Page 14 of Heston
Heston wasn’t going to argue. The infamous pink mist from a headshot usually meant instant death. Not this time. “Well, they missed. Didn’t hit anything vital,” he told his boss calmly. The kinetic energy behind the round that grazed her skull had probably been enough to knock her out, but it hadn’t shattered the bone, and skull bones were hard. Kelsey might just pull through this nightmare after all. The pink mist Alex was positive he’d seen might be nothing more than the fact that head wounds bled like crazy. Or the panic of seeing his wife shot amplified and distorted what he’d thought he’d seen. That’d be enough to fry a man’s logic card.
Heston knew what a headshot looked like, and this wasn’t it. This was a graze, pure and simple. No longer bleeding. No blood seeping around it whatsoever. Kelsey’s scalp, along the length of the two-inch-long, one-inch-wide burn just above her left ear, was a whitish line of frayed, gray flesh. Not a hint of pink, signifying the wound had been washed clean, maybe too clean, by her time in the river. A damned cold river. For the first time, Heston hoped the river had been frigid enough to work the miracle she desperately needed.
Snow started falling again, dropping like wet, soggy spitballs through the tree branches overhead. Not the least bit pretty. Not here. Not now. Heston wished it’d quit.
“H-heat,” Alex stuttered, fumbling through the many flaps and pockets of the bag at his side. “She’s not warm enough. I need to get her w-warmer. Help me, damn it!”
Heston shot a cursory glance at Alex just as the hefty ‘whump, whump, whump’ of Decker’s helo sounded overhead. Alex was in shock. His lips were thin and his eyes were bleak. Too bleak. He had to know how bad the odds for Kelsey were. But the last thing Heston needed was Alex giving up on his wife.
“Stats,” he asked Asher at the same time Deck’s strong voice came through their earbuds. “At your location, boys. Touching down. Keep my kids alive, gawddamn it!”
By then, Asher had an IV line inserted into the back of Kelsey’s right hand, an automatically inflating pressure cuff on her right biceps, and a stethoscope plugged into his ears while he listened to her heart.
“Thready heart rate, Heston,” he reported quietly. “Damned low BP. Eighty-eight over fifty-one.” He tipped back on his haunches and squeezed the bag of saline hanging off the portable metal stand he’d retrieved from his IFAK. “She’s dehydrated so I’m pushing more fluids. Okay, Boss?”
“Yeah. Okay. Good,” Alex rasped. He’d stopped tearing his bag apart, but the man was clearly losing it, and Heston doubted he had what Kelsey needed in that bag anyway. Didn’t even look like his.
“I’m bringing two gurneys. Get my friends ready to travel,” Decker advised calmly from the helo’s cockpit. “University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle is on stand-by to receive.”
Heston’s eyes blurred at the steadfast strength and sacrifice of the nation’s first responders, men and women like Decker. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly medical professionals jumped to assist complete strangers. How damned loyal they were to people they’d never met. Or how much Decker loved his boss and his boss’s pretty little wife.
“I couldn’t get her warm,” Alex whispered. Which wasn’t exactly true, not as close as they still were to the burning rubble. But Kelsey needed blood and a trauma team more than she needed warmth. And Alex was in bad shape, too.
“Copy that. Two patients. Both with gunshot wounds. But Deck…” he murmured as quietly as he could. “Seattle’s not going to be close enough.”
“Understood. Requesting a facility closer to this LZ, right gawddamned now.”
“Copy that. We’re ready for evac.”
“Yup. I see you now.”
Heston looked up as Deck cleared the front end of what was left of the trailer, with two portable gurneys on his shoulder and barking orders into his cell phone. When he caught sight of everyone, he stuffed his cell into a pocket and ran straight for Alex. He dropped the gurneys near Asher, then took careful hold of Alex, and pulled him to his feet. “Boss. I’m here. Let’s get you and Kelsey safely out of here.”
“Deck? You came? You came for… for Kelsey?”
“You bet I came, Boss. For you and Kels, I’ll walk through fire. Wouldn’t be anywhere else but here now, would I? Can you walk? I brought gurneys if you’re—”
“I don’t need your help!” Alex yelled. “Help her! Help my wife, damn it! Save her, not me!”
Gently as all get out, London intervened, grabbed hold of Alex by his elbow, and told him, “Hi, Alex. You don’t know me but I’m an old friend of Heston’s. Maybe he told you about me, London Wilde? No matter if he didn’t. That’s not important, but Kelsey is. Listen, I came all this way to rescue you and your wife, and I’ve done the best I can, but Deck’s right. You’re bleeding. You, sir, need to be seen by a doctor, same as your wife. Kelsey, right? You love her, don’t you?”
Wordless, probably for the first time in his life, or maybe because he was as smitten by London’s charm as Heston still was, Alex merely stared at her and nodded.
“Well then, let’s get out of these professionals’ way, shall we? They know what they’re doing, Alex, and I trust them. While they wrap Kelsey in those toasty heated blankets” —she nailed Heston with a damned sharp eyebrow, spurring him to do just what London said he’d do— “and on her way to the nearest hospital, you’re coming with me.”
“But I… I…”
“But you’ve done all you can, Alex. Let’s watch these guys get her loaded, so we can get Kelsey out of here as quickly as possible, okay?”
“Yeah,” he answered more calmly. “That’s what I want. Her out of here. Right away. Yeah. That.”
“Well good, because that’s what these men are doing.”
Alex seemed appeased. At least pacified for the moment. Hurriedly, Heston jerked the pre-warmed, aluminum-wrapped blankets from inside the still folded gurneys. He’d never seen his take-charge boss this disoriented or looking so lost before. By the time Heston had a neck brace on Kelsey and had her wrapped up tight in the warm blankets, London had draped another heated blanket over Alex’s shoulders. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Kelsey, not once, and he was every bit as pale as she was.
“She’s ready to move,” Heston told Asher and Decker.
“Be careful!” Alex snapped when they crouched in tandem and gently lifted Kelsey off the cold ground and settled her onto the gurney. “Don’t you dare hurt her!”
