The EMT’s name was Charles, and he liked people to call him that, because even though he thought he looked nothing at all like a Charles, in his opinion he looked even less like a Charlie or a Chuck. This call was about as good as it got if you were into EMT rush, and he knew it was going to stay with him a long while if they saved this chick’s life—and if the shooters, wherever they were, didn’t whack him, too. When he arrived, there were two people down. Cops everywhere, a SWAT team en route. A chase for some Escalade. Some little girl—near catatonic—being walked away from the shitstorm by a couple of moms pulled straight from a TV commercial for laundry detergent. It just didn’t get better than this.
When he’d gotten to the teen on the stoop, a woman—the victim’s mom, he’d assumed at first, until a cop had told him otherwise—had already taken off her coat and wrapped it like a blanket around the girl to try and keep her warm. That had been smart and he’d been impressed. She’d been pressing a folded hand towel against the hole in the victim’s side, holding it down as hard as she could when he and his partner, Ian, had run up the walkway to the front porch. The towel was a robin’s-egg blue, and the monogrammed C was white. He saw that the teenager’s blood had seeped through the layers of plush cotton the moment they lifted off the woman’s jacket. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were rising, as her body tried to compensate. But a stomach wound in battle? For better or worse—and, in the old days, usually worse—you could live a long time. What he couldn’t tell from where the bullet had entered was whether it was in the stomach or the intestines or the liver. Given the blood, he guessed liver. He threw on a non-rebreather mask to get as much oxygen transport as he could from her diminished blood volume.
And then there was this: the spine. Even if this chick lived, for all he knew the bullet had severed the spine, and she’d be left paralyzed.
Still, thank God that woman had kept her warm and sacrificed a good hand towel.
While he had gone for the girl, Ian had beelined for the guy whose body was lying half in and half out of the doorway. It was holding open the storm door, the window blown out, and at first the two EMTs could only see the victim’s legs. But Ian had joined Charles almost instantly to help with the girl, because the dude was long dead. Probably killed in a heartbeat. The poor son-of-a-bitch’s head was half gone, and so he wasn’t their problem: they weren’t supposed to bother with or even transport the dead.
So their focus was only on the girl. Stabilize her and get going.
Which they did. Charles decided pretty quickly that she was going to live. Pulse was elevated, skin was clammy. May have lost a freakish amount of blood. But he’d seen a lot worse.
As they were starting across the lawn with her, a couple of cops helping Ian and him carry the stretcher and the IV and the oxygen tank to the ambulance, they passed the woman, and he said, “I think you saved her life. Nicely done.”
The woman nodded. She looked about as white as he’d expect a person to look after pressing one of your monogrammed hand towels on a bullet wound that must have been a fucking spigot when she started. When they got to the ambulance and she was no longer in earshot, Ian whispered to him, “Buddy, that was her husband back there. The one with, like, only half a head.”
He nodded. The woman, he thought, must have really loved this chick they were bringing to the hospital. Maybe the cop was mistaken when he’d said the victim wasn’t her daughter. She had to be. Had. To. Be. To keep this one alive with her husband’s corpse right there? That was love, man. That was love.
Alexandra
The first time I woke up, I knew I was in hospital room. I didn’t know if it was hospital in jail, but I didn’t think so. It seemed nice, and there were no handcuffs on me. There was no police guy around. It was, I guessed, early in the morning. I could see the sky growing light outside the window. I had tubes going into my arms, and I felt an ache in my side. I thought of my mother and my grandmother, and I thought of the hospital in Yerevan. I thought of all the time I had spent in that hospital. Then I fell back into drug sleep. I don’t remember a single dream from those days. Not one.
…
It was third or fourth time I woke up that they brought in police guys to ask me questions. I didn’t trust them, but I was done fighting. And there was no way I could run. There was no place for me to go. I asked them about Richard, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Kept changing subject.
They told me I was going to live and that Yulian and Konstantin were in jail. They were not sure where the guys they had sent to kill me were, which did not make me feel very safe. But they said they would find them or they had already left the country, and either way I would be okay. Maybe. I was so weary I told them whole story. By then, I might have told them whole story even if Yulian and Konstantin weren’t in jail. I told them everything I have told you. One of the police guys looked like a grandfather. So many wrinkles on his face. So many pouches. Other one was woman with nice eyes who told me I could call her Patricia. They both asked me lots of questions. They said they wanted me to tell my story in a courtroom, and that was the best thing I could ever do for Crystal and Sonja and girls like us. So I said I would do that, too.