Code 61 - Donald Harstad [175]
“It starting to hurt yet?” asked Sally.
Hester shook her head, gingerly. “Mumm.” She tried again, making a real effort to be distinct. “Numb.” It was swelling, all right.
“Here, put your sweater back on,” said George, and I heard the distinctive sound of Velcro ripping open. “This stuff is part of my kit.” He tossed over a blue nylon bag, with a red cross in a white square stitched on the front.
“All right!” said Sally, and opened it up. There were several individual packets inside, each labeled for a different medical problem. “Fracture. Burns. Drowning … Ah, Wounds and Bleeding … ” Inside the packet there was a large compress, gauze, disinfectant ointment, and a scissors. “Shit, this is great … ”
“I'll get an ambulance coming,” I said. For all the good it would do. There was no way we could get Hester to it until we got lots of backup. I keyed the mike on my walkie-talkie. “Comm, Three … 10-33.”
Of course it was 10-33. This had been an emergency since the first shot was ffred. But I had to say something to convey the extra urgency, and there's no code for “more urgent than before.”
“Three, go ahead.”
“Okay, we have an officer down now. Get me a 1052 down here at the old Dodd place. Fast … but tell 'em to hold until we clear 'em in.”
“10-4, Three. Copy officer down?” She repeated it that way so everybody who was listening knew what we had, without her having to inform them separately.
“10-4, need as much 10-78 as you can get, and the ambulance. We are still pinned down. Repeating, still pinned down. How close is backup?”
“10-4 the 10-52,” she replied, and I could imagine her hitting the page button for the Maitland ambulance service. “And … uh … backup is en route.”
I was glad she acknowledged the ambulance request, but just telling me that the backup units were on the way, without giving me their current location, meant that it was going to take a while. There was obviously a problem with backup. It was so damned typical of the complex kind of plan that we were working under. I was angry, but there was nothing Dispatch could do about it. I was just sorry she hadn't been able to give me an estimate, though. That was bad.
“10-4. Look, tell the responding units that we are still taking automatic weapons ffre, from two or three locations. Repeat that, will you. Auto weapons fire from multiple locations.”
“10-4, Three.” She repeated the message, and as she did so she sounded about ready to cry. Being completely powerless in a tense situation will make you sound that way. “Can you be more specific regarding the location of the automatic weapons ffre?”
“I'm giving you the best I've got,” I said, as calmly as possible. “They were already here.” The calm was mostly for Hester's benefit. The last thing she needed to hear was me getting all worried. “Just make sure you don't send the EMS people in until we clear them.”
“10-4, Three. One says to keep them there until backup gets to you.”
Well, that wasn't going to be too hard. It was them keeping us pinned down, not vice versa.
“I think we can do that, Comm,” I said.
“The dumb one's coming back out,” said George.
The “dumb one” referred to one of the group who was shooting at us, off and on. This particular idiot wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a gray sweatshirt. He'd step out of the old machine shed, half crouched, point his AK-47 either at our barn or the old chicken coop, and just blow out about thirty rounds in a couple of seconds. The first time he'd done it, George had said, “Look at that dumb son of a bitch!” It stuck. So far, shooting from the hip the way he was, he'd not come close to even hitting the barn, let alone anybody inside. It wasn't for lack of trying, though. I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to draw ffre, and that was the other reason for “dumb one.” There was something about the jumpy way he did it that told me that this wasn't really his idea. The comfort was, it let us know they weren't sure exactly where we were.
“Back in a minute, Hester,” I said. I