Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [31]
What the hell is going on?
He wanted to rise, but his body refused. With a wobbly push he forced himself up from the bench, and it gave him a head rush. The flow of pedestrians through the mall was starting to blur. The glow of streetlights, landscape illumination, and colored neon had blended into a ghostly fog. He removed his sunglasses and strained to focus. His gaze tightened, and for a split second things came clear to him. He’d seen them before, just an hour earlier—another pair of eyes hiding behind sunglasses after dark—and his mind replayed the brief and seemingly meaningless encounter. It wasn’t so much the face he remembered as that long, white mobility cane approaching at a surprisingly fast clip. It was a needlelike missile that had emerged from the crowd, guided by the hand without sight, and no matter which way he turned, he couldn’t get out of the way. He jerked one way, the stick followed, and in the ensuing head-on collision, that mobility stick had jabbed into his ankle like a jousting stick.
I can’t feel my foot.
He glanced back at the café table by the potted palm across from the theater. Swyteck had no idea who he was even looking for—no reason to know what was happening to the man he was supposed to meet.
His gaze shifted back toward the white walking stick in the crowd, but it was gone. Or maybe it was still there and the image wasn’t registering.
I can’t see—can’t . . . breathe!
He wanted to scream. No voice. He tried to run, but he felt nothing from the chest down. His arms, too, failed him, refusing to break the fall. He felt only the wind on his face as he dropped to the sidewalk. His chin slammed against the concrete, and as darkness took over, he noticed that he couldn’t taste the blood.
Then the silence turned black.
Chapter Fifteen
A woman screamed, and Jack jumped to his feet.
Just a few doors down, a crowd was gathering near the illuminated fountain. Through the growing forest of onlookers, Jack saw a man lying flat on the pavers with people around him speaking in short bursts of panic and waving their arms in frantic gestures. He threw a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover his sparkling water and sprinted toward the commotion. By the time Jack got there, an older gentleman had already rolled the fallen man onto his back, ripped open his shirt, and started chest compressions. An elderly woman was shouting into her cell phone.
“My husband’s a retired physician and is trying CPR,” she said, “but the man’s not breathing, and there’s no pulse!”
Another woman came forward, opened her purse, and said, “I have an aspirin.”
“Can’t,” said the doctor, waving her off. “He’s unconscious.”
“Looks more dead than unconscious,” said one of the onlookers.
“Did anyone see him collapse?” asked the doctor.
A waiter spoke up. “I did.”
“How long ago?”
“Five minutes or so.”
“Be exact.”
The waiter checked his watch. “I’d say more like seven.”
“Tell them they’ve got sixty seconds!” the doctor shouted to his wife.
She repeated the message to the 911 operator, but Jack heard no approaching ambulances in the neighborhood. The doctor kept at his work, a hundred compressions per minute, desperately trying to revive him. He looked exhausted. Jack stepped in to relieve him.
“I got it,” said the doctor. “I need an automated external defibrillator. Check the theater.”
The symphony drew an older crowd—apart from the cocaine addicts, they were South Beach’s most likely demographic for cardiac arrest. Good call, Doc.
Jack ran. The doors were open, and Jack burst into the lobby. It took him ten seconds to shout out his needs to the woman at the will-call window. It took her an ungodly long time to bring him the emergency kit. Jack grabbed it and raced back to the mall. Paramedics were finally on the scene. They had already administered the three stacked shocks that Jack had seen a hundred times on television dramas—200, 300, 360—and an IV was in place. One of the EMTs was struggling to intubate, but he couldn’t force the airway.
“Forget it, let’s roll!” he shouted.
The man looked utterly