Spider - Michael Morley [128]
McLeod is an expert shot. He’s killed deer, rabbits and all manner of birds, but he’s never shot a human being before. Now his hands are shaking as badly as if he were mixing a cocktail. He takes hold of the pistol by its barrel and hands it to Orsetta. The policewoman checks it and then levels it at Spider’s crumpled body.
She’s taking no chances. One twitch from the motherfucking son of a bitch and she’ll empty the rest of the magazine into him.
‘Further back,’ she says to McLeod, ‘there is a woman on the ground, please go and help her. I will watch him.’
‘Sure, yeah, sure,’ says McLeod nervously. He heads around the tomb and immediately recognizes the collapsed body as Nancy King.
Orsetta hears voices and footsteps behind her, coming from the entrance to the catacomb. She realizes that her hearing has been affected by the gunfire. She feels her head start to spin and her sense of balance slip away.
Through the fog she makes out that the voices are speaking Italian. We’re safe, she tells herself.
The crackle of a police radio echoes through the catacombs and then beams from several flashlights illuminate the blackness. Someone tells her that everything is going to be all right. A hand reassuringly touches her and fingers gently prise the gun from her grasp. In the glare of a flashlight she sees McLeod start to remove tape from Nancy King’s hands.
Then her mind goes slack and she allows herself to collapse.
It takes them twenty minutes to find Jack and Lu’s bodies in the rubble of the building.
‘Over here!’ shouts ESU veteran Wayne Harvey. ‘They’re beneath this fall.’ The blast has brought down parts of the ceiling and water is flooding in from ruptured pipes that have been ripped from the walls. The electricity is out and bright beams and helmet lights cross each other as people scramble towards Harvey. A dozen hands claw at the heap of bricks, wood and breeze blocks.
‘I see someone!’ he shouts, looking down on Lu Zagalsky’s bloodied, naked and unconscious body.
The bondage table has taken most of the force of the blast, the slab of heavy oak not cracking and only the legs of the table finally buckling from the weight of the ceiling fall.
Howie Baumguard tears the table away and sees Jack’s twisted torso lying protectively across the girl.
‘Oxygen and stretchers!’ shouts Harvey, taking off a glove to feel for a pulse on Lu’s neck. He glances at his watch. ‘She’s alive, but only just. Get her covered up and outta here, quick as you can.’
‘It’s okay, buddy, we’ve got you,’ says Howie, kneeling in the wreckage next to Jack, pawing away hunks of concrete as if they were unwanted cushions on his sofa. ‘We’ll have you out of this shit in no time.’
Jack is barely conscious and still too shocked and dazed to speak.
‘Fuck, man! That’s bad!’ says Howie, suddenly spotting his friend’s injured hand. ‘Paramedic! We need someone over here, quick, fucking quick!’
‘On my way!’ replies a calm voice from somewhere off in the darkness. A beam of helmet light flashes in Howie’s eyes, blinding him for a second, then the distinctive west coast voice of Pat O’Brien is next to him. ‘I see him. Stand back and let me get in there.’
Howie steps aside and stumbles, his ankle twisting on the unseen jags of bricks and blocks.
‘He’s bleeding like fuckery,’ he says, pointing. ‘Look at his hand, his right hand.’
O’Brien aims the light down, takes one look and knows instantly what to do. He slips a rucksack off his shoulder, snaps on latex gloves and quickly blots the wound with an antiseptic pad so he can see the ‘three S’s’: the size, shape and severity of the cut.
‘Your buddy’s right, you’ve got a main bleed here, my friend,’ says O’Brien, turning Jack’s hand in his own, wondering how much blood the guy might have lost. Another quick dip in the medi-sac produces a tourniquet, sterile spray and suture kit. The gash is still pumping and is filled with grit and dust. He sluices it with the sterile spray, picks out what fragments he can with his little finger and then dives in with the needle and