Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [2]
“I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die,” she said.
“Nobody’s going to die. We’ll have you out of here in minutes. After that you’ll be on your way to the hospital, and everything will be hunky-dory. I’m sure your parents or your boyfriend or whoever will meet you there. You’re doing just fine.”
Zak wasn’t sure what the truck officer’s plan was, though he could hear the crew talking it over as they worked, shoving blocks of wood inside, cribbing the vehicle lest the weight cause it to sink onto Zak and his patient. Getting crushed by an SUV was just one more thing for him to think about.
“You guys were out late.”
“We were at Bible study class.”
“This late?”
“It goes on for hours sometimes.”
“There’s a tennis racket here, too. You play tennis?”
“I live for tennis.”
“So you’re pretty good then?”
“Third seed on the Seattle U team, but I’m going to challenge and take second. I’m pretty sure I can. By the end of the year I’m planning to be first.”
“You ever play guys?”
“I play anybody.”
“Good. I bet you can’t beat me.”
“You’re on, buddy.”
“What do you want to bet? Lunch?”
“It’s against my religion to actually wager. But I’ll play you anytime you want. And you won’t win.”
“Okay, then. We’ve got a date.”
“Not a date. I have a boyfriend. Just a tennis match.”
“Right.”
When they began using a small electric saw to cut through the sheet metal, it got significantly noisier inside. It didn’t take long before Zak saw large slabs of the night sky appear, and it wasn’t much longer before Nadine’s leg was free. Somebody slid a backboard partway into the car and asked Zak which direction was most appropriate for sliding her out of the vehicle. He directed them toward the passenger’s side, knowing it was crucial to keep her spine aligned and immobile. Another firefighter grasped her leg, and they carefully eased her out of the driver’s seat and onto the backboard, which made harsh sounds against the particles of broken glass when they slid it out. Nadine blew air through her clenched teeth but other than that was silent, holding Zak’s hand until they pulled her from the vehicle.
Zak crawled out in time to see her placed on a gurney and wheeled toward the back of a nearby medic unit, another firefighter having taken traction on her neck. Even though they’d agreed to play tennis, he doubted she would remember it or that it would actually take place. She was a Bible thumper, and he’d already had one too many Bible thumpers in his life.
Perhaps because he’d grown up in a household full of women, Zak never had any trouble talking to them, which was a good thing, because Zak lost girlfriends almost as quickly as he acquired them. Muldaur, his lieutenant, once said he was so relaxed around the opposite sex it was almost as if he were gay. “Zak could pick up women in a garbage dump,” Muldaur said. “And they’d be gorgeous, too.”
Though he’d had plenty of relationships, Zak would have given anything for a stable situation that would endure as long as the twenty-five-year marriage Muldaur basked in. What he got instead was one unsatisfactory fling after another. Zak’s routine was to meet a woman, take her out a few times—or once—before falling into bed with her, and somewhere in that twilight space after they’d become intimate but before they became friends, he would simply forget her. It wasn’t exactly that he lost interest; he actually forgot. It was pathological and he knew it, but so far he’d done nothing to stop it.
At twenty-eight, Zak had never moved in with anybody and never let a woman move in with him. He’d never been close enough to loving someone to contemplate it. He wasn’t proud of the multiple liaisons and did not boast to his friends about them the way some men did; he was in fact embarrassed by the relentless train of relationships, viewing each as another dereliction in a long line of derelictions. In view of his history, he found it odd that he’d become so attracted to a patient