Page 89 of Justice for Francesca

Tripoli

Through the window, he watched Francesca stand to face her father. When her father raised his gun to her, Tripoli was out of time. He hoped his aim was as good as it used to be. Accounting for going through the glass window, he let the shot fly. There was a brief echo amongst the breaking glass, and he registered Oisin falling to the ground, but all of his focus was on Francesca’s body snapping back, hitting the chair, and then hitting the floor.

“Cosmos!” he yelled. “Ambulance!”

Tripoli ripped the hood from his head and dashed through the door, ignoring the bodies of Stella Ortiz and Oisin McCabe. Sliding to his knees at Francesca’s side, he threw the chair out of his way and immediately began to pull her shirt and rip it open to get at the wound. Using his hood, he immediately placed pressure on the wound. As gently as he could, he tipped her shoulder to see if the bullet had exited her body, but it hadn’t.

“Francesca! Can you hear me? Open your eyes, sweetheart!”

Cosmos skidded into the room, already on the phone.

“No exit wound. Unconscious. She has a pulse, but it’s weak. We’ve got minutes, Cosmos!”

“They’re on their way from the other side of the runway. Five minutes out.”

Lobo and Steel came into the room, her brothers right behind them. Cosmos’ men stood outside the office, looking on through the shattered windows. “What can we do?” Lobo asked.

“Get out of here. There are going to be cops crawling all over this place in moments. You can’t do anything more for her.” Tripoli spared a glance up at the two men. “Thank you. I owe you.”

“Anything for Fleur,” Lobo said with a smile. “Good luck.”

The two men passed through the waiting men and faded into the shadows.

The muted sounds of sirens began in the distance.

“Shit! I need to stop the bleeding,” Tripoli voiced. “Find me a first aid kit, paper towels, alcohol, anything that I can use to sanitize and pack it with.”

Fionn said, “The plane will have a first aid kit. I’m on it.”

Cosmos ordered his men to the hangar. “There will be first aid kits stationed in several places. Go find them.”

Rory started rifling through all the desk drawers for anything usable.

Fionn came flying back into the room with a small red backpack and a first aid kit. “Bag is a trauma kit.”

Cosmos dropped onto his knees on the other side of Francesca, his pants already soaking up the blood seeping from her body. “Let me hold the pressure while you get ready. I got her.”

One of Cosmos’ men came back in with another first aid kit and a trauma kit that he’d found over a workbench. Another ofhis men came back with a pile of shop towels he found in a cabinet.

Tripoli’s hands were steady, but inside, he was quaking. If she got through this, she was going inside a bulletproof vest and eight feet of bubble wrap. Permanently. He opened the trauma kit and grabbed the clotting gauze. He ripped open the bag. “Okay, pull up,” he ordered Cosmos. “Get ready to put pressure back on.”

Cosmos lifted up the bloodied balaclava, and Tripoli dumped the contents into the wound. Cosmos immediately reapplied pressure as Tripoli went for a second bag.

The sirens were loud now, and EMTs came running into the room just as Tripoli finished dumping the second bag of combat gauze. Cruz followed quickly on their heels. “I told you to wait for me,” he grumbled. “How bad?”

“Bad,” Tripoli whispered. “Too close to her heart. If I hadn’t gotten the shot off when I did to Oisin, he would have put it in her head. As it was, I was too slow. He pulled the trigger at almost the same moment, and it ended up in her chest.”

Two additional EMTs were looking over Stella and Oisin, but both were beyond help. “We need you to clear this room, all of you,” Cruz ordered. The men started to leave, the three brothers fading out first. They couldn’t afford to be recognized, and there was nothing they could do anymore. Cosmos’ men huddled at the hangar door but made no move to leave beyond that.

Tripoli was still on his knees next to Francesca. “Don’t you leave me, Francesca! You hear me? You die on me, and I’ll call you Frankie every fucking day, a hundred times a day, even though you’re not here to hear it!”

Cosmos tried to pull him up by the arm, but Tripoli shrugged him off. An EMT turned to him. “Sir, we need you to back up.”

“I’m a medic. Navy. And I’m not leaving her.”

“You can’t work on her anymore, sir. You’ve done what you can. You need to leave it to us now.”

A bang. A flash. Smoke. The jungle. Tripoli shook his head and crawled toward Mayhem, but when he arrived at the body, it wasn’t Mayhem. It was Francesca. What the hell was she doing in Raider gear? Why was she in the jungle? It didn’t make sense. He noticed the hole in her chest, noticed it was pouring blood, and he could see her heart pumping slower and slower through the wound. The edges of the wound were growing, allowing more and more blood to pour out. He heard voices calling to him, but he refused to look away from Francesca.

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