Maggie Price - Most Wanted Woman

“Have the dispatcher connect you to the nearest EMT,” Regan added. “I need you to stay on the line with the EMT so I can relay conditions of the victims.”

“Got it,” the man said.

Regan looked back at the injured boy. “Easton, I want you to lie down. Slowly.”

“No. Gotta help ’Melia.” He was sobbing. Tears mixed with the blood on his face, dripped in rivulets onto his T-shirt. The adrenaline shooting through his veins had him straining, fighting against their hold. “Let me go. Gotta help—”

“We’re going to help her.” Regan tightened her grip on his arm. An air bag had probably protected him, but he could still have spinal injuries. His head needed to be immobilized.

“Josh, we have to get him down.” Beneath her hand, the boy’s pulse hammered. “Gently.”

“All right.” He stepped in front of the teen, locked his hands on his shoulders. “Easton, I’m Sergeant McCall. Do what we tell you so we can take care of Amelia. Lie down. Now.”

A sob cut off his words as he shivered uncontrollably. “Okay.”

The instant they got Easton on the ground, Josh looked at Regan. “I’ll check on the girl.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He dashed for the car while Regan waved the blond woman over. “What’s your name?”

“Helen.”

“Helen, I need you to hold Easton’s head like this.”

Gulping, the woman dropped to her knees. Regan positioned the woman’s trembling hands on either side of Easton’s head. “His spine has to be kept as straight as possible. Keep his head still.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Still crouched, Regan shifted. “Easton, look at me. Look up at my face.” Using her palm, she shaded his eyes from the sun, then moved her hand while watching his pupils react to the light.

Rising, Regan snagged the bald man’s arm and pulled him toward the car. “What’s your name?”

“Quentin.”

“Tell the EMT the male victim is equal and reactive to light,” she instructed. After Quentin echoed her words into his cell phone, Regan added, “Stay close to me.”

“Okay.”

She reached the gaping driver’s door just as Josh slid out. She’d seen his same grim, flat stare on the faces of uncountable cops at accident scenes.

“She’s alive, but bad,” he began in a detached voice that Regan knew came with the job. “Wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” He gestured a blood-smeared hand at the car. “There’s an impression of her face imbedded in the windshield.”

Like an instant replay, Regan again saw the girl as the car sped by. A pretty smiling girl, her long blond hair blowing in the wind. Carefree. Happy.

Not anymore, Regan thought as she leaned in through the door and shoved the deflated air bag aside. Her throat tightened at the devastation.

“Amelia?”

The girl’s face was an unrecognizable bloody mass, her long hair dripping crimson. Using her middle three fingers, Regan pressed against the pulse-point on the girl’s neck. She watched Amelia’s chest rise and fall in labored, sporadic heaves while counting her breaths. At that instant, Regan would have given anything for some medical equipment. “Amelia, can you hear me?”

The girl’s eyelids fluttered open. She moved her head, expelled a feeble moan.

“Hang on, Amelia.” Regan checked her pupils. They were small, with sluggish reaction to the light. At this point, at least, her brain was still functioning. “I need to leave you for a second, but I’ll be back. You’re going to be okay.”

Scooting out of the car, Regan snagged the phone from Quentin. “This is a load-and-go situation,” she told the paramedic on the other end. “One patient critical, one stable. Critical patient is an approximately seventeen-year-old female with a severe head injury. Glasgow coma scale is seven. Pulse slow at fifty, respirations ten and signs of Cheyne-Stoking. Possible punctured lung.”

She exchanged a few more details with the paramedic, then handed the phone back to Quentin. “Stay on the line.”

He gave her an impressed look. “Sure, Doc.”

Regan shifted her gaze to Josh. “I need you sitting behind her. We’ve got to stabilize her head and spine.”

“The back doors are jammed. I’ll go in over the front seat.”

She glanced at his bare legs. She had glimpsed the broken glass littering the backseat. Angling to give him room to get past her she said, “Be careful of the glass.”

“Least of our problems.” He went over the seat like a shot. Regan dived back in beside Amelia.

“Wedge your elbows on top of the seat so your arms won’t get so tired.” As she spoke, Regan positioned Josh’s hands on either side of the girl’s head. Beneath her palms, she was aware of the firmness in his long fingers, the steadiness. The type of man you’d want around in a crisis.

“Right now she’s breathing on her own, but we’ve got to make sure her airway stays open,” Regan explained. “Use your fingers to push her jaw forward.” She adjusted her hands on Josh’s, moving his fingers beneath hers into position for a modified jaw thrust. “You’ve got to keep her head absolutely still.”

“All right.”

“She’ll probably vomit. Head injury patients almost always do, so get ready. When it happens, I’ll deal with cleaning her airway. You keep her motionless.”

“Yeah.”

Already, Amelia’s breathing had slowed, become even more irregular. The pinkish cerebral spinal fluid that bathed and suspended the brain and spinal cord now seeped from the girl’s ears and nose, indicating serious brain injury. An empty helplessness tightened Regan’s chest. If only she had some equipment. “Amelia?”

Nothing.

Pinching the girl’s arm got no response. “Amelia, can you hear me?” Regan knew that unconscious patients could still hear what was going on around them. “Hang on,” she said, keeping her voice calm and soothing as she rechecked the girl’s pulse. “Easton’s okay, Amelia. You’re going to be okay, too. Hang on.”

Despair engulfing her, Regan met Josh’s gaze. She knew the girl’s chances were as bleak as the look in his eyes.

An hour later, Josh stood in the clearing with Jim Decker, Sundown’s police chief. A few yards away, the coroner wheeled a gurney over the baked grass toward a hearse. The body bag on the gurney glistened like a mound of wet, black clay beneath the sun’s blazing rays.

“A shame the girl didn’t make it.” The navy-blue uniform that hugged Decker’s tall, lean frame had creases sharp enough to carve rock. Signaling his rank, silver eagles nested on each collar point of his tapered shirt. Mirrored aviator sunglasses completed the look. Josh knew that the man was in his sixties, but his dedication to keeping fit—along with a head of thick, black hair that was only now showing threads of gray—made him look a decade younger.

“Amelia was here for the summer, visiting her grandparents,” Decker continued. “They’re good folks. Now I have to go tell ’em she’s dead. And for what? A beer and a fast ride.”

Josh scrubbed a hand over his face. He’d been at the scene less than two hours, but it felt like twenty-four. “Death notices are one of the downsides of our profession.”

“That they are.”

When Decker shifted his stance, Josh’s gaze followed the chief’s across the clearing to where Regan sat in the shade of a massive oak. Her knees were up against her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs as she stared toward the road where a cop directed traffic.

Decker dipped his head. “Etta’s bartender. There’s an interesting young woman.”

The undertone of guarded curiosity in his voice told Josh the chief wasn’t referring to Regan’s physical attributes. “What’s interesting about her?”