Page 54 of Resuscitation
Huh. All it took to get a date was a little murder and mayhem, go figure. Maybe for their second outing, he’d book time at a gun range.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
Friday,February 13th, 11:58 P.M.
After Sara left,Blake felt the adrenaline seep from his body, leaving him physically and emotionally drained. He’d never felt so exhausted. The night of constant high adrenaline, high danger, and close combat had nearly wiped him out.
He headed out to the parking lot, hands in his jacket pockets. The snowstorm had passed, leaving only a light breeze scudding wispy clouds overhead. There were even a few stars visible. He gripped the handle of his truck door and yanked it open, but a nagging feeling tugged at the back of his mind.
Something wasn’t right.
He closed the door again without getting in and scanned the area, his brow furrowed in concentration. The parking lot, dotted with haphazardly parked emergency vehicles and the remnants of the night’s chaos, seemed eerily still.
He’d missed something. Something important.
Blake hurried back inside the building and straight to the trauma bay, standing outside the room where the bodies of Mercer and Brick lay in the same position that they had both died in. Connor’s corpse was still on the cot, covered by a sheet. A forensic photographer circled the bodies, relentlessly snapping away and illuminating the room with bright flashes. The sterile smell of antiseptic mixed with the metallic tang of blood, creating an unsettling atmosphere.
Blake retraced his steps from there, arriving first at the nursing station where he’d unleashed the liquid nitrogen, freezing one thug’s face, and brawled with the South African. Here, there were more forensic techs, swirling fingerprint brushes and wielding cameras. He saw the dead man’s boots, but it hadn’t been Blake’s attack that killed him. It was the South African, Harper.
Where the hell was Harper? The cops had said there was no one to take into custody, only corpses. But Harper had been very much alive when Blake last saw him.
He waved to the CSI techs and continued down the hallway to the waiting room. Someone had covered Psycho’s burnt body with a yellow plastic sheet and there was an officer standing guard at the door.
She looked up at him. “Sir, this is a restricted area. Do you have…”
“I’m looking for Dr. Porter? The detectives were interviewing her.”
She nodded. “Right. They sent her home, were going to follow up with a formal interview tomorrow.”
“She’s gone?”
“I saw one of the SWAT officers escorting her out not two minutes ago.”
Blake froze. “I don’t think that was a police officer,” he told her. “There’s a gunman unaccounted for.”
She frowned. “No, sir. I was told they accounted for all five hostage takers.”
Blake had told the detectives everything he’d seen, but he hadn’t actually sat down and counted how many gunmen he’d encountered.
He stopped, did a mental inventory: dead guy #1 at the nursing station, Psycho aka dead guy #2, mohawk guy, Mercer, Connor—also all dead.
Leaving Harper. “Not five. Six. Radio your supervisor. There’s a man, South African accent, name of Harper—not sure if that’s his first or last name. I think he impersonated a SWAT officer and escaped. Maybe with Dr. Porter.”
She keyed her radio, but Blake wasn’t about to stand around and wait. The cops had what they needed to start a search and send a car to Sara’s home. No way in hell was he going to let her face potential danger alone. Not again.
He turned and ran, ignoring the officer’s calls to wait. His heart pumped with terror as he burst through the main entrance doors and into the parking lot, his eyes frantically scanning the snow-covered ground.
As he approached the empty space where Sara’s Subaru had been parked, Blake’s gut twisted with dread. The imprint of her tires was still visible in the fresh snow, but something else caught his attention. Footprints. Men’s boots. Alongside a woman’s tracks. Leading from the staff exit to where Sara’s car had been parked.
He spun to his truck, climbing in and jamming the key into the ignition before he even got the door shut.
“Please be wrong, please be wrong,” he muttered as he gunned the engine, his truck lurching across to the exit.
A mass of tire tracks crisscrossed the white expanse—all the recent police and emergency services that had rolled into the hospital. But all tire tracks came and went in the direction of Potsdam, except one pair of tracks that headed off in the opposite direction toward Eastfork.
Blake scanned the road ahead, searching for any sign of Sara’s car as he sped through the familiar landmarks of Eastfork. He lost the tracks when he hit the one section of town that had been plowed—the few blocks on either side of the fire department.
She said she was going home, and maybe that’s just what she did—went home. Alone. But the nagging feeling in his gut wouldn’t subside. He’d learned to trust his instincts in the war zone, and now they were screaming at him like a mad banshee.
