It's a Love Thing (30 page)

Nikki flipped her long brown hair over
her shoulder and quirked a smile that made her dark eyes twinkle
deviously. Apparently breakfast wasn’t the only thing she’d picked
up before coming to work.

“
You gave Longbow a ride to
work again didn’t you?”

It seemed Blanca’s neighbor didn’t own
a car. He relied on the good-will of others to drop him off or pick
him up from work. His work, during the off-season, was
reforestation: planting pine and fir saplings in old burn areas or
on land that had been clear-cut. Nikki had told Blanca the company
Longbow worked for was owned by a Mexican family from one of the
neighboring towns. Blanca figured that was how he knew Spanish, but
it still didn’t explain how he knew about the white island, Ibiza,
that was her namesake.

“
You keep picking him up
like that he’ll think you want to give him a ride of a different
sort.”

“
It was nothin’,” Nikki
said, busying herself around the office. “Forest isn’t like that
anyway. He’s a loner. I’ve never known him to date or have a
girlfriend. I don’t mind giving him a lift now and then. Besides,
fire season has already started in Nevada and California. It won’t
be long before he’ll be called out and we won’t see hide or hair of
that perpetually tanned body for months.” She stopped at the copy
machine and peered into the office. “I thought you wanted me to
tell you how I knew you skipped breakfast this morning, not dish on
the private life of your sexy neighbor.”

Nikki was the one who’d offered up the
unsolicited information, but Blanca knew she wouldn’t gain any
ground with her secretary for pointing that out. She eyed her for a
minute and then smiled and said, “Sorry, my bad. Go on.”

Nikki beamed like she had the world’s
greatest secret to tell. “Forest said the walls between your place
and his are paper thin. He said you hit the snooze on your alarm
clock five times this morning and that you cussed it out and threw
it on the floor the last time it went off.” Nikki sat down in a
chair in Blanca’s office and crossed her legs. “So, I figured with
you running late, you could use a bite to eat. You wanna talk about
what’s keeping you up at night? I’m a good listener, comes with the
job. Both of them,” Nikki added quickly.

An alarm of a different kind sounded
throughout the clinic, shrill and high. Lights began to flash over
the inside of the clinic’s doors. The town’s fire department and
ambulance services were right next door and their alarm systems
were hardwired into the clinic. Blanca reached over and turned her
short-wave radio up so she could hear what emergency had triggered
the alarm while Nikki got out a map and waited.

“
Responder One, do you
read?”

Someone from the ambulance crew
answered. “Responder One here. What you got, Tony?”

Tony, the fire chief Blanca had met
upon arrival, answered in a rush. “A State Trooper came upon a
campsite of Meth brewers below Lowman. He caught ‘em by surprise
and one of the fools shot him. He’s driving himself in, but by the
sounds of his voice he’s not gonna make it before he passes out.
Send the ambulance to meet up with him.”

“
Responder One rolling.
Tony, you got an ID on the Trooper?”

“
Yeah, it’s one of ours,
Reynolds. I’m calling his brother Max right now.”

Nikki spread the map out on Blanca’s
desk and pointed to the area she believed the chief had been
talking about. “These camp sites are way back in the woods, hardly
anyone but the locals know about ‘em. I’d say it’s a good twenty
miles from the campgrounds back to the highway, and then another
ten miles from the highway to here. Max is one of our best
paramedics. I’m sure there’s nothing that’ll keep him from going
out with the team.”

“
Should I offer to go with
them?” Blanca asked. She couldn’t help but think of the burly
officer with the stern face that had pulled her over on her way
into town. She hadn’t liked the way he’d questioned her about being
an out-of-stater, or how he’d laughed at her mispronunciation of
the town’s name, but she also knew he was just doing his job.
Somehow it was worse knowing he had a brother on the emergency
responder team. It made her feel responsible for him. The first
responders in rural areas like this were all like family, and
families were supposed to take care of each other.

“
No,” Nikki said. “Let the
paramedics do their jobs. If they need you, they’ll let us
know.”

The wail of the ambulance as it left
the bay and rushed past the clinic made the fine hair on the back
of Blanca’s neck stand on end.

*****

Blanca was on the phone with Garden
Valley’s high school wrestling coach, Alex Thompson, when Nikki
rushed into her office. Blanca could tell before Nikki opened her
mouth it wasn’t good.

“
They’re bringing Reynolds
here. Max called me on his cell phone. The life flight from Boise
can’t be here for another hour, and Max says he’s lost too much
blood to make it to Boise in the ambulance.” Nikki was back out the
door and prepping the triage room before Blanca could ask
questions.

“
Mr. Thompson, I’d love to
volunteer my time providing physicals for your athletes, but you’ll
have to call back another time to arrange it. I have an emergency
coming in.” Blanca hung up the phone and dashed into triage to
prepare.

“
Paramedics can’t give
blood. We’ll need all the O negative and Humate we
have.”

Nikki pulled bags from the medication
fridge and dragged an IV pump into the room. “They’ve already given
Vasopressor and two liters of fluids but he’s bleeding out as fast
as they’re putting it in.”

“
Did they say where he was
hit?”

Nikki finished placing the IV solution
on a warming pump before answering Blanca’s question. “They went
ballistic on him. The maniacs must’ve been high. He’s got a head
wound that’s contained, a shoulder wound that’s oozing, and a groin
wound that’s gushing. Max thinks they might have hit the femoral
artery. He’s hoping you can do something to slow things down while
they wait for the life flight.”

“
There’s no repairing a
femoral artery under these conditions, if that’s what is, and I’m
not a surgeon. Sutures and minor procedures are the scope of my
practice. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do for him,” Blanca
said, staring blankly at the clinic’s back entrance where the
ambulance would arrive. The docs back home had pounded the
boundaries of her license into her for so many years, she could
barely think outside them anymore.

Nikki grabbed her by the shoulders and
shook her. “You’re all we got. Nobody here is going to give a
horse’s hiney about what you’re licensed to do and what you’re not.
If there’s something you can do to save Jax, do it, and worry about
the consequences later.”

“
Jax?” Blanca echoed.
“Who’s Jax?”

“
Reynolds, Max’s twin
brother.”

The ambulance siren blared in the
distance.

Nikki offered Blanca a pack of sterile
gloves and a gown. “Fake it ‘til you make it, I always
say.”

Reynolds was pale as a sheet and out
cold when they brought him in. His pressure was in the toilet and
the paramedic team practically had him standing on his head in the
bed to slow down the bleeding from his left groin. He looked so
different lying on his back with an oxygen mask over his face and
IV lines coming out both arms. He was no longer the picture of
strength and justice he’d engrained in her upon their first
meeting, but a man on the verge of losing his life.

The bloody bandages at his head and
shoulder were darker than the one on his groin and Blanca could
tell, even with the pressure dressing the paramedics had applied,
the blood was too bright and plentiful to be coming from anywhere
other than a major artery.

“
Hang a bag of Humate
first,” she ordered as men scrambled into place around the cot.
“He’s at risk for going into DIC and multi-system failure if we
don’t replenish his clotting factors. Hang a bag of blood on the
other side as soon at that one is finished. Use a pressure bag,”
she added. She’d worked in a trauma center for many years as a
nurse practitioner; she just hadn’t been the one in charge of
making the life-saving decisions.

Blanca carefully removed the pressure
dressing, applying force with her hand in place of the weighted
sandbag, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing was going to be enough if
the artery was torn or severed. Nothing, that is, short of a
miracle. She followed the hole in Reynolds’ groin with a finger.
“Can someone get some suction over here and a bright light so I can
see what I’m doing?”

“
Sure, Doc,” a man in
khaki’s and a muscle shirt answered.

It took a minute for her to recognize
the face, but the stature and the coloring of the man was the same
as Reynolds’ so she figured it must be his twin. “I take it you’re
Max,” Blanca said, keeping her eyes on her work. “Does your brother
have any allergies we should know about, any other conditions,
ailments, abnormalities?”

“
No, ma’am. He’s fit as a
fiddle… normally.” His voice dropped to a whisper but he recovered
quickly. “And if we run out of blood you can hook me up to an IV
and siphon it directly from me to him. We’re an exact match,
antibodies and all. We were both tested when we served in
Afghanistan together a few years ago.”

Great, Blanca thought. Jax was a war
veteran on top of being a twin, and was currently an officer of the
law. Could you get any more pressure than that?

A bright light was turned on and
someone placed a magnifying lens over her head. It wasn’t the type
surgeons wore, more like that of a jewelry maker, but it did the
trick. She suctioned with one hand and pressed deeper with the
forefinger of the other. Her finger hit something hard and foreign
and she immediately knew it was a bullet. Trauma nursing in a big
city had been hell on her nerves, but good experience. And right
now she was praying that experience would pay off.

“
Hand me those forceps,”
she told Nikki. Then she slid the tool in next to her finger while
Brandi took over suctioning. When she pulled out the bullet and
dropped it on a tray, she swore she heard the heartbeats of every
single person in the room. The bleeding got worse for a moment, but
she pressed harder using the entire pad of her finger, and a couple
of dressing changes later, the bleeding had almost
stopped.

“
You can’t stay like that
forever. Can’t you stitch it up or block it with something else?”
Nikki said, horrified and relieved at the same time.

“
It’ll have to do. I can’t
risk cutting into him or blindly trying to sew him up. I could tear
the artery worse or even sever it completely. What time is it? How
long before the life flight can get here?”

A blonde kid she hadn’t met answered.
“It’s five-o-clock. The flight crew was on stand-by last I checked.
They should be able to get here in twenty minutes.”

“
I’ll call them,” Max said,
leaving the room looking a little taller than when he’d first
arrived.

“
Here, Doc,” Nikki said,
pushing a rolling stool under her. “Take a load off. You’re going
to need all that stamina for the flight to Boise.”

“
His pressure is rising,
slowly but surely,” the blonde paramedic said.

The tow-headed youth couldn’t have
been more than twenty, but he seemed to know what he was doing.
Blanca drew in a deep breath and thanked the Lord for the first
time in a long time that she’d grown up and practiced in a big
city. She’d never imagined gunshot wounds, or any of the other
crazy things she’d dealt with in Chicago would follow her to the
rural area that was supposed to be her sanctuary. She should’ve
known. The grass is always greener…

The flight crew strapped Reynolds in
with Blanca at his side. They were about to take off when Reynolds
started coming to and began fighting the restraints. Blanca hovered
over his body and pressed her quickly numbing finger deeper into
the tissue of his wound while the flight nurses medicated him.
She’d seen pain and fear turn mortally wounded men into raging
beasts before.

“
It’s scary what a little
adrenaline can do for the body isn’t it? The flight nurse next to
her said.

Blanca nodded. “He’s as strong as an
ox, even with the wounds and the blood loss.”

The male nurse snorted. “He’s a
Reynolds. It’s in their blood. Both he and Max were shot down in
Afghanistan. Their fire-team was ambushed by snipers. It didn’t
keep ‘em from dragging each other out of the depths of hell, or
from saving the lives of two others while they were at it. This
isn’t going to keep Jax down either. Believe me. I know. I was one
of the guys they saved. We were all in the Guard together. The
military just loves redneck sharpshooters like us. We’re too stupid
to know they’re sacrificing us on the front lines and too proud to
do otherwise once we realize it.”

When the meds set in, Reynolds relaxed
and his eyes grew heavy, but he fought it and looked down at Blanca
with a goofy grin on his face. “Darlin’, I don’t usually let a
woman handle my goods without at least getting her first name. I
guess you could say I’m old fashioned that way.”