Isla refused to cower against a damn car instead of helping Sally. If someone was firing from the right and another from the left but their reach wasn’t quite as far, she needed to get her friend behind the Escalade so she could help treat the wound.
And if there was a third shooter back there, then so be it. But she didn’t think so because there hadn’t been any bullets coming from that direction.
Besides, the security guards had the shooters occupied.
She hoped.
With a prayer on her lips, she dove past Sally and then tugged the woman behind the Escalade, without incident.
“You okay?” she asked Sally.
The woman nodded. “Yeah.” She removed her hand from her shoulder and pushed up her scrub sleeve to view the wound. “Think it was through and through.”
Isla helped her lean forward so she could view the other side. “Yes.” Blood flowed from what she felt was the entrance wound.
Thank God the bullet hadn’t been on the other side.
Sirens descended, tires squealed, then she could hear Gabe’s voice announcing the police presence and the “Drop your weapons” order.
Keeping an ear on the action but her eyes on her friend, she pulled off her shirt, and using a piece of broken glass, cut some of the material into strips. Sally folded a swath and placed it on the entry wound while Isla did the same to the exit before wrapping several of the strips around the woman’s shoulder and patches of cloth.
It wasn’t much of a tourniquet, but it would do for now.
The shooting stopped.
“Come any closer and I’ll kill him!” a male voice shouted. “I’m not here for him, but I will shoot him.”
She glanced around, noting the police and a few men sherecognized from ESI working their way slowly toward them through the parking lot. Isla searched the faces, looking for Sinjin, but she knew he wasn’t there. His vehicle hadn’t been in his driveway when she’d left for the hospital earlier.
God, she wished she had her phone so she could talk to him, hear his voice. But it was in her purse on the ground somewhere between the hospital entrance and the cars. She glanced at Sally, noting the woman didn’t have her purse either. They no doubt dropped them when they’d scurried for cover.
“Put your weapon down,” Gabe ordered, his men setting up a perimeter in the next row.
“Not going to happen,” the guy grunted. “Not unless you arrest the people who let my father die.”
The stalemate continued for what felt like days but was probably less than an hour. It was a nightmare, but she was wide awake.
A whooshing noise from chopper blades sounded in the distance. Probably some news station wanting to get a good view, no doubt.
Isla itched for a better observation spot. She hated that she couldn’t see what was going on, so she lifted up and peeked through the car’s windows to see security behind the pillars, and one shooter holding a gun to a hostage. Unsure where the second shooter hid, she quickly ducked back down.
She watched as Mac and his men slowly pulled people huddling behind vehicles to safety and the line-up of ambulances that were parked at the back of the lot.
The whoop-whoop of the chopper sounded close now, but instead of hovering above as she’d assumed, it flew over and landed somewhere down the road. She found that odd but pushed it out of her mind.
Row by row, Mac and his men crept closer, and she silently urged them to hurry because blood was starting to soak throughSally’s dressing.
Isla was putting pressure on Sally’s wound. They had been taking turns, but she could tell the woman was getting weak. Not because she was sweating—it was Godawful hot outside—but because of her pallor and her eyes were starting to drift closed. At the very least her friend was in shock.
“Hang on,” she told Sally. “Our row is next.”
“Too bad you’ll be dead,” a gravelly voice said from low on the ground near the front of the car.
Isla sucked in a breath and twisted to the side in time to see the man who had stopped her in the hallway near the ICU waiting room last Friday. He wasn’t the one she just saw holding a hostage, so he must be the second shooter, her mind reasoned.
“You aren’t wearing scrubs now, but you were the day my father died,” he said, pointing his gun at her, crouched down out of view from the police.
Before she had time to react, blink—breathe—a shadow appeared on her left, and in a blur of movement, barreled into her, rolling with her to the right as she heard a gun go off. With the wind knocked out of her, she didn’t have time to scream.
