Ally’s eyes held Kevin’s. She was ready to back away with the knife-to run-but she had a better chance of holding him with her eyes.
‘We’ll take care of you,’ she told Kevin. ‘Trust me. Jerry can’t hurt you any more.’
A car door slammed. Feet against gravel, moving fast. A man’s gruff voice, calling out. Sergeant Matheson.
She rose on feet that were decidedly wobbly, with the knife behind her back. She didn’t take her eyes off Kevin.
‘We’re through here.’
‘Kevin’s killed Jerry,’ she told the sergeant as he stopped in the doorway, appalled. She kept her voice carefully neutral, and behind her back and out of Kevin’s view she held out the knife toward him. ‘I think Kevin needs to go back to hospital now. Can you take him, Sergeant?’
He was good. His eyes swept the room, taking in the scene before him, but even before he was done he had the knife from her and it was pushed into a recess behind the desk. Then he went to kneel before Kevin.
‘Help the doc,’ he told her, glancing over to where Darcy was pushing desperately downward. ‘I have this.’
It took the next three hours and all their combined skill to save the man Ally hated most in the world.
Kevin’s first stab wound had been to Jerry’s chest. Instead of backing away from the bars, he’d slumped against them, and Kevin had stabbed wildly at everything else he could. Luckily Jerry had fallen with his head out of reach, but his legs were a mass of deep lacerations, any one of which could have been fatal.
They almost lost him. Darcy had shoved a chair under his legs to raise them above the level of his heart, trying to stop the pressure of the blood surging out onto the floor.
For those first few minutes Ally worked with him. They put pressure pads on every spot they could find, fighting desperately to stop the bleeding.
It seemed an age, though in truth it was only three or four minutes, before back-up arrived, in the shape of Betty, driving her own car but carrying bags of saline and more dressings than Darcy’s meagre doctor’s bag provided.
The three of them worked on.
Sergeant Matheson took Kevin away but they didn’t notice. Did Kevin realise that Jerry wasn’t dead? Ally wondered, but it didn’t matter.
He could still die. His blood pressure was dropping and dropping.
But somehow, somehow he lived on. To lose this much blood and live was almost miraculous.
Still they worked.
Finally Darcy sat back. The last of the spurting sources of blood had been quelled. Maybe there was a hope. The fluids were pouring in now, the IV line set to maximum. He had a chance.
Or did he?
‘His trachea has moved,’ Darcy said. He’d hardly looked at Ally. There’d been no time. The three of them had worked as a solid medical team, as if they’d trained together for years and were working in the emergency ward of some huge city hospital instead of in a lake of blood on the floor of the number one cell of Tambrine Creek police station. Now, though, Darcy had time to sit back and assess the whole situation.
His trachea had moved?
Ally finished taping a pressure bandage to Jerry’s groin and looked up at Jerry’s throat. The man was seriously overweight, his neck was pudgy but she put her fingers down and felt, and she could feel what Darcy meant.
Jerry’s trachea felt as if it had shifted slightly to the left.
‘His lung.’ Darcy grabbed a stethoscope from the pile of equipment Betty had brought, and his face tightened as he listened.
‘Tension pneumothorax?’ Ally asked, and he nodded.
‘It has to be. That first wound was to the lung. I could hear the pneumothorax before but didn’t realise… The air’s going straight out into the chest wall.’
Dear God. They all knew what that meant. A punctured lung causing a pneumothorax was serious, but a tension pneumothorax was far, far worse. The air that Jerry was managing to get into his injured lungs wasn’t being exhaled. Neither was it escaping through the track of the wound. Part of it was escaping into the chest wall.
The pressure was building, shifting the trachea. Soon it would compress the heart and the other lung, causing it to collapse. And then…
Then death.
The ambulance officers were there then-two volunteer officers who were standing back in dismay, waiting to see whether they’d be transporting a corpse or a patient.
‘Let’s get him to hospital,’ Darcy said grimly. ‘I need to get a tube in there.’
‘Can you?’ Ally practically gaped. Inserting a cannula into a chest wall was a job for a surgeon, and a good one at that.
‘I don’t see that I have a choice,’ Darcy said grimly. ‘I’ve seen it done. Once. What do they say? See one, do one, teach one. Teaching’s for tomorrow. For now… Are you assisting-
There was only one answer to that.
‘If you’re going to be a hero, you need a heroine,’ she said, and flashed an uncertain smile at Betty. ‘How about you? You want to be a damned-fool heroine, too?’
‘Who, me? I’m just here ’cos I like blood.’ Betty grinned, and the awful tension dissipated for the moment. ‘And I love watching heroes and heroines. My very favourite thing.’
The surgery Darcy performed was the stuff of nightmares. Injecting lignocaine. Using a cannula with trochar, inserting it carefully, painstakingly carefully through the chest wall. Hearing the rush of air. Connecting the cannula to an underwater seal and watching the water bubble. Knowing the air couldn’t flow back up the tube.
Described like that, it almost sounded easy, Ally thought, but it was the finest piece of surgery she’d ever seen performed by a non-surgeon. That it had been done by a family doctor who’d last seen the procedure five years ago was unbelievable.
She couldn’t believe Darcy had succeeded, and years later when he recalled doing it Darcy still shook his head in disbelief himself.
They didn’t stop there. The slashes were deep and serious and no amount of pressure would stop some of them from seeping. Some of the slashes were down to the bone. The suturing took hours, and some would require further work from a plastic surgeon. Maybe he’d even need vascular surgery if he wasn’t to lose a hand. But they managed to establish a blood supply of sorts, and when Darcy finally dressed the hand Jerry’s fingers were encouragingly warm.
Finally they’d done all they could-and he was still alive. Ally could stand back from the table, push away her mask and think that maybe he had a chance of long-term survival.
‘The helicopter’s coming in now,’ Betty told them in a voice that was far from steady. ‘Medical evacuation’s been arranged.’
‘They’ll have to fly low,’ Darcy told her. ‘The air pressure…’
‘Do you want him to stay, then?’ Betty was a fine nurse. She’d reacted with composure through everything. ‘I didn’t even ask-I just had Joe get them to come.’
‘He needs to go,’ Darcy said. He looked down at Jerry for a long minute. ‘The lung needs an expert. The blood supply to the hand is none too stable. And the wound in his groin…he may well need a vascular surgeon to repair the damage if he’s not to lose feeling. Let’s get him out of here now.’ He hesitated. ‘What’s happening to Kevin?’
‘Ally told one of the nurses to give Kevin five milligrams of diazepam IV,’ Betty told him, and he threw Ally a curious look.
‘That’s a lot of diazepam for a massage therapist to prescribe,’ Darcy said with a wry grin.
‘You’re just lucky the massage therapist didn’t take the whole lot herself,’ Ally retorted. ‘Though if there’s any going now, I wouldn’t mind at all.’
Finally, while Darcy assisted in loading Jerry into the ambulance for transfer to the helicopter pad, Ally went
