeah, now that you said it, I think she did come in for a
slice the other night,” Carmen confirmed slowly. “But what does that have to do with this asshole who broke in? Seriously, I don’t know anybody named Damien.”
“Be glad about that,” Luke said, turning to pin Isabella and Hollister with a stare as he voiced the question running rampant in Quinn’s brain. “This is related to what happened to me and Quinn, isn’t it?”
Isabella side-stepped his question neatly, but didn’t cut the conversation off at the quick, either. She looked at Hollister. “We need to get a BOLO out on Cherise, and I want the guy who did this in a holding cell with my goddamn name on it. The sooner, the better.”
Hollister nodded. “I’ll have Capelli get Luis on the phone. We’re going to need all the pizzeria’s surveillance video from last night and this morning.”
“You think those video cameras actually work?” Carmen snorted. “Not since Christmas, honey. Three years ago.”
Quinn’s mind raced to outpace the rapid push of her pulse as Hollister winced, then landed on his feet. “This is Capelli we’re talking about. He might be able to pull something useful from one of the city cams out on the pier, proper. Carmen”—he turned back toward the gurney—“we’ll have you go through some photo arrays, but is there anything else you can remember about the guy who did this? Anything at all.”
She shook her head, but then gasped in contradiction. “He had a tattoo. Some kind of weird tattoo on his arm. I saw part of it sticking out from beneath the sleeve of his hoodie when he hit me. I don’t know what it was, though. Maybe a rope or a chain or something?”
“Was it this?” Hollister pulled up an image on his cell phone, and Carmen turned the same color as the sheet on the gurney holding her up.
“Oh no. No fucking way. You think this is a Vipers thing? You can forget it. I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“Carmen—”
She whipped a finger into the space between her and Hollister, her expression fierce as her dark eyes flashed. “Don’t you ‘Carmen’ me, Charm School. I’m not messing around. If this has anything to do with the Vipers, I’m not saying a word.”
In Too Deep: Station Seventeen Book 3 Page 20
