Backfire

Eve said, “Is—is she okay?”

He made himself nod. “The bullet didn’t kill her. She’s alive, but she’s out—” There weren’t any more words. He pressed his shirtsleeve hard against the wound, his eyes not leaving her face.

He didn’t care about Xu, didn’t care if the Fairmont burned to the ground, only about Sherlock. No, get yourself together, Sherlock’s alive. You have to take charge, there’s no one else. She’d captured Xu and then someone else had shot her. Who? It didn’t make sense; Xu was alone, always alone. Wasn’t he?

He looked over at the three boys, Billy’s parents standing protectively behind them, and Savich registered that Billy was as redheaded as Sherlock, tall, gangly, and skinny as a plank. He nodded at them, and manufactured a calm, steady voice. He said to Eve, “These boys protected Sherlock from the crowd. Get their names.” He managed a smile at Billy’s mom.

“Ma’am, your son is a hero, all three of them are heroes. Thanks, all of you.”

He looked back down at Sherlock. “Eve, where’s Harry?”

“He went after Xu.”

No more words; he never looked away from Sherlock’s face until Eve touched his arm. “The EMTs are here, Dillon. Let them take care of her.”

EMT Nathan Everett lightly touched Savich’s shoulder. “You all right, sir? Yes, okay, I see now it’s her blood. You need to let us take care of her now.”

Savich raised his face to a man he’d never seen before in his life. “She’s going to be all right.”

“Yes, sir, yes, she will,” Nathan said, and turned to direct two other EMTs to bring a gurney.

Eve pulled Savich to his feet. He watched them lift Sherlock onto the gurney. She looked nearly lifeless. No, she would live, she had to. “I got the boys’ names and addresses.”

Savich forced himself to focus on Eve’s face. “Are you okay, Eve? And Harry and Griffin?”

“Yes, we were just rattled.”

“Have Harry and Griffin gone after Xu?” He looked at her face, really registered it for the first time. “You look like you’ve been in a war.”

She nodded. “All three of us do. The fire and smoke was from an incendiary device, but we made it through. Xu even had a bomb rigged in the room. Luckily, we’d gotten out before he blew it.”

The crowd melted away from Sherlock’s gurney as they rolled her to the ambulance. Savich walked quickly after her. He said over his shoulder, “Who shot her? It sure wasn’t Xu, since I saw her cuffing him. So who was it?”

“We’ll find him,” Eve called after him, as he climbed into the ambulance with Sherlock and they shut the door.

It was slow going getting through the snarled traffic, the gawkers milling around, but finally the ambulance pulled onto Market Street on the way to San Francisco General.

Savich held her hand between his, never looking away from her face.

“I know it’s a lot of blood, sir,” Nathan said, “but head wounds are nasty like that.”

“Yes, I know,” Savich said. “I’ve seen them before.”

He watched the EMT check her pupils again and look at her head wound. He prepped her arm and slid a needle into a vein at her elbow. “My name is Nathan. The bleeding from her scalp has stopped. She needs this IV in case we have to give her medication. She’s getting saline now, nothing more.”

Savich nodded. “My name’s Savich. Give me an alcohol pad and I’ll wipe the blood away.”

Nathan Everett wanted to say No, you shouldn’t touch her, but he saw the big man with only one shirt sleeve, his black leather jacket on the floor beside him, was desperately trying to keep control. “Sure, here you go. But stay away from the wound; we don’t want it to start bleeding again.”

He watched Savich lift up her hair and wash it with sterile dressings Nathan had soaked in saline from a plastic bottle. He was gentle, his touch light. After a half-dozen dressings, he got most of the blood cleared from her hair.

Nathan handed him another dressing. “You need to wash your face as well, sir.”

Savich did as he said. So much blood, he thought, as he wiped his face.

Thank goodness, Nathan thought; the wound wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It was a deep gouge along the side of her head. But was her skull fractured? Her brain injured? Was she still bleeding inside her skull from a lacerated artery? Nathan didn’t know, but he did know the bullet had passed only a few millimeters away from exploding her head open. Nathan swallowed. The important thing now was that she wake up soon. The sooner she woke up, the better the chance she was still the person she was. He said aloud what he was hoping for. “It isn’t fatal, but she needs to wake up. Are you an FBI agent?”