High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

I needed a trauma team

with surgeons.

Her breathing was rapid and shallow. I took her pulse. Weak, thready. Classic shock symptoms. She was bleeding out.

“Stay with me, Lindsey. I love you. Stay awake.”

She stared at me, tried and failed to speak while I shakily dialed 911 on my iPhone, gave our location, my badge number from memory, and called for help.

“My wife has been shot. She’s badly wounded.”

Fire Station Four, with a paramedic unit, was only five blocks away. I heard the sirens from McDowell. It took somewhere between forever and eternity for the first emergency lights to appear on First Avenue.

The memory of Robin dying in my arms was banging in my vision. I couldn’t let it happen again.

Couldn’t.

“Keep breathing, baby. In and out.”

She nodded.

“Hold my hands tight.” She did, but her strength was fading.

Then her eyes closed.

Stripping off the blazer, I carefully rolled her to one side and used it as a makeshift dressing against her back. I wouldn’t let the word enter my mind: useless.

Firefighters and cops were arriving. Red and blue lights bounced off the wall, doors opened and closed, and uniforms approached. I moved aside and let them work, giving a description of the shooter to an officer who broadcast it on her portable radio. A helicopter appeared overhead and blasted us with white light.

More sirens were approaching from the distance.

Chapter Thirteen

St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Level One Trauma Center, was half a mile away.

An hour later, Lindsey was still in surgery. “Critical condition.” That’s all a doctor had told me as I was sent into in a long, largely empty waiting room with a television at one end bolted near the ceiling. A Hispanic family, mother and three small children, sat near it, staring silently.

God didn’t owe me anything. That didn’t stop me from praying for Lindsey.

A man came in to have me sign paperwork as Lindsey’s next of kin. I had her Social Security number memorized. He seemed amazed that we had insurance. I remembered when St. Joe’s was a hospital for the elite. Now most of the patients must have been on Medicaid or nothing.

It wasn’t even connected to the Catholic Church anymore. After an abortion was performed to save the life of the mother, the bishop retaliated by cutting off church ties that went back to 1895. Now the local wags called it Mister Joe’s and the moneyed Anglos had long abandoned it for Mayo. But it still was one of the best hospitals in the Southwest.

After the doctor left, it was quiet except for the television and a page for “Trauma Team Two.” I assumed that “Trauma Team One” was busy with Lindsey.

My face was still burning from the scratches. My left cheek and eye felt swollen from where the woman’s running shoe had connected. I didn’t want to look in a mirror.

I was bargaining with God like a panicky twelve-year-old, staring at nothing, when Phoenix Police Sergeant Kate Vare strode in, wearing a stylish short leather jacket and carrying an expensive leather portfolio.

She sat next to me. The butt of her Glock protruded from the jacket.

How I wished Lindsey had taken her Glock instead of a pack of cigarettes for that walk.

“I’m sorry, Mapstone.”

It was the most human thing she had ever said to me.

Vare and I were once rivals, or at least she saw it that way when I worked for Peralta and she was a cold-case expert for Phoenix P.D. But the new chief had reorganized the department and now she was a night homicide detective. Otherwise, she looked the same: petite, ash-blond hair in a short bob, tightly wound.