In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [1]
A small thing but mine own, he thought, grinning mentally because he was unable to work the necessary facial muscles. His face under the oxygen mask felt frozen, his arms and legs numb, his body did not exist. Until someone started to dig a hole in his side with a sword. He let out a roar of pain then, but it must have been only a whimper because his throat refused to move, too.
“We’re just intubating you, putting a tube in your lungs, got to drain the blood quickly,” a soothing female voice said, close to his ear.
Well, what the fuck happened to anesthetic? he wanted to shout back. But of course, he could say nothing.
“What’s your name?” someone else yelled at him. “Open your eyes, look at me. . . .”
Weren’t his eyes open? He could see faces peering down at him under a halo of light, feel hands on him, hear them speak. He just could not answer.
“Blood pressure’s gone, we’re losing him. . . .”
The gel they smeared on his chest was cold. He thought someone should tell them about that, tell them to warm it up a little so it’s not such a shock to the system. The next thing he knew, his heart was jumping out of his chest as the cardiac shock jolted his body upward in an arc. Again. And again.
“What’s the reading?” someone demanded.
Why bother? he thought wearily. I’m already waiting to see that light at the end of the tunnel, the light that welcomes the dead.
He was so tired. He knew he was going. He was on his way. He felt his body jolt one more time, but the voices were dimmer now. He gave a mental shrug. He’d had a good life, he guessed. As good as it gets. At least in the latter years. He couldn’t grumble. He had no wife, no kids, no family. Not much to live for really. Except maybe another dinner at the little Italian place he favored. Or one last weekend at the old beach house, out on the promontory, alone with the elements, taking out the boat he had painstakingly restored over the years.
He loved that place in any weather—the silent, rolling spring fogs; the hot sizzle of August; the languid late-summer nights; the gray, rain-lashed storms of winter. He’d always thought he had found paradise. Until now, when he was about to discover the real thing. . . .
“Try again!” a stern voice commanded the storm troops, and again the cardiac shock ricocheted through his body.
Just give it up, guys, why don’t you? he wanted to say. It’s just too hard to make the effort to live now. . . . This is easy, sliding into the tunnel, waitingto see the light . . . maybe to see God’s face, finally, the way the preacher always used to tell us we would, way back when we were kids in that little cedar-plank Baptist chapel in the foothills of the East Tennessee mountains. . . .
“There’s no pulse,” someone yelled.
Of course there isn’t, I’m dying. He relaxed into it. There was nothing to live for. No one.
He felt a piercing pain as they injected a stimulant directly into his heart. He wanted to scream.
“One more time,” the command came, and his body jumped again.
Zelda. The name zapped through his brain along with the cardiac shock. What had happened to Zelda? Where was she? They had killed him. Now they would be after her.
“There’s a pulse.” The nurse’s voice was triumphant as they all gazed at the monitor with the little green peaks and valleys that showed his heart beating again.
With a monumental effort, Ed opened his eyes. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said in a throaty whisper.
3
Homicide Detective Marco Camelia stood to one side in the emergency room, watching the battle between life and death. As far as he could see, death was winning. And that would make his job of finding the perpetrators of the crime a hell of a lot more difficult. Now, if only Ed Vincent would come out of it, wake up and tell them who did it, he would have it made.
Camelia was forty-six years old, a lean, wiry Sicilian of medium height, with thick dark hair and brown eyes that looked almost black when he was mad, which was a good part of the time. He