detrimental to your health.'
'There's no need to threaten me.'
'I'm afraid there is. May I remind you who fired first?'
'You came bursting in here like the Seventh Cavalry--what did you expect?'
'Shall we bandy civilities later?' Pendergast said coldly. 'My colleague is badly hurt.'
Still remarkably composed, June Brodie turned, pressed the tab on a wall intercom, and spoke into it with a voice of command. 'We have visitors. Prepare to receive an emergency patient--and meet us with a stretcher down on the dock.'
Brodie walked through the room and exited the door without looking over her shoulder. Pendergast followed her back down the hallway, gun at the ready. She descended the stairs, crossed the main parlor of the lodge, exited the building, and walked across the platform to the pier to the floating dock. She stepped gracefully into the back and fired up the engine. 'Untie the boat,' she said. 'And please put away that gun.'
Pendergast tucked the gun in his belt and untied the boat. She revved the engine, backing it out.
'She's about a thousand yards east-southeast,' said Pendergast, pointing into the darkness. 'That way,' he added. 'There's a gunman in the swamp. But of course, you probably know all about that. He may be wounded--he may not.'
Brodie looked at him. 'Do you want to retrieve your colleague, or not?'
Pendergast indicated the boat's control panel.
Saying nothing else, the woman accelerated the boat and they sped along the muddy shores of the bayou. After a few minutes she slowed to enter a tiny channel, which wound this way and that, dividing and braiding into a labyrinth of waterways. Brodie managed to penetrate the swamp in a way that Pendergast was surprised was possible, always keeping to a sinuous channel that, even in bright moonlight, was almost invisible.
'More to the right,' he said, peering into the trees. They were using no lights; it was easier to see farther in the moonlight--and it was safer as well.
The boat wound among the channels, now and then threatening to ground in the shallow muck but always sliding across when the jet drive was gunned.
'There,' said Pendergast, pointing to the mark on the tree trunk.
The boat grounded sluggishly on a mud bar. 'This is as far as we can go,' Brodie murmured.
Pendergast turned to her, searched her quickly and expertly for concealed weapons, and then spoke in a low voice. 'Stay here. I'll go retrieve my colleague. Continue to cooperate and you'll survive this night.'
'I repeat: you don't need to threaten me,' she said.
'It's not a threat; it's clarification.' Pendergast climbed over the side of the boat and began making his way through the muck.
'Captain Hayward?' he called.
No answer.
'Laura?'
Still nothing but silence.
In a moment he was at Hayward's side. She was still in shock, semi-conscious, her head lolling against the rotten stump. He glanced back and forth briefly, listening for a rustle or the crack of a twig; looking for any glint of light off metal that might indicate the presence of the shooter. Seeing nothing, he gripped Hayward under the arms and dragged her through the muck back to the boat. He lifted her over the side, and Brodie grasped the limp body and helped set it in the bottom.
Without a word she turned and fired up the engine; they backed out of the channel and then returned at high speed to the camp. As they approached, a small, silent man wearing hospital whites came into view, standing at the dock with a stretcher. Pendergast and Brodie lifted Hayward out of the boat and placed her on the stretcher; the man then rolled her along the platform and into the main parlor of the lodge. He and Pendergast carried the stretcher up the stairs, down the hall, and into the bizarrely high-tech emergency room, positioning it beside a bank of critical care equipment.
As they moved her from the stretcher onto a surgical bed, June Brodie turned to the little man in white. 'Intubate her,' she said sharply. 'Orotracheal. And oxygen.'
The man leapt into action, passing a tube into Hayward's mouth and delivering oxygen, both of them working with a swift economy of action that clearly attested to years of experience.
'What happened?' she asked Pendergast as she cut away a mud-heavy sleeve with a pair of medical scissors.
'Gunshot wound and alligator bite.'
June Brodie nodded, then listened to Hayward's pulse and took her blood pressure, examining the pupils with a light. The movements were practiced and highly professional. 'Hang a bag of dextran,' she told the man in scrub whites, 'and run a 14g IV.'
While he worked, she readied a needle and took a blood sample, filling a syringe and transferring it to vacuum tubes. She plucked a scalpel from a nearby sterile tray and, with several deft cuts, removed the rest of the pant leg.
'Irrigation.'
The man handed her a large saline-filled syringe, and she washed the mud and filth away, plucking off numerous leeches as she did so and tossing everything into a red-bag disposer. Injecting a local around the ugly lacerations and the bullet wound, she worked diligently but calmly, cleaning everything with saline and antiseptic. Lastly, she administered an antibiotic and dressed the wound.
