Page 63 of Running Scared
Dean called up the number, which had been lasered into his brain as he’d tried to do calculations on grains of the drug versus Marcus’s body weight.When he said it, Bailey let out a breath.
“Close,” he said.“That was as close to an OD as I’d ever want to give.”
“His leg’s a mess,” Dean said, keeping his eyes shut.He didn’t want to see the blood on his own hands.“Had to… feel for arteries.Couldn’t penetrate arteries with bone shards.”
Bailey grunted.“And you didn’t want your friend to suffer,” he said softly.
“Tell me he’ll be all right.”Dean wasn’t too proud to beg.
“We’ll get him to the hospital in Juarez, and you and Bird too,” Bailey said, and the brief, dry touch of his lips on Dean’s forehead was more reassuring than anything he could recall.Dean felt consciousness slipping away again, and he tried to fight it.Bailey was here.He had something important to tell Bailey, and he couldn’t let it wait.Not after the last five days….
“Bailey….”he whispered.
“Shh, Dean.Not going anywhere.”
“Love you.”He sighed, and then he fell off the ledge into the blissful dark.
MAYBE ITwas the five days out of the ER.Maybe it was the time with Dean’s family.But Bailey could actuallyfeelhis doctor cloak settling on his shoulders once he knew Dean was alive.
Before that, he was a mess.
It didn’t help that in circling the area where the cell phones had last pinged they’d seen the burnt-out husk of a Jeep with two still-smoking bodies in the front seat.Bailey wasn’t sure what noise he’d made, but it probably hadn’t been human, because Reg had grabbed his hand, and Anthony had set about coldly cataloging all the reasons the two bodies in the Jeep couldn’t be Dean and Marcus.
“One of those guys is enormous, and the other is much, much smaller.We’re looking for two five foot nine or ten guys whodon’twear wool in the desert, and these guys are probably six five and five three.”
Reg squinted at him as he aimed his field glasses through the plane’s portal.“Those arereally goodfield glasses.”
“Yeah, well, my dad got them when he was in the Bureau,” Anthony said, still peering through them.
Bailey was more interested in how he knew the identity of his would-be assassins.“How do you know—”
“Purple,” Anthony said promptly.“One of those guys is wearing a purple wool suit in July in the desert—wool doesn’t combust like cotton, and I can see a wool fedora still smoldering from here.”
“So, uhm, what do you think happened?”he asked, although he had a pretty good idea.
“Oh, they were hit by an IED of some sort,” Anthony said, with the surety of somebody who made munitions and ordinance his livelihood.“In fact,” he murmured, about a minute later, “I’d bet they were hit by antiaircraft fire that went through the tail section of that planeright there.”
“Oh my God,” Bailey said.“Oh my God.Oh my God.Dean!”
He didn’t remember much, not of the desert landing, nor of their two pilots disembarking.In fact, everything was a sweaty, panicky blur until Glen Echo clamberedbackinto the landed twin-engine and shook him and Reg by the shoulder.
“They’re alive, Doc—but they need you.”
ONCE BAILEYhad confirmed Dean was alive but unconscious, he turned his attention to Marcus’s nightmare of a leg.
“Oh God,” said Damien, their other pilot, taking a look over Bailey’s shoulder.“Those are the fucking worst.”
Bailey glanced at him.“You have experience with these?”
“Both as the recipient and as someone who’s nursed a fellow sufferer,” Damien said grimly.“The good news is, we can get this man to a hospital in less than five hours, and that wasnotthe case for meorour friend.”
“Spencer’s was grosser,” Glen said clinically.“I’ll go get the gurney.”
Bailey barely suppressed a snort of laughter.He guessed the company billing wasn’t bullshit—these guysweresearch and rescue, which meant as first responders, not much shook them, not even the giant knot on Dean’s temple or the fact that the pilot probably had a cracked skull and had bruised every organ known to medical science.
Bailey helped Damien and Anthony position Marcus for an easier transport to the gurney.“How was your friend’s injury grosser?”he asked, genuinely curious.
“He got his falling out of a helicopter into a flood,” Damien said.“By the time we got to him, it had been festering in a flood for twelve hours.It was like, one dump of antibiotics away from gangrene.”
