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The trauma room door opened.
“Where you eat...”
A lone figure slipped in. An older man dressed in slacks and a cardigan.
“Who you’re fucking...”
The lone figure crept forward.
“I know everything—”
The newcomer’s arm snaked around the gunman’s neck, his surprisingly large bicep bulging against the gunman’s throat.
Caught so off-guard, the gunman’s eyes flared wide as he dropped his gun. He flailed, but it didn’t last long. Within seconds, his eyes rolled back, and he flopped, unconscious, in the newcomer’s arms.
I kept up compressions, but something wasn’t right here. One lone officer? And where was his uniform?
“Who are you?” I asked as he lowered the gunman onto the floor, face-first, and secured his wrists in restraints behind his back.
“Off-duty police officer, Doctor,” he said. “I happened to be in the building.”
I nodded as I held out my hands to Raven and she placed the defibrillator paddles in them.
The threat had been neutralized, but I still had a job to do.
“Thank you,” I said to the officer, then turned my attention back to my patient for another round of compressions and then another.
The officer slung the gunman over his shoulder and carried him out of the room.
“Push another milligram of epinephrine, Tom,” I instructed.
He looked at me, hesitated, then nodded. But I knew that look. “Why bother?” it asked.
“Because I have to,”I answered to no one in particular and kept going.
But each time I paused to assess, the result was the same.
No heartbeat.
I glanced up at the clock. Twenty-five minutes had passed since we’d started CPR.
I’d lost.
Death had won.
Fuck.
I stopped compressions but left my hands against the patient’s chest. I always did that, like maybe all the high-tech equipment was wrong and I’d feel his heart beating all on its own.
But the equipment wasn’t wrong.
Bloody hell.
It felt like a blow, a solid punch to my solar plexus, making it just a little harder to breathe.
“Time of death, eleven-oh-five PM,” I called out, then stepped back, my cool exterior carefully intact.
“Tom, could you please contact the mortuary affairs team?” I asked as I yanked off my blood-soaked gloves and tossed them in the rubbish bin, fighting the urge to kick the can across the room.
