James Hayman - The Cutting

‘Gunshot wound to the left arm. Pulsatile bleeding with a lot of blood at the scene. Seems to have missed the bone. BP seventy-five on the way in. Two lines full out. She’s taken two liters normal saline.’

McCabe waited while she called out to her team, ‘Okay, start another line in her right groin. I want four units O-negative stat.’ A group of residents and nurses began to make it happen.

‘Are you the husband?’ A man in his forties addressed McCabe, who’d come into room three right behind the EMTs.

‘No.’ McCabe indicated the badge pinned it to his bloody shirt. ‘I’m Detective McCabe, Portland PD. Who are you?’

McCabe could hear the young woman’s voice directing her team from the head of the stretcher. ‘I want blood sent out for type and screen.’

‘I’m Dr. Kennedy, emergency attending. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait outside, Detective.’

McCabe shook his head. ‘I’m not going anywhere. This woman is a key witness in a murder case and somebody’s trying to kill her. She needs protection.’

The doctor paused only a second or two. ‘She’ll be alright in here.’ His tone was friendly. ‘We’re trying to save her life, not end it. There’s no room for extra bodies in the trauma room. She’ll be going up to surgery in about ten minutes.’ Dr. Kennedy indicated McCabe’s blood-covered clothes. ‘In the meantime, you can shower in the doctors’ locker room. Do you know the patient’s name?’

‘Put her into your system as Jane Doe, and tell your folks while she’s here she’s under protective custody of the Portland PD.’

The doctor nodded. He turned to a young man, a medical student, McCabe guessed. ‘Get Detective McCabe some scrubs to put on and show him where to clean up,’ he said. ‘You can join her in the ICU recovery room on five when she gets out of the OR, which won’t be for two or three hours. Until then she’ll have about ten reliable people around her at all times. I’ll let you know.’

The young man found a large plastic bag for McCabe’s clothes and a smaller one for his wallet and keys. He then led him to a small locker room with a row of shower stalls. McCabe stripped down and stuffed the clothes plus his gun and holster into the larger bag. He tied a knot in the bag to seal it and took it with him into the shower stall. He wasn’t going anywhere unarmed tonight, and he wasn’t leaving any guns lying around untended. As the hot water hit him, rinsing Sophie’s blood off his face and arms, he watched the reddened water swirling around and down the drain. The shower scene from Psycho played in his mind.

Sophie was in surgery on the fifth floor. About thirty feet from the doors to the OR, along a partially darkened corridor, McCabe sat in a plastic chair in the otherwise empty ICU waiting room. He was dressed in scrubs. He pinned his shield to the blouse. He debated whether to strap his. 45 over or under and opted for under the loose-fitting garment. He hooked his cell phone to the gun belt. His hand rested loosely on the weapon.

According to the doctors, the sniper’s bullet passed cleanly through her left arm about five inches below her shoulder. It missed the bone but ruptured the brachial artery. A vascular surgeon was working now to clean out the damaged tissue and reconnect the artery itself. McCabe got a little lost in the medical jargon, but the terms ‘de-bridement’ and ‘anastomosis’ stuck in his mind.

The surgeon said it would take about two hours to repair the arm but she’d probably be just fine, not lose any function. He also said the biggest threat to Sophie’s life was infection. McCabe didn’t bother telling the doctor that really wasn’t the case.

McCabe extinguished the lights and muted the TV, allowing its colorful silent images to remain the only movement in the room, their glow the only illumination. He stared silently through the glass wall at the hallway in front of him. There were few passersby. A couple of nurses, an elderly man pushing a bucket and mop, a young man in scrubs. He watched each for signs of threat. A bank of three elevators stood directly across the corridor from the waiting room. McCabe kept his eyes on the little lighted numbers above the doors, watching for one that might stop at five, though he doubted the shooter, if he was coming, would choose such a direct route.

Tuesday. 11:00 P.M.

The shooter figured it’d take him about six hours to walk back to Portland. Finding a vehicle he could requisition might prove a little tricky, but he’d keep his eyes open. Where he could, he’d travel cross-country, avoiding the roads. He assumed the cops would be scouring the area, starting where they picked up the woman and working out from there. He wondered if they’d bring in dogs. His scent’d be all over the damaged Blazer. He didn’t know if they’d pick up any prints. He’d tried to be careful about that, but he didn’t have time to wipe anything down before he flew out the door. He touched his face where he’d banged it against the steering wheel trying to duck when the cop unloaded that shotgun. Then the air bag whacked him again. Fuck it. Too late to worry about that now. Left his favorite Pierotucci leather jacket in the backseat. That pissed him off. It was practically new and set him back four hundred bucks. Looked great, too. He didn’t think there was anything in the pockets. Other than that, just a couple of old Billy Ray Cyrus CDs and a DVD of an old movie, Day of the Jackal. He’d already seen it a couple of times but was planning to watch it again tonight. Now that was all fucked up.

If they did bring in dogs, he’d be easy to track. Another reason to find a car. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about dogs. ’Course, he wasn’t real sure about that. A special ops guy he met in Kuwait in ’91 told him trained bloodhounds could even track someone driving away in a car. Something about the car’s vent system exhausting the interior air out through the back and carrying the smell of the passenger with it. Sounded like bullshit. Probably was bullshit. How the fuck could a dog smell something like that, anyway? Fuck it. He put it out of his mind. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have time to organize any fucking dogs. With another six hours of darkness, he’d be to hell and gone before they got anything going.

Just a little hike through the countryside. He was only pissed because he’d missed the bitch’s heart. Hadn’t accomplished the damned mission. Then that cop unloaded on him with a fucking shotgun. Bastard. Anyway, calm down, be cool, he told himself. Be cool or be dead.

Still, it bothered him that he missed. He shouldn’t have missed. Shit, he never missed. It was just because of the fucking cigarettes the bitch kept sucking on, moving around, tossing them out the window. Jesus. Didn’t she care what they were doing to her lungs? Didn’t she have any fucking respect for her body? And that hairball cop letting her do it. Didn’t he know how bad secondhand smoke could be for you? Him a father and everything. Well, he’d give them both something better than butts to suck on. Be cool, he warned himself again. Calm down. Don’t let the rage take over.

He walked silently along a line of trees at the edge of a meadow. He didn’t know how bad the woman was hurt. The green image through the night-vision scope made things pretty blurry. Specially when they were moving around like she was. He was pretty sure he hit her arm. Couldn’t tell how bad the wound was. Might have hit a bone or an artery or maybe both. They would’ve taken her to the hospital. There were two hospitals in Portland. He’d head for the bigger one.

He held the M24 sniper rifle in the crook of his left arm. Good weapon. Accurate. He stroked it with his free hand. Shooting someone always got the juices going, and he was getting a hard-on. In fact, he’d had it for a while and it wasn’t going away. If you had a hard-on for more than four hours you had to go see a doctor. That’s what the TV ad for that limp-dick medicine said. Well, he guessed he’d see a few doctors tonight. He came to a dirt road. Looking both ways he couldn’t see much of anything. He was trying to figure out which way to go and thinking about how to get himself a vehicle when he saw a pair of headlights approaching him at a good clip about a half klick away. He squatted down in some scrub. Unlikely to be a cop, but you couldn’t be sure. As it drew closer he picked out the shape of a pickup truck. Not a cop. He set the M24 down in the grass by the side of the road and walked into the middle, real cool and casual like, and waved the truck down as it approached. It slowed to a stop. The driver was a kid, seventeen or eighteen years old.