She heaved aside a tipped-over armchair and ran out into the rain. John followed her. The air was pungent with the smell of wet laurels and exploded Semtex.
'Told you to stay where you were,' snapped Katie.
'Look at him-this guy needs medical attention, and he needs it right now.'
Katie rang Anglesea Street and called for an ambulance, a fire pump, and the bomb-disposal unit, as well as Liam Fennessy and Jimmy O'Rourke and eight other gardai, no matter where they were or what they were doing.
'Stay well away from the car,' she warned John, but he was already skirting around it. He crossed the lawn, which was scorched with streaks of black, and knelt down next to Declan in the flower bed.
Declan was quaking like a man suffering from an epileptic fit. His hair was cinder-black and sticking up on end. His face was blackened, too, and when John gently lifted his head, his right eye slid glutinously out of its socket and dangled on his cheek. But the worst blast damage was on his left side. His left arm was missing, so that his shoulder bone was gleaming through the bloody shreds of his sleeve, and his left leg had been blown just above the knee. Katie saw his leg, right in the middle of the road, with his neatly tied Adidas trainer still on it.
Blood was jetting out of Declan's femoral artery and darkening the soil beneath his leg. Without any hesitation, John pulled off his belt, tore back the tatters of Declan's overalls, and lashed the belt around his thigh, pulling it so tight that the blood stopped spurting almost at once. 'Get me a towel,' he told Katie. 'We've got to stop his arm from bleeding, too. And blankets, to keep him warm. He's in serious shock.'
Katie ran into the house and stripped blankets off her bed. When she came back out John had stripped off his coat and was using his bundled-up shirt as a pad to press against Declan's shoulder. Rain dripped from his hair and ran down his bare, muscular back.
'Here,' she said, and gave him two bath towels. Then she covered Declan with blankets, and knelt over him to keep the rain off his mutilated face. The Pajero's tires were burning now, with a malevolent hissing noise, and there was a stench of rubber that made her eyes water and went right down her throat.
'How long before the ambulance gets here?' John asked her.
'They're very quick, mostly. But it depends where they're coming from.'
'He won't make it unless we can treat him for shock.'
'He'd be dead already if it wasn't for you.'
'I did two years' training at San Francisco General Hospital. I was going to be a doctor.'
They waited in the herbaceous border for another ten minutes, and then they heard the ambulance siren coming from Fota Island. Even before the ambulance appeared, they heard squad car sirens as well, five or six of them, and a fire pump.
Katie looked at John through the rain. Declan was still shuddering, and occasionally he let out a quick, surprised gasp. Then the ambulance pulled into the driveway, and the doors were opened up. A young paramedic laid a hand on her shoulder and said, 'You're grand, Superintendent. We'll take it from here.'
A garda gave her a hand and helped her up, and it was only then that she realized that she was shuddering, too, and that the tarmac drive, when she tried to walk across it, had turned to water.
47
After an hour Jimmy O'Rourke came into the sitting room, brushing the rain from his shoulders. 'We've checked everywhere. Garage, shed. All through the house. There's no more booby traps that we can find.'
'Does it look like the kind of device that Dave MacSweeny might have planted?'
'Well, let's put it this way, it doesn't look as if it was very professional. The bomb boys think they wired about half a pound of Semtex to the self-starter, but the connection may have been faulty. It was only when Declan put the jump leads on it that there was enough current to bridge the gap.'
'God, I don't know how I'm going to break the news to Patrick.'
Jimmy laid a hand on her shoulder. 'I'll do it if you like. Patrick and I go back a very long way.'
'No, you're all right. It's my job. And besides, I was the one who asked Declan to take a look at Paul's car, and it should have occurred to me that there was some good reason why it wouldn't start. That was what Dave MacSweeny was doing here yesterday. He wasn't waiting to follow us. He couldn't even have known that I was going to give Paul a lift. He was hanging around, the bastard, waiting to hear his bomb go off.'
'And when it didn't, he lost his temper, and rammed you into the river?'
'It's the most likely scenario, isn't it? Pity Dave MacSweeny isn't around to tell us whether it's true.'
Jimmy turned to John, who was wearing one of Paul's shirts, and a thick brown Aran sweater. 'John?the paramedics asked me to tell you that you probably saved Declan's life. He's critical, but they think he's going to pull through.'
'John was a medical student in San Francisco,' Katie explained.
'Well, that was God looking out for Declan, I'd say.'
John said, 'It wasn't any big deal. In any case, I quit after two years. I guess I wasn't really cut out for it. It gets to you, after a while, all that blood and guts. I was more interested in alternative healing, you know. Aromatherapy, reflexology, herbal medicines, that kind of thing.'
'Witchcraft?' asked Jimmy, making a potion-stirring gesture. 'Eye of toad and bollock of bat?'
John gave him a wry smile, but didn't reply.
Liam came in. 'Superintendent? Can I see you for a moment?'
'Of course.'
'Outside, if that's all right. There's something I have to show you.'
