Tess Gerritsen - Ice Cold

She unzipped his jacket and stared down in horror at the stain spreading across his shirt. She ripped the fabric apart and exposed the bullet wound that had punched into his chest. He was still breathing, but his jugular veins were distended, bulging like thick blue pipes. She touched his skin and felt the crackle of crepitus as air leaked from his chest and infiltrated the soft tissues, distorting his face, his neck. Punctured right lung. Pneumothorax.

Bear bounded back and licked Rat’s face as the boy struggled to speak. Maura had to push the dog away so she could hear the boy’s words.

“They’re coming,” he whispered. “Use the gun. Take it…”

She looked down at the deputy’s weapon, which he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. So this is how it’s going to end, she thought. Their attackers had given them no warning, made no attempt to negotiate. The first shot had been meant to kill. There would be no chance to surrender; this was to be an execution.

And she was their next target.

Maura rose to a crouch to peer over the boulders. A lone man was moving down the mountain toward them. He carried a rifle.

Bear gave a threatening bark, but before he could lunge from the cover of the boulders, Maura grabbed his collar and commanded: “Stay. Stay.”

Rat’s lips had darkened to blue. With every breath he took, the punctured lung was leaking air into the chest cavity, where it was trapped, unable to escape. The pressure was building, squeezing that lung, shifting all the organs in his chest. If I don’t act now, she thought, he will die.

She yanked open Rat’s backpack and scrabbled through the contents for his knife. Sliding open the blade, she found it streaked with rust and dirt. To hell with sterility; he had only minutes left to live.

Bear barked again, a sound so frantic that she swung around to look at what had alarmed him. Now he was facing down the hill, where a dozen men were climbing toward them. A man with a rifle above us. More armed men approaching from below us. We are trapped between them.

She looked down at the gun, which had fallen in the snow beside Rat. The deputy’s weapon. When this was over, when she and Rat were both dead, they would point to this gun as proof that they were cop-killers. No one would ever know the truth.

“Mommy.” The word was barely a whisper. A child’s plea from a young man’s dying lips. “Mommy.”

She bent close to the boy and touched his cheek. Though he was looking straight at her, he seemed to be seeing someone else. Someone who made his lips slowly curve into a weak smile.

“I’m here, darling.” She blinked as tears slid down her cheeks and chilled on her skin. “Your mommy will always be here.”

The snap of a breaking branch made her stiffen. She raised her head to peer over the boulder and saw the lone rifleman just as he saw her.

He fired.

The bullet kicked snow into her eyes and she dropped back to the ground beside the dying boy.

No negotiations. No mercy.

I refuse to be slaughtered like an animal. She picked up the deputy’s gun. Raising the barrel, she fired high into the air. A warning shot, to slow him down. To make him think.

Lower on the slope, dogs barked and men shouted. She saw the approaching posse scrambling up the mountain toward her. She had no cover against their gunfire. Crouching here beside Rat, she was exposed to the firing squad moving toward her.

“My name is Maura Isles!” she shouted. “I want to surrender! Please, let me surrender! My friend is hurt and he needs…” Her voice died as a shadow loomed above her. She looked up, into the barrel of a rifle.

The man holding it said, quietly: “Give me the gun.”

“I want to give up,” Maura pleaded. “My name is Maura Isles, and-”

“Just hand me that gun.” He was an older man, with implacable eyes and authority in his voice. Though the words were spoken quietly, there was no compromise in that command. “Give it to me. Slowly.”

Only as she started to obey him did she suddenly realize this move was wrong, all wrong. The gun in her grasp. Her arm lifting to hand it over. The men watching from below would not see a woman about to surrender; they would see a woman preparing to fire. Instantly she released her grip, letting the gun tumble from her fingers. But the man standing above her had already lifted his rifle to fire. His decision to kill her had been preordained.

The blast made her flinch. She fell to her knees, cowering in the snow beside Rat. Wondering why she felt no pain, saw no blood. Why am I still alive?

The man on the boulder above her gave a grunt of surprise as the rifle dropped from his hands. “Who’s shooting at me?” he yelled.

“Back away from her, Loftus!” a voice commanded.

“She was gonna shoot me! I had to defend myself!”

“I said back away.”

I know that voice. It’s Gabriel Dean.

Slowly Maura raised her head and saw not one, but two familiar figures moving toward her. Gabriel kept his weapon aimed squarely at the man on the boulder, as Anthony Sansone ran to her side.

“Are you all right, Maura?” Sansone asked.

She had no time to waste on questions, no time to marvel over the miraculous appearance of these two men. “He’s dying,” she sobbed. “Help me save him.”

Sansone dropped to his knees beside the boy. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“I’m going to decompress the chest. I need a chest tube. Anything hollow will work-even a ballpoint pen!”

She picked up Rat’s knife and stared at the thin chest, at the ribs that stood out so starkly beneath the pale skin. Even on that frigid mountainside, her palm was sweating against the grip as she gathered the nerve to do what had to be done.

She found her landmark, pressed the blade against his skin, and sliced into the boy’s chest.

HE WOULD HAVE KILLED ME,” SAID MAURA. “IF GABRIEL AND Sansone hadn’t stopped him, that man would have shot me in cold blood, the way he shot Rat. No questions asked.”

Jane glanced at her husband, who stood by the window, looking out over the medical center parking lot. Gabriel neither contradicted nor confirmed what Maura had said, but remained strangely uncommunicative, letting Maura tell the story. Except for the murmur of the TV, its volume turned low, the ICU visitors’ lounge was quiet.

“There’s something all wrong about what happened up there,” Maura said. “Something that doesn’t make any sense. Why was he so determined to kill us?” She looked up, and Jane scarcely recognized her friend in that gaunt and bruised face. Maura’s usually flawless skin was marred by scratches that were now scabbing over. The new sweater she wore hung far too loose on her frame, and her collarbones stood out on the pitifully thin chest. Without her stylish clothes, her makeup, Maura looked as vulnerable as any other woman, and that unsettled Jane. If even cool, confident Maura Isles could be reduced to this battered creature, then so could anyone. Even me.

“A deputy was killed,” said Jane. “You know how things turn out whenever a cop goes down. Justice gets a little rough.” Again she glanced at her husband, waiting for him to comment, but Gabriel just stared in silence at the glitteringly clear morning. Although he’d shaved and showered after his return from the mountain, he still looked exhausted and wind-burned, tired eyes squinting against the sunlight.

“No, he showed up there intending to kill us,” said Maura. “Just like that deputy did, on Doyle Mountain. I think this is all about Kingdom Come. And what I wasn’t supposed to see there.”

“Well, we now know what that was,” said Jane.

The day before, the last of forty-one bodies had been recovered from the burial pit. Twelve men, nineteen women, and ten children-most of them girls. The majority showed no signs of trauma, but Maura had seen enough in Kingdom Come to know the victims had surely been force-marched to their graves. The blood on the stairs, the abandoned meals, the pets left behind to starve-all pointed to mass murder.