In His Protective Custody

“If I save my strength for anything,” Zane warned him, “it’ll be to strangle you.”

“Fine,” Ryan bit off, snaking the car around an ice cream truck that had its annoying theme song on. “First we get you patched up, then we’ll discuss you strangling me. Fair enough?”

Zane inclined his head in agreement. There wasn’t exactly much he could do, since Ryan was the one behind the wheel. Zane usually let his partner drive because traffic snarls and logjam conditions didn’t seem to faze Ryan the way they did him.

“Fair enough,” Zane echoed, repeating the phrase grudgingly.

Ryan definitely looked concerned, Zane thought. The man kept glancing at him as if his partner expected him to go up in smoke at any second. There was fear in Lukkas’s eyes.

“I’m okay, Ryan,” he assured the other officer. “I’d be more okay without a bullet in my arm, but I’m okay,” he repeated. “Really,” he underscored when his partner of a little more than a year made no answer. “There’s no need to drive on the sidewalk. Look.” He nodded toward the front windshield. “The cars are beginning to clear a path for us.”

“About time,” Ryan declared, mumbling under his breath. “We’re the police—they should be clearing a path for us.”

“The ‘protect and serve’ is in our part of the deal, not theirs,” Zane reminded him. “They don’t even have to be accommodating if they don’t want to be—unless we arrest them.”

Ordinarily, his partner wasn’t this forgiving of the public. “You just want to argue,” Ryan accused, flooring the vehicle, going all of fifteen yards before he had to slow down again.

Zane slowly let out a labored breath. Was it his imagination, or was it getting harder to breathe?

“No, I just want to stop bleeding. You could have stayed on the scene and brought the gunman in,” Zane reminded him. There was no need for the man to do an imitation of a mother hen. “McKenzie could have taken me to the hospital. Hell, I could have taken me to the hospital.”

“Number one, it was your shot that stopped the thief, so technically you should have been the one to take him in, not me. Two, McKenzie can’t find his way out of a paper bag. It’d take him four hours to get to the ‘nearest’ hospital.” He glanced toward his partner. “And you would have probably bullied him out of taking you there altogether. Aha, aha.” One hand off the wheel, he pointed at Zane’s face. “You’re smiling.”

“I’m grimacing, Lukkas,” Zane corrected him. “You just drove over another damn pothole.” This one had felt as if it was big enough to swallow the whole squad car—with room to spare. The jarring motion accentuated the pain in his arm.

“Sorry. Not my fault the city’s falling apart faster than the mayor can come up with the money to fix it.” The siren was on and the lights were flashing. Craning his neck, Ryan stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Get out of the way, damn it! Can’t you hear the damn siren?” he shouted.

His words were all but swallowed up by the noise of the crowds as they made their way through the throngs of humanity that occupied the streets at any given moment of the day.

Zane stared straight ahead, trying to distract himself from the fire in his arm. The streets of the city were always crowded, but it seemed as if they were even more so at this particular time of the day. It was lunchtime.

He looked down at his arm, staring approximately where the bullet had gone in. He would have felt better if there was also an exit wound, but there wasn’t. The bullet was still inside his arm, and despite the hastily secured “bandage” created out of the convenience store clerk’s towel inventory, the wound was oozing blood. A lot of it.

And he was getting progressively more light-headed. Despite his efforts to concentrate, Zane could feel his grasp on his surroundings slipping away from him.

He didn’t like not being in control, and he wasn’t, not here.

Initially, Ryan had wanted to call for an ambulance, but waiting for one would have taken even longer, so he’d opted to allow his partner to drive him to the nearest hospital. In this case that was Patience Memorial.

He hoped that the name wasn’t an indication of what he was going to need to have while he sat around, waiting to be seen.

“Hallelujah, we’re here!” Ryan declared in much the same way that the Israelites must have sounded when, after forty years of aimless wandering, they finally reached the Promised Land.

Directly before the hospital’s main entrance, a security guard directed traffic. Barely out of his teens, the guard stopped making exaggerated hand gestures as Ryan all but stopped right on top of him.

The security guard did his best to sound official. “Emergency vehicle parking is to your left, Officer.” The cheerful grin that punctuated his statement spoiled the effect.

“I’ve got a wounded officer here,” Ryan announced gruffly, pulling the car into the first available space. “I’m bringing him in and then I’ll be out to re-park.”

Jumping out of the black and white, Ryan hurried around to the other side just as Zane opened his door. Zane felt as if the effort to do that simple thing had temporarily drained him. He struggled not to let his fatigue show. “I don’t need you to hover around me, Lukkas.”

“But you might need me to lean on,” the shorter officer pointed out as Zane rose unsteadily to his feet, one hand braced against the hood of the vehicle.

The loss of blood had made him even more dizzy than he’d anticipated. A lot more. Zane scowled as he tried to support himself for a moment, leaning against the side of the vehicle. He didn’t like displaying weakness of any kind. It was disconcerting enough to be weak, much less to show it. But apparently this wound left him no choice.

“Yeah, maybe,” Zane finally said grudgingly.

Ryan raised his eyes to Zane’s. There wasn’t even a hint of a smile this time around. “Don’t worry, I won’t mention this later,” Ryan promised.

Zane eyed him skeptically. Doubt was always his first emotion, but then he relented. “You’re okay, Lukkas,” he said quietly, staring straight ahead.

Ryan smiled, exceedingly pleased. “Coming from you, that’s like getting a five-star rating.” With Zane’s arm stretched across his stout shoulders and holding tightly on to the man’s wrist while supporting his waist with his other hand, Ryan turned toward the security guard. “Which way’s your ER?”

“You can get there right through here,” the man said. His hand was already on the telephone receiver. “I can call for a wheelchair for you if—”

“You do and it’s the last call you’ll ever make,” Zane growled. The security guard immediately stepped away from the wall unit.

“Can’t take you anywhere,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.

“Nobody told you to,” Zane reminded him with more than a little effort.

“Having a partner die on me would’ve looked bad on my record,” Ryan informed him, a note of finality in his voice.

The ER was dead ahead, its entrance guarded by three registration booths, providing the first line of defense. A fast track was available for New York’s finest, and the woman at the first desk immediately waved them into the interior of the facility. At the same time, she was on the intercom, alerting any available staff members that a wounded police officer was coming in and needed immediate attention.

In the middle of an outpatient procedure, Dr. Gloria Furst looked up in response to the announcement she’d just heard. She glanced around the area for the closest attending physician.

Her brown eyes narrowed as she found one.

“Pulaski,” she called out. “Looks like you’re up. See if you can help the man in blue without messing up this time.”

Alyx’s smile was one she’d practiced nightly in the mirror because glaring would only get her into more hot water. “I wasn’t aware of messing up last time, doctor.”

“I’m sure you weren’t,” the doctor commented crisply, her voice frosty. “But you’ll learn, Pulaski. You’ll learn—maybe.”

Alyx drew in a deep breath, told herself that she could and would survive this nightmare and went to find her patient.

Her patient, she was told, was in trauma bed number seven. She made her way over to that section, which turned out to be closer to the front than the back.

Drawing back the curtain, Alyx didn’t look at her newest patient until she was all but on top of him. And then she stopped dead.

Unwilling to lie down as the attending nurse had requested when she took his vitals, Zane was sitting up on the side of the bed. He came across as the very personification of impatience.

“You,” he said in surprise when he saw her.

“Me,” she confirmed. At least her breath was returning, she thought. Thank God for the small stuff. “Officer Calloway, I’d recognize that scowl anywhere,” she added, infusing a deliberate note of cheerfulness into her voice. And then she looked at the wound. “Let me guess. Someone decide that they weren’t thrilled with your attitude?”

“It was a convenience store robbery in progress. We stopped it,” Ryan told her proudly, puffing up his barrel chest just a little. And then he smiled brightly. “Ryan Lukkas.” Putting out his hand, he introduced himself. “I’m his partner.”