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“I appreciate that.” She glanced at the wall clock outside Anya’s office as she walked past him. It was after ten. “But I’ve got to get back to work.”

Josie left him in the empty morgue. The smell of fresh paint lingered in the hallway. It hadn’t been this quiet since before the renovations started. Tools and other equipment as well as cans of paint, buckets of joint compound, and stacks of floor tiles lined the walls. Ladders stood open, some with small paint cans still sitting on the tiny shelf below the top rung. Several drop cloths remained spread across the floor. She was focused on the elevators ahead, fantasizing about the epic shower she was going to take when she got home, when her boot slipped on something slick. Her leg flew out from under her. As she flailed, the patient belongings bag caught the side of a ladder, sending it clattering onto its side. She fell backward, her free hand reaching behind her, ready to break her fall. Except her elbow hit the tile first and then her shoulder slammed into the floor. The breath whooshed out of her.

Some muted part of her brain registered the popping sound her shoulder made on impact. She felt it, too. There were a few seconds of nothing but her lungs yearning for air and her mind staging a five-alarm panic attack because it already knew something was very, very wrong. Then came the pain, intense and all-consuming. A skewer of white-hot agony stabbed through her shoulder, setting off a deep throb that made beads of sweat form along her hairline. She rolled onto her back, lips parted, trying to breathe.

Ramon’s face swam over the top of her. “Josie! Josie! What happened? Are you okay?”

She couldn’t answer. Eyes watering, she begged the universe for something. Air or a modicum of relief from the pain in her shoulder. Ramon’s face drew closer and she realized he was kneeling beside her. He scanned the area and cursed. “I told those guys to clean up their mess. Hold on, you’re okay. You’re okay.”

As he disentangled the cotton strings of the patient belongings bag from her wrist, oxygen trickled back into her lungs. The relief was immediate. “I think I dislocated my shoulder,” Josie croaked.

Ramon gave her a crooked smile. “No kidding. Come on, I’ll get you upstairs to the ER.”

Only the excruciating ache in her shoulder kept her from protesting. This wasn’t something a couple of ibuprofen and a good night’s sleep was going to relieve. Ramon slid a hand under her back and levered her body to sitting. From there, Josie was able to stand. Being upright made the pain worse. The way her arm hung uselessly from the socket brought another wave of anxiety crashing over her. She cradled it in her good hand and tried to breathe deeply. Ramon kept a hand around her waist to steady her and guide her around the puddle of primer she’d slipped on. Still, she knew she was leaving white boot prints down the hall.

“Can I call someone for you?” Ramon asked as he ushered her into the elevator. “Your husband?”

Josie had to concentrate very hard on every breath, every movement of her body to keep the pain at its current level which was agonizing but not so much that she couldn’t perform the basic functions of walking and talking. “Yes, please,” she said tightly.

A phone appeared in Ramon’s hand. “Fraley, right?”

Josie nodded, grateful that it was Ramon who had found her since he knew her and everyone else on their team well from working with Anya. Once the elevator doors opened, Ramon made the call. Josie didn’t hear any of the conversation. She tuned out everything but getting down the hall to the ER, sucking in air through gritted teeth. Ramon took her right to triage which was a special sort of torture in itself. Endless questions that her brain simply didn’t have the bandwidth for in that moment. What the hell did it matter when her last period started when, with each passing second, she felt like gnawing off her own arm might be a viable pain management option?

Lucky for Josie and the very lovely nurse she was considering beating with her arm once she chewed it off, Noah arrived. He pushed through the door to the small triage office, looking like her salvation and not just because he was dressed casually in jeans and an old gray T-shirt that showed off his musculature. Before he was even across the room, he started firing off answers to the nurse’s questions on Josie’s behalf. The relief of not having to be fully cognizant was palpable. Noah’s warm palm along the nape of her neck chased away the unease buzzing under her skin. The next thing Josie heard was the nurse saying, “She’s a level three so it shouldn’t be too long.”

Josie thought about the chaos of earlier which, given the cacophony on the other side of the triage door, seemed alive and well and wanted to shout “liar” at the woman but knew it was the pain talking. The next two hours passed in a blur of eye-watering, sweat-soaked pain. She barely registered the noise or cloying heat of the overfull waiting room. Finally, a nurse called them back. They followed her through the labyrinthine hallways lined with overflow patients on gurneys. Action film guy was where they’d left him. Given his hooded eyes, he’d finally gotten some pain meds, though he hadn’t turned down the volume on his phone.

Noah pulled her to the side as a technician pushing a man in a wheelchair came toward them. Through her haze of pain, Josie noticed the patient was Louis Fisher. His long hair hung loose around his shoulders. He wore a hospital gown. A blanket covered his legs. His face was pale and drawn. Recognition flickered in his eyes as they got closer.

“Detective,” he called. “Detective Quinn!”

The technician slowed as they passed but Noah kept his hand on Josie’s lower back, urging her forward. Over his shoulder, he told Fisher, “Excuse us. We can’t talk now.”

Then she and Noah were in one of the curtained cubicles in the treatment area. Josie stretched out on the gurney and waited. Another nurse appeared, asking all the same questions the first one had and doing absolutely nothing to quell Josie’s desire to throw any object she could reach at the woman’s head. Not that she was in any position to perform such feats of athleticism, even when the nurse started cutting Anya’s scrub top away so the medical staff could have a proper look at her shoulder.

Josie could tell by the way Noah’s face contorted that it looked as bad as it felt. The nurse remained cheery as ever which Josie would appreciate if she wasn’t entertaining violent fantasies. They helped her into a hospital gown. Noah asked about pain medication and the nurse told him the doctor would have to examine her first.

That doctor was Jacob Holmes.

For the first time since her fall, Josie let out a long, tortured groan. Given the look of displeasure on Holmes’s face, he wasn’t any happier to see her.

“It seems you’ve had a fall,” he said, moving stiffly toward her.

Josie calculated the time and trouble it would take to request another doctor and decided it wasn’t worth it. She needed relief from the pain now. Yesterday.

She only recoiled slightly when his fingers brushed the snaps of her gown. Behind him, one of Noah’s brows lifted. Not now, she mouthed.

“A possible—” Holmes parted the sleeve of the gown on Josie’s left side. “Oh yes, this is a shoulder dislocation.”

He didn’t touch her again, instead backing away without closing the snaps. He spoke to Noah instead of her. Muttering about X-rays and pain medication, muscle relaxers, sedation and a closed reduction. Josie didn’t care. She just wanted him out of the room.

When he finally left, Noah was at her side. “What’s going on? You know him?”

In fits and starts, she gave him the shortest version possible of what she and Gretchen had discovered earlier that night and how she’d witnessed him swipe blood off the arterial bleed patient’s mouth. The more she said, the more his face turned to stone, except for the small muscle tic near his jaw.

The curtain opened and a nurse pushed a cart inside. A laptop rested on top of it. To the side were vials of medication. “The doctor ordered a muscle relaxer and something for pain.”

Josie changed her mind about wanting to throw things at the woman’s head.