Page 2 of The Final Cut

“I don’t care.”

“I do.” His voice drops, hard enough to cut through the panic clawing up my spine. “I care because if they put you in cuffs, I can’t protect you, I can’t protect Cal, and I can’t find your sister. Let me do my job.”

I hate him for making sense while Cal is bleeding beneath my hands. I hate everyone for making sense.

A siren rises somewhere beyond the garden wall.

My head snaps up.

The sound should help. I know that. I have spent too much of my adult life sitting behind the engine of that sound, feeling it in my bones like relief. Tonight it scrapes straight through my ribs.

“They’re coming,” I tell Cal. “You hear that? They’re coming. You’re going to surgery, and you’re going to be mean to nurses, and I’m going to yell at you for bleeding on my dress.”

His fingers twitch against the stone.

I want to grab them. I want to squeeze his hand and anchor him to me with bones and skin and every terrified thing I have left. I can’t. If I move even one hand, the pressure changes. The blood wins more ground.

So I press harder and talk faster.

“You remember when I got the flu in ninth grade and puked in your truck? You didn’t even get mad. You just opened every window and said I owed you a detailing when I stopped dying. Which was rude, by the way. You were very rude to your sick child.”

His lips shift. Maybe a smile. Maybe pain.

I take it like a gift.

Boots pound across the terrace. Voices layer over each other. A paramedic drops beside me with a trauma bag, and my body reacts before my mind catches up.

“Gunshot wound to the left upper abdomen, maybe flank. Significant blood loss. He was conscious, then intermittent. Airway intact. Breathing shallow. Pulse fast and thready.”

The paramedic looks at me for the first time. Mid-thirties, longish dark hair pulled tight, eyes quick. “You EMS?”

“I was EMT in Chicago.” My mouth keeps working while my hands keep pressure. “Entry wound here. I didn’t roll him. I didn’t check for exit. He coughed blood once. He’s been responsive to voice, but he keeps trying to close his eyes.”

“Good. Keep pressure until I tell you.”

“I know.”

She doesn’t react to my tone. Smart woman. She opens gauze, talks to her partner, and slides into the rhythm that should be mine. Gloves. Shears. Vitals. O2. Monitor. A second medic moves in with a stretcher and a backboard, and suddenly there are too many hands near him.

Too many hands that are not mine.

“Don’t lift him like that,” I snap.

The male paramedic glances at me. “Ma’am, we’ve got him.”

“You need to check⁠—”

“We’ve got him.”

“He took the shot close range. He may have internal⁠—”

“Ma’am.”

“I am not a ma’am.”

The female paramedic looks up, patient in the thin, dangerous way people get when they are doing a job and someone with a personal stake is making it harder. “Then tell me your name.”

“Reva Hart.”