Ellen turned to Margery. “Are you okay? Do you need water?”
“I’m okay,” Margery said, her voice shaking.
Penny took one of her hands. “They’re not going to hurt us,” Penny said with quiet strength, then turned to the man. “Right?”
“No, ma’am. I just want my brother to live. That’s all. I’m sorry about the trouble. I just need my family safe. You can understand that.”
His voice was almost earnest. Ellen wanted to believe him—but didn’t.
“You came here under false pretenses,” she said. “You’re not with the county. Why? Tell me!”
He hesitated, then said, “You save Sammy, I’ll tell you.”
“And Greg Baldwin?”
His jaw tightened. “We didn’t mean for him to get hurt. He wasn’t supposed to be home.”
Just like the other robberies this week, Ellen thought. Whatwas going on with these people? Burglars with hearts of gold? She almost laughed at the thought.
Ten minutes later, Lyla and Rena returned, soaked to the bone. Rena held the supplies in a plastic bin. Lyla’s expression caught Ellen, wide-eyed, alarmed. But she didn’t say anything.
Ellen filed it away and turned back to Sam.
The dining room was the only space with halfway decent lighting and close to the kitchen for sterilizing tools. Ellen ordered Rena to boil a pot of water while she checked Sam’s vitals. His fever was of the most concern. She would prefer to have an IV to inject the antibiotics and ketamine into, but she didn’t. She would have to make do.
She did the math on a scratch pad and adjusted the dosage of the medication. She prepared three shots.
Once the water was boiling, she slipped on latex gloves and told Rena to do the same, then put her forceps and scalpel into the water and rinsed them with vodka that she had in the cabinet.
Sam’s abdomen was taut and warm to the touch—bloated. The wound had started to scab at the edges, but it was oozing pus, dark and foul-smelling.
Ellen injected ketamine into his thigh. His body jerked briefly, then slackened. He was barely conscious when he came in; now he was out.
“He won’t feel pain now,” she told Rena.
With a second syringe, she injected ceftiofur directly into a vein at the bend of his arm, then followed with a broad-spectrum penicillin.
“You’re really gonna cut into him?” Rena asked, pale.
“Unless you want the infection to kill him before you can get him to the hospital.” She was more concerned about internal bleeding, and didn’t know if she would be able to stop it.
Ellen took a deep breath. She sliced into the edge of the wound,carefully enlarging it to expose the embedded buckshot. Sam moaned, muscles twitching involuntarily under the sedative.
Every pellet she removed came with fresh pus and tissue. She worked slowly, methodically, gripping the tiny fragments with forceps, wiping blood and infection away, whispering to herself with every extraction.
“One… two… three…”
By the sixth pellet, her gloves were slick. Her fingers trembled.
“Come on,” she whispered.
The seventh was lodged deep near his liver. She hesitated, then angled her forceps and eased it free. The eighth she nearly missed—it sat just beneath the skin near his navel, and removing it caused a sudden gush of blood.
Dammit, this wasn’t good. “Pressure, I need pressure!” she barked.
Rena scrambled to grab a clean towel, pressing it down with shaking hands.
When the bleeding stopped, Ellen poured aluminum sulfate powder generously into the wound—old school, rough, but the best she had. It fizzed as it reacted with the exposed tissue. Then, she packed the cavity with gauze and wrapped the abdomen in layers of clean bandage.
