M.L. Gamble - Trust With Your Life

Thanks to her training, all the procedures for keeping herself safe kicked in together in her head. She continued past the accident for twenty yards, leaving room for the cops and ambulances, and parked cleanly off the road. She was directly in front of a call box, right under a light. While waiting for the operator to answer, she removed her dark windbreaker to reveal a more easily seen white T-shirt. Molly noted more skid marks and a flattened safety fence lying on its back just ahead of her and glanced down the steep hillside.

Imagining another night’s vehicular violence gave her a chill, but she remained cool and gave the necessary information to the operator, whose sole responsibility was to communicate with motorists in trouble. A minute later, she hung up and grabbed two blankets she always kept in the trunk, looked both ways and dashed into the traffic lanes at the edge of the mayhem.

At that moment, a man in a black pickup truck rolled toward her. He stopped in the left lane and jumped out, yelling, “Did you call it in?”

“Yes. They’re coming,” she answered. “Do you have any flares?”

“Good idea.” The guy ran back to his truck while Molly hurried to the man lying on his back. He was young and preppy-looking, dressed in a white polo shirt, khakis and one deck shoe. The emblem on his shirt wasn’t an alligator, though. It was a face, a smiling Oriental face. She threw one of the blankets over him, smacking her knuckles on something hard as she tucked the cloth around his knee.

Her fingers wrapped around the object and she scooted it out from under him, recognizing its shape before she saw it, even though she had never held one before.

It was a gun. Small, heavier than she would have guessed, it was warm to the touch.

For a second, Molly couldn’t think what to do with it; panic squeezed out all thought. Finally she took a big gulp of air and stuck the thing into the pocket of her denim skirt. In the fullness of the fabric, the pocket swallowed the gun.

Molly pressed her hand against the man’s neck. No pulse. She pulled his eyelids up and found his pupils were dilated and motionless.

He was dead.

Molly drew back, suddenly cold, noticing how incredibly noisy it was near the truck since its engine was still running. Her train of thought was probably born out of reflexive self-protection, she realized, remembering people say that in times of great tragedy it’s possible to put one’s emotions on hold and take them out later when there’s more time for a nervous breakdown. Which is what Molly felt she might have someday when she recalled how lonely it felt to sit beside two dead men.

These were the first corpses she had ever seen, and her eyes filled with tears. They were so still. And heavy, as if gravity was sucking their bodies down into their graves already.

A few months ago she had been circumstantially involved in a murder case, but it had not saddened her like this. In that matter, Molly had been witness to no mayhem, had not been privy to dead eyes and wounds and blood. Because of that, she had remained calm. She had given the police various coherent statements, had coolly appeared before a grand jury, was set to testify next week at the trial. Molly had not even spent one sleepless night because of images of corpses.

Something told her that this time things were going to be different.

Now that she was face-to-face with violence, all she could think about was the car’s engine, the pebbles digging into her knee, the weight in her pocket, the sound of her heartbeat echoing in her ears and her own mortality. If she had been driving on this stretch of road only a few seconds earlier...

Molly stared at the dead man beside her, finally forcing herself into action. Carefully she leaned over the figure and started CPR.

Five puffs in, then push, push, push.

“Let me help you.” A man in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit touched her shoulder and she nodded, not allowing herself to wonder what was going on around her, never missing a breath. She blew expelled air into the stranger’s body, while the other good samaritan pushed down on his chest.

The stranger remained dead.

“There’s one alive by the Bronco. I don’t think the car’s a risk to blow up. Do you want to try him?” the man asked, gently squeezing her arm as he coaxed her to her feet.

Molly stood up and nodded, feeling her lip tremble and her eyes sting. She moved away as if walking through sand. A rock, zinged out from under the tire of a vehicle on the freeway above, smacked into her forehead above the eye. It hurt like mad, but for some reason Molly welcomed the pain.

She heard a squeal of tires behind her and shouts, then two young women, dressed in bicycle pants and U.C.L.A. T-shirts, ran past her. They began working on one of the other accident victims, an older man with white hair. When he lifted his hand, all three women grinned.

Encouraged, Molly fell to her knees next to the remaining man. He had on a heavy windbreaker zipped up tight. His pulse was so weak she could hardly feel it, and his dark skin had paled, particularly around his mouth. Glancing back at the off-ramp entrance, she saw both lanes were blocked by cars and several people were running around.

The pickup driver and a teenager with dreadlocks were working together and lighting a string of flares around the blocked lanes.

Molly tilted the man’s head back, then blew sharply through his dry lips. Her hands fumbled with his windbreaker, stopping at the hard lump over his heart.

Damn if he wasn’t wearing a gun! A bigger one than she had picked up before, to judge from the outline of it. The weapon was strapped against his chest.

“What in the hell was going on out here?” she asked in fear and anger. No one answered her.

Visions of high-speed chases and deranged drug dealers flooded her brain. She blanched, but pushed on. A second worry, that this scene somehow had something to do with the murder trial she was going to testify at, Molly dismissed. Get a grip, she scolded. Lives were depending on her.

The scream and whine of emergency vehicles began to fill the air.

The girls had saved the white-haired man, Molly thought. Maybe she could save this one, too.

“Please stay in your cars and proceed.” This static-tinged command blared out of a patrol car’s loudspeaker as two black and whites rolled up and parked a yard from Molly. She left the gun where it was and slipped her hand beneath the holster to do chest compressions. Suddenly the man’s body jerked, and he inhaled and began to gag.

Molly turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke, which was when she saw the hole. It was about the size of a pencil, neat and clean, right in the center of his left shoulder blade. Blood soaked his entire back.

“We’ll take over, miss.”

The paramedic’s hand on Molly’s shoulder made her gasp. She stood. “His pulse is low, about thirty-three. I’ve been doing CPR for three minutes. And I think he’s got a bullet in the back,” she added.

Hearing this information, the paramedic didn’t even blink, but turned and ordered, “Get me an IV and plasma. Possible gunshot.”

A uniformed cop beckoned Molly and the two coeds. They followed, and Molly saw there was now an entire fleet of police and rescue trucks. The authoritarian honk and blinking lights of a fire engine clogged her senses along with the sounds of radios, dispatchers, air brakes and the whacka, whacka, whacka of a hovering news helicopter. It buffeted the group below with hot gusts of air.

“Hell of a job, ladies,” offered a smiling highway patrolman, his beige uniform impossibly clean. “We could have used you after the last earthquake.”

The group stood silent, watching as the ambulances loaded up their badly battered or lifeless cargo. One of the policemen, a man about sixty with a precision salt-and-pepper haircut and a fat polyester tie, took Molly aside to ask a few questions.