I nearly drop my medical bag when I see the man on the table. He’s unconscious, just like my patient downstairs, but worse. Way worse.
There’s a trail of red blood leading from the kitchen door all the way to the dining table they’ve laid the guy on. I start calling out orders like I’m in an episode of Chicago Med where the characters can’t so much as order a cup of coffee before work without having to save someone from dying.
The guy on the table isn’t a Reyes—not Latino either, I don’t think. He has hair the color of rust hanging down past a slightly darker unkempt beard. And he’s wearing a motorcycle jacket over a t-shirt that used to be white. Now it’s stained red.
“What am I looking at?” I ask, pulling on a pair of latex gloves to lift the tee.
Someone was thoughtful enough to stuff a rag over the wound to staunch the blood. Decent first step, but I have zero faith that whoever it was bothered to make sure the towel was clean, much less sanitize it as we would have in the ER.
I answer my own question when I lift the rag and find a hole below his rib cage. “A gunshot wound.”
I’ve been trying to be better about cursing since I started dating Jonathan. But several of them fall out of my mouth as I rummage through my bag for a needle to start an IV.
How is he still alive? The odds of surviving a torso shot without going directly to the hospital are extremely slim. And it’s been over an hour since Ant sent me that SOS text.
“How long has he been lying here?” I ask Ant, who’s just standing there watching me with a bemused smile like I really am starring in an episode of Chicago Med. “Why didn’t you bring me here first? He’s way more gravely injured!”
“He’s way more gravely injured!” Ant waggles his head and pitches up his voice to do his impression of me. And the rest of the gangsters gathered in the room fall out laughing.
“I don’t know this dude like that,” Ant answers after they’re all done with their belly laugh. “He’s the one who pulled his gun first and nearly got us all killed by them other Chinese. I don’t owe him shit. He’s lucky I brought you in here at all.”
We’d have to see if my surprise patient was truly lucky. I might have gotten here too late to save him. But even if I could convince Ant to take him to a hospital, which I knew from past experience, I could not—he might not make it even that short of a distance. If I had to guess how much blood he’d already lost, my wager would be somewhere between a lot and too much.
“Tell O-Blood to get in here. I need him on a bag.”
“Aw, not again!” O-Blood groans shortly after I’ve started the IV. He’s a large Latino guy with a big stomach and a real name I never bothered to learn. Everybody’s been calling him O-Blood ever since I taught him how to assist me in makeshift surgeries by offering up his own arm for blood donation.
“Just do it!”
I use my nurse voice, and no more complaining. O-Blood hurries over to the sink, washes his hands, and then reaches under the sink to grab a collection bag for the self-draw process.
But Ant shakes his head. “That’s fucked up. This MC dude ain’t a Reyes. We don’t know him like that.”
When this is all done, I’m going to have yet another talk with my little brother about the general value of human life. But for now, my number one priority is making sure this MC dude doesn’t leave me with all sorts of nightmares by bleeding out on my makeshift surgery table.
After sanitizing my hands the best I can, I toss the rag away and use saline solution to clean the wound site—
The unconscious patient suddenly surges up and grabs my wrist with a rough, callused hand. “The fuck you doing?”
I look up to find the biker, now sitting up on the kitchen table, angrily awake.
Sharp…everything about him is sharp. Sharp voice. Sharp nose underneath a sharp, crystal blue gaze that makes me shudder inside. Like I’ve tumbled into an ice-cold lake. And a monster has grabbed onto my wrist.
Then that monster pulls a gun out of his jacket.
And points it straight at me.
CHAPTER 4
My patient has a gun.
Having a weapon drawn on me by a patient was one of those ER nurse bucket list items I never wanted to check off.
But, in that moment, I tick that box off with a hard, fearful swallow.
He lets go of my wrist. But any relief I might have felt about that dies a quick death when he uses that hand to slide back the chamber, cocking it to discharge right in my face.