From the kitchen window, Eli said, “A marked car just pulled up. Female officer, going to the door.”
I closed my eyes and let my head fall back. “I coulda stayed in bed.”
The sound of automatic gunfire shot me to my feet. I made the side door and was outside before Eli finished his turn. Beast butted in close, sharing her speed and strength. Behind me, I heard the Kid shouting into his cell phone, “Officer down, Officer down! Automatic gunfire! Request backup and medic!” He started shouting the address as I rounded the house.
I didn’t bother with the wrought-iron gate. There wasn’t time. I leaped, grabbed the horizontal bar to the side of the fleur-de-lis at the gate top, and vaulted over, landing in a crouch. Behind me, Eli cursed and rattled the gate lock. Another burst of gunfire erupted from across the street.
I leaned into the side of the house and looked around the corner. The officer was lying in the street, bloody, but crawling for the protection of her unit. She had her service weapon in one hand and from her body came the sound of a steady beep—the “officer in trouble” alarm and GPS that cops pressed when they were in danger. Already I could hear sirens from all around.
I looked up at the window where we had spotted the surveillance and saw the glass was busted out. The barrel of a weapon was trained down, directly at the cop. With no thought at all, I raced across the street, seeing the barrel rise toward me. And realized that was exactly what the shooter had been trying for—me in the line of fire.
Time did that weird slow-down thing that happened often when I was in danger of getting dead. I jerked my body left, then right, the barrel in the window following. Behind me I heard the distinctive sound of a nine-mil as Eli laid down cover fire. Puny shots in the aftermath of the automatic weapon fire.
The shooter fired again, rounds hitting the street just behind me. I dove for the cop, grabbed her as I landed, and rolled her behind the car. I lay atop her as the cop car was riddled with bullets. What hearing I had was lost to the concussive battering.
NOPD units started to arrive, sirens and lights flashing. A car swerved up to me and screeched to a halt. Suddenly I was surrounded by three cops, all with their weapons pointed at me. “Not me!” I screamed and pointed, deafened. “The window!”
Two cops fell, hit by the shooter before they could take cover. One was dead before he hit the street, the back of his head gone. The unwounded cop pulled him and the other officer out of the line of fire. He started doing CPR on the dead guy. I rolled off the female officer and applied pressure to the bloody place in her left shoulder. The blood was pouring, not spurting, but no telling what was happening inside her.
More cop cars arrived. “Around back!” the officer shouted, and pointed at the house. “Seal off the streets!”
“Got him!” someone screamed. “Down on your knees! Down on your knees. Hands behind your head!”
Eli. They had Eli. Cops in a panic, three of their own down. “He’s with me!” I shouted.
The cop beneath me added her voice to mine. “Not him! Not him! The house.” She pointed, and coughed blood. I knew instantly what that meant. A round had hit a lung. The lung was collapsing and her chest cavity was filling up with blood. The officer was drowning in her own blood. My emergency medical training was years old, but it came back to me now with absolute clarity.
I angled the cop against the cruiser door. Looked up into the eyes of a paramedic who dropped to his knees beside me. “GSW,” I said. “Left lung. Probable hemothorax.”
The medic stuck his ear pieces in and listened to her chest with his stethoscope. “Yeah. Lung is down,” he said, already cutting through her uniform shirt. “We have to get her transferred stat.” He started removing the Kevlar vest that hadn’t protected the officer. The bullet had gone in just above the vest at a downward angle.
The cop coughed and sucked blood and coughed again. Blood splattered over all of us. She was wearing a T-shirt under the vest. It was scarlet and sopping. I felt her heart stutter under my hands. If my hearing hadn’t been compromised by the concussive gunfire, I knew I could have heard the heart in distress. Beast’s hearing is that good, even over the sirens squalling.
“She needs a chest tube. She won’t make it to the hospital,” I said. Paramedics weren’t certified to insert chest tubes in the field. Only doctors could do that. Meaning that this cop was dead. I looked at her for the first time. She was brown haired, brown-but-pasty-skinned, brown eyed. Maybe Latina. Maybe one of the mixed races found so commonly in the Deep South. And she was seeing her death, her eyes wide and panicked and knowing.
With a pair of scissors, the paramedic cut her T-shirt open. The wound was bad.
Eli dropped to his knees beside me. Eli. He was a Ranger. Rangers have to do all sorts of things in the field. Like save one another, or themselves. I asked the paramedic, “If you were to stick a large bore needle into her chest beneath her left arm, well around her chest wall from the bleeding bullet hole, where exactly would you stick it?”
The paramedic looked back and forth between us, understanding what I was asking. He couldn’t help her, but a bystander could. “I’d stick it right here.” He touched the cop’s skin. It was icy, sweating. She was going into shock.
I slapped her face, and she looked at me, pulling back from the brink. “We can try to save you, or we can be smart and avoid a lawsuit and let you die. You want us to try to save you? Nod once for yes.”
The cop nodded once, then again, and again. Coughing. Blood going everywhere.
Eli handed me an oversized Betadine swab. I swiped her chest at the site the paramedic had pointed to. Eli tore a paper-and-plastic package and removed the plastic top from a needle. It looked like a ten-penny nail with a hole bored through. It was huge. There wasn’t time for gloves or better cleaning. There wasn’t time for anything.
Eli’s fingers pushed between two of the cop’s ribs, pressing into the . . . intercostal space. I remembered the word. Useless now, that memory. He jammed the needle through the flesh. The injured cop didn’t even flinch. Blood flushed through the needle end and out into the street. Eli secured the needle in place with a wad of gauze and taped it down.
I looked at him and said, “Get outta here.” He understood. So did the paramedic and the cops around us. Civilians don’t do stuff like this. The official types all looked away. Eli grabbed a blue absorbent pad, stood, and walked away, head down, wiping his hands and hiding the blood all at once. He moved down the street away from my house, away from the shooting.
I looked at the cop and saw her badge. Her name was Officer Swelling. She was maybe twenty-five. Was wearing a wedding ring. She took a breath and exhaled, the sound of air gargling and thick, her eyes on me. She didn’t cough, but it was a near thing. She mouthed the words, Thank you. I shrugged at her and she added, her words a whisper, “Who was that masked man?”
I laughed. So did Swelling, as well as she was able. Moments later, the cop was inside an ambulance, hooked up to fluids and being transported down the street toward the nearest hospital. A second ambulance was departing with the other injured cop. The coroner was standing over the third one. The paramedics were still doing CPR but everyone knew it was just a formality. The officer was familiar, but I couldn’t think of his name at the moment. A face I’d seen at NOPD or on a scene. An older guy, midfifties, one who’d eaten one too many beignets and sipped one too many sugared drinks. White guy. Dead white guy.
I looked up at the broken window pane where the shots had come from. Other panes were busted out from where Eli had fired back. I looked down at myself. I was covered in sticky, drying blood. I opened and closed my hands; the blood was tacky and cold in the warm air.
I had blood on my hands. Again. Maybe this time I should have felt good about it, good because I’d maybe saved an officer’s life. But I had a feeling that Swelling would be uninjured and going about her life just fine had I not lived across the street from the house.