“Alex, I’m at the hospital—”
I suddenly made a connection, and my heart skipped the next beat. “Is Nana there?”
“It’s not Nana,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to call. Kayla Coles was just admitted to St. Anthony’s. She’s here in the ER.”
“Kayla?” I said, my voice rising. “What’s going on? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know, Alex. We don’t know enough yet. It’s not a good situation though.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected, or the one I wanted to hear.
“Annie, what happened? Can you tell me that much?”
“It’s hard to know exactly. What’s certain is that someone attacked Kayla.”
“Who?” I practically shouted into the phone, feeling horrible, as though I already knew the answer to my own question.
Damon stepped halfway into the hall and stared at me, his eyes wide and scared. It was a look I’d seen far too many times in our house.
“All I can tell you is that she was stabbed with a knife. Twice, Alex. She’s alive.”
Stabbed? My mind screamed the word, but I held it in. I swallowed hard. But she’s alive.
“Alex, I’m not supposed to talk about this over the phone. You should get down here to the hospital as soon as you can. Can you come right now?”
“I’m on my way.”
Chapter 75
NANA WAS STILL AT HER CLASS, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to get Naomi Harris from next door over to stay with the kids. I jumped into my car and sped the whole way. A siren would have helped.
The drive to the hospital was fast; that’s all I really remember about it, and that Kayla was on my mind the whole way. When I pulled up outside the emergency room, her car was parked under the canopy by the entrance.
The driver’s door hung open, and as I ran past and looked inside, I saw blood on the front seat. Jesus, she drove herself here! Somehow, she got away from him.
The waiting room was crowded, as it always is at St. Anthony’s. There was a line of forlorn, raggedy-looking people at the front desk. The walking wounded and their friends and relations. Maria had been pronounced dead here.
“Sir, you can’t—”
But I was already sliding through the doors to the treatment area before they could close. Once inside, I saw it was another very busy night at St. Tony’s. Paramedics were wheeling gurneys; doctors, nurses, and patients crisscrossed every which way around me.
A young male lay on a cot with a gash in his hairline, leaking blood onto his forehead. “Am I gonna die?” he kept asking everybody who passed.
“No, you’ll be fine,” I told him, since nobody else was stopping to talk to him. “You’re all right, son.”
Where was Kayla, though? Everything was moving way too fast. I couldn’t find anyone to ask about her. Then I heard a voice call out my name.
“Alex, over here!”
Annie was waving to me from down the hall. When I reached her, she took my arm and ushered me into a trauma room—a bay with two beds partitioned by a green plastic curtain.
Several medical personnel stood in a horseshoe around the bed. Their hands were moving quickly, many of them in bloodstained gloves.
Other hospital people came and went, pushing past me as if I weren’t even there.
That meant Kayla was alive. I assumed that the goal here would be to stabilize her if possible, then get her to the operating room.
I craned my neck to see as much as I could, and then I saw Kayla. She had a mask over her mouth and nose. Someone was just lifting a red-soaked compress from her belly where they had already cut her shirt away.