They brought him in without a gurney, four men and one body, and set him down with a tenderness that fit nothing else about them. I started in before they'd even straightened up.
"What happened to him?"
Nothing.
"Talk to me. How long since he was hit? Did he lose consciousness at the scene?"
The biggest of them finally looked my way. Gray at the temples, and behind the eyes, a whole lot of nothing.
"He was shot. Three times." The accent set each word down with care, the way you'd stack glass. "You fix it."
"Then give me something to work with. Allergies? Conditions? Anything?"
"No allergies."
"A name, at least. I can't chart 'large man, expensive suit.'"
"He doesn't have one tonight."
Right. I cut his shirt instead of arguing, because a name has never once stopped a bleed, and the man on my table was burning through the only currency that counted. The shears went up the ruined side, the suit fell open, and there was the whole story, told in three small mouths in his skin: two high on the chest, one low beneath the left ribs, where the body keeps the organs it would rather not discuss.
Everybody bleeds the same color in my trauma bay, even the men who arrive with an armed escort and no name for the band. I've scrubbed it off my arms a thousand times, and not once has it told me who had it coming. That's a question for somebody with a bigger paycheck than mine.
Dr. Mercer reached the foot of the bed and stalled out. On an ordinary night he was a fine attending, thorough, half a step slow. This was not an ordinary night, and four silent men ringing the bay were doing nothing for his hands. I watched him add it up, the suits, the size of the patient, the arithmetic of three holes that had no business leaving a man breathing, and I watched the exact moment the sum got bigger than he was.
"Pressure," I said, mostly to hand him a job. "Somebody get me a pressure."
"Palp at seventy," Deysi said.
"Sats?"
"Eighty-one, and sliding."
Eighty-one doesn't sit politely and wait for a plan. I leaned over him and felt the thing the room hadn't said out loud yet. His chest wasn't moving the way a chest is supposed to. The right side climbed. The left barely bothered, like one lung had quietly handed in its notice.
I pressed my stethoscope to him and didn't need long. Breath on the right. On the left, a held note that refused to let go.
"His windpipe's pulling off center," I said. "Tension pneumo, left side. He's drowning in his own air."
"We should get a film," Mercer said.
"He'll be dead before it develops." I was already moving past him. "There's air trapped in his chest, strangling everything that keeps him here. I'm not waiting on radiology to confirm a corpse."
"Tell me what you need." That was Theo, and every trace of the joke had drained out of his voice. I gave him credit for it.
"Large-bore needle, fourteen gauge. Second space, midclavicular. Now, Theo. Not after your next meeting."
He slapped it into my palm. I found the landmark with two fingers, that soft give just above the third rib, and didn't let myself feel the four men watching or the way the leader had gone statue-still. I drove the needle home.
The hiss it gave back was the best thing I'd heard in hours. Trapped air, finding the door at last. His left side rose on the next breath like a sail catching wind.
"Eighty-eight," Deysi said. "Ninety. Look who's back."
I let myself enjoy that for one entire second.
One second turned out to be the whole budget. The monitor changed key mid-breath, the steady beep stretching into one long, flat complaint, and his heart, after surviving three bullets and a collapsed lung, picked that moment to quit on me.
"He's in V-fib," Theo said.
