Shit. Her intruder had brought a gun and all she had was a lousy baseball bat. Somebody really wanted her – or maybe Cole? – dead.
Suddenly from the doorway, she saw a bulky shadow fling itself on the man with the gun. A loud grunt, a groan, and the discharge of a weapon. She stood cautiously, bat raised, and watched the two figures grappling on the floor, a tumbling of arms and legs and desperate grabbing for the gun.
Getting as close to the fighting men as she dared, she poised to slam the bat into the man’s head – God help her if she hit the wrong one.
While she hesitated, the gun discharged with another quiet pop and one figure went lax.
The other person snatched up the weapon and ran out the door. She heard him tromping noisily down the stairs.
Frankie reached the inert figure.
“Cole! Oh my God!” The ex-con lay unmoving on the bedroom floor, a red circle blooming steadily on his chest and dripping onto the hardwood floor.
Chapter 43
Frankie heard feet thundering all the way up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom, accompanied by Cruz shouting and cursing.
“Thank God, thank God,” she mumbled, tossing the baseball bat on the bed and bending over Cole’s body.
“Why’s the damn front door open? What’s hap – ” Cruz stopped in the doorway, taking in the bloody scene, the evidence of a struggle, the unconscious – or dead – body lying on the floor.
For a split second, his heart had stopped, his mind frozen with fear. It wasn’t Frankie’s blood.
“Get my medical bag downstairs by the entry door,” Frankie snapped, not looking up as she applied pressure to the wound high on the left side of Cole Hansen’s chest.
Cruz blinked once, spun around, and returned seconds later with the bag.
“Take my place,” she ordered, her pale, mobile face cool as ice, hard as a slab of granite. She hurriedly washed her hands in the bathroom while he, woozy and light-headed, maintained pressure on the already blood-sodden towel.
Kneeling beside him, she opened the medical kit and snapped on latex gloves. She pushed him back and lifted the towel. The wound oozed steadily. “Good, no spurting. I don’t think he hit an artery. Maybe, if we’re lucky, no major organs were damaged either.” She frowned, thinking. “Although I don’t like how close the bullet is to the heart.”
He exploded. “What the hell is going on? Why haven’t you called 911?” He knew the emergency responders would’ve already been on scene if she’d called them first. But she hadn’t.
She’d called him, and all she’d said when he picked up his cell phone was, “Emergency. My house STAT!”
When he began to ask questions, she’d simply yelled, “Effing get here,” and dropped her phone. He could hear her muffled words through the connection while he dressed and raced across town – a twenty-minute because he floored it. No freeway traffic this hour of the morning.
Sometimes Frankie’s words were soft and pleading – “Come on, hang in there” – often shrewish – “Wake up, you mother-effing idiot!”
Even in a crisis she censored her swearing. The discovery was a paradox that almost made him smile. The proper Dr. Jones cursing like a sailor while simultaneously curbing her coarse language. Wryly, he reminded himself there was nothing to smile about.
“Why didn’t you call 911?” he repeated as she poured an orange liquid over Cole Hansen’s shoulder and probed the wound with her gloved fingers as delicately and gentle as a mother testing a child’s splintered palm.
Her eyes were closed as if, Helen-Keller-like, she could learn more by touch than sight. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied after a moment. “If I called 911, we’d have at least four to six emergency technicians here, fussing around Cole.” She opened one eye. “I’m an MD. Don’t you know I can handle this?”
“Oh.” He sat back on his heels, then narrowed his eyes, taking in her still one-opened and very steely eye. She lifted the other brow, giving her face an almost comical look.
He gestured toward the patient, who groaned softly. Good, the jackass wasn’t dead. “And I suppose the bullet wound – if he should live, mind you – will go unreported?”
Frankie sighed deeply as she reached for a scalpel. “See that bottle on the dresser? Grab it for me.”
Cruz grabbed the bottle. Vodka? In her bedroom? But he wasn’t going to question her when she was wielding a surgical knife about.
She doused her instruments and the wound with the vodka and cut an X-incision around the entry point, which caused a spurt of bleeding. “Staunch that,” she ordered.
While he daubed the wound with sterile gauze from the kit, she deftly probed with forceps in the open, bloody wound until she pulled something out with a cry of triumph. “Ha, got you, you little bugger!”