extreme stress, that such an impulse might be a part of her.
She said, “Did I want to die?”
“You aren't going to die,” the paramedic assured her as he and another man untied the ropes from the handles of the litter, preparatory to loading her into the ambulance. “The worst is over now. The worst is over.”
TWO
1
Half a dozen police and emergency vehicles were parked across two lanes of the mountain highway. Uphill and downhill traffic shared the third lane, regulated by uniformed deputies. Lindsey was aware of people gawking at her from a Jeep Wagoneer, but they vanished beyond shatters of snow and heavy plumes of crystallized exhaust fumes.
The ambulance van could accommodate two patients. They loaded Lindsey onto a wheeled gurney that was fixed to the left wall by two spring clamps to prevent it from rolling while the vehicle was in motion. They put Hatch on another identical gurney along the right wall.
Two paramedics crowded into the rear of the ambulance and pulled the wide door shut behind them. As they moved, their white, insulated nylon pants and jackets produced continuous frictional sounds, a series of soft whistles that seemed to be electronically amplified in those close quarters.
With a short burst of its siren, the ambulance started to move. The paramedics swayed easily with the rocking motion. Experience had made them surefooted.
Side by side in the narrow aisle between the gurneys, both men turned to Lindsey. Their names were stitched on the breast pockets of their jackets: David O'Malley and Jerry Epstein. With a curious combination of professional detachment and concerned attentiveness, they began to work on her, exchanging medical information with each other in crisp emotionless voices but speaking to her in soft, sympathetic, encouraging tones.
That dichotomy in their behavior alarmed rather than soothed Lindsey, but she was too weak and disoriented to express her fear. She felt infuriatingly delicate. Shaky. She was reminded of a surrealistic painting titled
Although her mind was too clouded to find any sense in most of what the two men were saying, she understood enough to know that she was suffering from hypothermia, possibly frostbite, and that they were worried about her. Blood pressure too low. Heartbeat slow and irregular. Slow and shallow respiration.
Maybe that clean getaway was still possible.
If she really wanted it.
She was ambivalent. If she actually had hungered for death on a subconscious level since Jimmy's funeral, she had no special appetite for it now — though neither did she find it particularly unappealing. Whatever happened to her would happen, and in her current condition, with her emotions as numb as her five senses, she did not much care about her fate. Hypothermia switched off the survival instinct with a narcotizing pall as effective as that produced by an alcoholic binge.
Then, between the two muttering paramedics, she caught a glimpse of Hatch lying on the other gurney, and abruptly she was jolted out of her half-trance by her concern for him. He looked so pale. But not just white. Another, less healthy shade of pale with a lot of gray in it. His face — turned toward her, eyes closed, mouth open slightly — looked as if a flash fire had swept through it, leaving nothing between bone and skin except the ashes of flesh consumed.
“Please,” she said, “my husband.” She was surprised that her voice was just a low, rough croak.
“You first,” O'Malley said.
“No. Hatch. Hatch … needs … help.”
“You first,” O'Malley repeated.
His insistence reassured her somewhat. As bad as Hatch looked, he must be all right, must have responded to CPR, must be in better shape than she was, or otherwise they would have tended to him first. Wouldn't they?
Her thoughts grew fuzzy again. The sense of urgency that had gripped her now abated. She closed her eyes.
2
Later …
In Lindsey's hypothermic torpor, the murmuring voices above her seemed as rhythmic, if not as melodic, as a lullaby. But she was kept awake by the increasingly painful stinging sensation in her extremities and by the rough handling of the medics, who were packing small pillowlike objects against her sides. Whatever the things were — electric or chemical heating pads, she supposed — they radiated a soothing warmth far different from the fire burning within her feet and hands.
“Hatch needs warmed up, too,” she said thickly.
“He's fine, don't you worry about him,” Epstein said. His breath puffed out in small white clouds as he spoke.
“But he's cold.”
“That's what he needs to be. That's just how we want him.”
O'Malley said, “But not too cold, Jerry. Nyebern doesn't want a Popsicle. Ice crystals form in the tissue, there'll be brain damage.”
Epstein turned to the small half-open window that separated the rear of the ambulance from the forward compartment. He called loudly to the driver: “Mike, turn on a little heat maybe.”
Lindsey wondered who Nyebern might be, and she was alarmed by the words “brain damage.” But she was too weary to concentrate and make sense of what they said.
Her mind drifted to recollections from childhood, but they were so distorted and strange that she must have slipped across the border of consciousness into a half-sleep where her subconscious could work nightmarish tricks on her memories.
…
