Page 4 of Sergeant O'
I just hoped she didn’t find someone before I got my shit together.
Chapter One
Friday night
Jade
The ER board wasn’t terrible.
Room Three had a ten-year-old who fell off his bike and split his chin open on the sidewalk. He was watching a video on his mom’s phone and holding her hand while he waited for stitches. Room One had a man with right lower quadrant pain—probably appendicitis, though his labs were still pending. Room Six was Daisy Buchanon, who just needed to be transported back to her assisted-living facility but had already told me twice that I should “marry a man who can cook but isn’t too pretty”.
Solid advice.
So far there were no bar-fight injuries, no one claiming their neighbor poisoned them again, and no drunk fisherman with hooks embedded in places they shouldn’t be.
It was the kind of night where I might actually be able to take my break on time.
Which should’ve been my first clue that things were about to go to hell in a hand basket.
The overhead speaker crackled. “Multiple trauma alert—GSWs and head injury, three incoming via ambulance. Officer involved. ETA three minutes.”
My stomach suddenly felt like it was filled with lead.
Gunshot wounds. Head trauma. Officer involved.
Three minutes.
Fortunately, my training took over, and I began to move on autopilot.
I grabbed the supply cart and started barking orders to the closest tech. “Trauma One, Two, and Four need to be prepped. Monitors, saline, suture kits, crash carts in each. Let’s move.”
I didn’t know who to expect when the ambulance arrived, but I knew how this worked: there was a good chance at least one of the patients would be someone I knew.
And maybe even cared about.
The bay doors burst open, and two paramedics jogged in with someone on a gurney. The second I saw the navy uniform and the blood-soaked bandage on his thigh, my heart slammed against my ribs.
“GSW to the right thigh,” one of them called out. “We applied pressure and a tourniquet on scene, but he lost a lot of blood before we got there. His BP’s dropping.”
I glanced at the patient’s face and felt the blood rush from my head to my toes.
Brian.
He was unconscious. His skin was pale and his lips blue.
The vitals monitor was already hooked up, and his numbers were not good.
I didn’t even remember moving, but suddenly I was pushing the gurney alongside the paramedics toward Trauma One.
“Lift him on three,” I said, my voice steady even as my hands shook. “One, two, three.”
We transferred him to the bed. The tourniquet was biting into his upper thigh, already soaked below the pressure bandage.
“Let’s get this dressing off,” I said, snapping on gloves.
Blood welled up fast under the gauze as soon as I peeled it back.
“Saline wide open,” I told the tech.
