A Fountain Filled With Blood

He had a bizarre urge to take her hand in both of his and kiss it. He squelched the notion, nodding instead. “Yeah. Absolutely. You get your car and I’ll follow you.” She flashed him another smile and jogged off toward the parking lot, her long black skirt flapping around her ankles. How the hell did she manage to be so damn pleasant and open and normal, when he felt like a seventeen-year-old around her? Ever since he had crossed that line last December, he had pretty much avoided her, on the theory that his feelings must be middle-aged idiocy and absence would make the heart grow indifferent. It hadn’t worked that he could tell. Spotting her in the park, running into her at the IGA, or even driving past the rectory made his chest squeeze and the back of his throat ache. Maybe this would be better, to go on as friends, ignoring that other thing. Hell, maybe if he acted normal, he’d come to feel normal, too.

A blast of noise and movement swung his attention back to the entrance to the ER. Two EMTs, a doctor, and a nurse were moving a gurney in a carefully controlled frenzy through the bay, heading toward the open doors of the waiting ambulance. Between the bodies surrounding him, Russ could catch glimpses of Emil’s face. He winced. Christ. “Careful! Keep those lines clear!” the doctor said, levering himself into the ambulance as the EMTs maneuvered Emil, strapped to a spine board, from the gurney to the ambulance bed. The nurse passed over the IV bag she was holding above her head and scrambled up into her seat.

The doors into the ER hissed open again and Paul emerged, accompanied by another nurse. On his face was the look Russ knew from Vietnam—the face of someone who has just seen his buddy blown away beside him. A mix of shock, fear, and terrible comprehension. “Paul!” he called out. The oversized man looked up. “Clare’s gone to get her car. I’ll follow you to the airport.” Paul nodded, as if speech was too much of an effort right then.

One EMT had finished strapping Emil in and was jumping out of the back of the ambulance when Clare screeched in behind the wheel of her little white-and-red Shelby Cobra. She waved to Paul, who lumbered over and squeezed himself into the tiny passenger seat. The EMT slammed and sealed the door and dashed to the cab of the ambulance. It began moving before the cab door had swung shut.

Russ and the ambulance both kept their lights flashing all the way to the fire station. He couldn’t shake the image of Emil’s ground-meat face. They had never been more than professional friends—he had precious few real friends for someone who had come back to his hometown, Russ realized—but in the five years he had headed up the department, he had spent a lot of time with Emil Dvorak—in the ME’s office, at the hospital, in courthouse hallways. He thought about the pathologist’s razor-sharp wit, his orderly office, full of thick books and opera CDs, his addiction to Sunday-morning political debates. The damage to that fragile brain when Emil’s skull had been pounded again and again—bile rose in Russ’s throat, threatening to choke him. He followed the ambulance across the intersection and into the fire station’s parking lot. Lights blazed from the station bays, burnishing the garaged fire trucks and emergency vehicles, glittering off the blaze-reflective strips on the life-flight helicopter, which was hunkered down in the middle of the asphalt. Several firefighters stood inside their bays, watching. He followed Clare’s car to the farthest corner of the lot, where the firefighters’ cars were parked.

The life-flight team—a paramedic, a nurse, and a pilot—jogged over to the ambulance to help the EMTs off-load Emil on his spine board. Clare leaped from her driver’s seat and paused while Paul wriggled his way out of the passenger side. Russ joined them, a little apart from the medical team, which was carefully transferring Emil into the helicopter.

“Paul,” he said, “I wanted to ask you—what was Emil doing tonight?” One of the nurses hoisted the IV high as they smoothly lifted the board into the belly of the chopper. “Do you know where he was? Who he was with?”

Paul kept his gaze fixed on the figure disappearing into the helicopter. He rubbed his hands up and down, up and down along the seam of his shorts. “He had dinner with some friends of ours. Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler. At their bed-and-breakfast, the Stuyvesant Inn. He was going to come straight home….” his voice trailed off.

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll be talking with them tomorrow. We’re going to get whoever did this.” Russ knew that was cold comfort when measured against Emil’s broken body in the helicopter. Paul looked at him, his eyes wide and red-rimmed.

“Paul,” Clare said, “it’s time. The pilot’s going to warm up the engines now.”