Among the Pines by Jack Slater

Author:Jack Slater [Slater, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

25

An ambulance peeled away from the red brick entrance to the emergency room at the Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville, punching its lights and sirens as it accelerated toward its destination.

Blake slowed to let it pass, grinding the top and bottom rows of her molars so hard against one another, her jaw muscles threatened to lock up. A dull headache was beginning to build, sending columns of pain up the side of Blake’s right temple. It hurt to chew. But as thinking about her failure hurt more, she embraced the distraction.

“There’s a space,” Melissa said, pointing to a parking spot not far from the entrance.

The two detectives had barely spoken on the fifty-mile journey from the scene of Jax’s shooting. Blake didn’t break her grim silence as she guided the unmarked cruiser between the two white lines. There was nothing to say. Whoever had shot Jax had gotten away. With the superior firepower, accuracy and range offered by a rifle over pistols, they had been able to keep the three of them at bay long enough to escape.

Blake’s boots were coated in dust and fragments of half-decayed pine needles. Her eyes still stung from the grit thrown by the rotors of the helicopter medevac that had carried Jax out of a clearing in the forest. The last news they had was that he’d arrived at the emergency room about a half hour earlier. Since then, silence. They didn’t even know whether he was dead or alive.

“Dammit,” Blake muttered as she reached for the door handle, the end of the journey breaking the semi-meditative state she’d slipped into since watching the chopper lift off.

She saw for the first time that her fingers were stained in dark dried blood. Her throat knotted up at the memory of scrambling over to Jax’s fallen body, his almost adult frame appearing strangely shrunken as he struggled for breath on the ground, pink foam bubbling from the bullet wound that had entered through the rib cage on his left-hand side. Another gunshot wound had pierced his stomach, and by the time Blake had collapsed on her knees at his side, there was a dinner plate-sized bloodstain on his olive-green T-shirt.

For a moment, just a fraction of a second, she had frozen. It had seemed impossible that anybody could survive such wounds. It was only when Ryan appeared at her side, the steel blade of a razor-sharp pocketknife gleaming in his hand that she’d jerked back into action. As Ryan sliced the sodden material of his T-shirt from the belly to the neck in one swift yet deliberate upward cut, Blake ran her fingers along the teenager’s blood-soaked skin in search of further injuries.

As he gasped for breath, his body almost fitting against the earthy ground, she cleared his airway and tilted his head back.

“Blake?”

Melissa’s voice punctured Blake’s reverie. Realizing that her partner was staring at her, an expression of concern obvious on her face, she shook herself and pulled the car door open.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Ignoring the shocked expressions on the faces of passers-by, Blake strode toward the entrance.

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