my brain just shut down with shock and I hadn’t been unconscious at all. But Gunther was.
When my sight kicked back on I could see the big man wrapped hard around the steering yoke, his head up against the windshield and leaking a string of blood that ran down through his eyebrow and onto a cheek.
I tried to reach out to him, but I was half hanging in the seat harness, all my weight pushed forward with the angle of the cockpit. We had pitched into the Glades and speared into the water and black muck. The propeller and most of the engine had disappeared, buried in front of us. The wings at either side looked like they’d simply dropped flat out of the sky and lay floating on the bent stalks of sawgrass, resting on the pile. But in the cockpit, water was settling knee high around both of our legs and when I looked down at Gunther’s leg, I could see the glisten of white bone that had ripped through his trousers at the middle of his thigh. Compound fracture, I thought. And God knows what else.
I tried to do a quick assessment of myself. I could move my feet, but when I tried to twist my shoulders a pain screeched through my lower chest. I had been punched at Frankie O’Hara’s gym with enough wicked hooks to the body to know that I’d at least bruised a few ribs but hoped I hadn’t cracked any. I took shallow breaths and after several seconds I reached out and got a good brace with the left arm on the console and pushed my weight off the harness. I fumbled with the buckle but got it loose and then got solid footing on the angled cockpit floor. I leaned back on the edge of my seat and then reached over to get my fingertips on Gunther’s neck artery. A pulse. Thready, but a pulse. The pilot had not even reached for the radio when we’d felt the first jolts from the engine. I looked at it now, folded into the crushed console and partly submerged in rising water. Useless.
I had to get myself out. I had to get him out. And we were already losing daylight. Who was ever going to find us out here? Who even knew we were out here?
One step at a time, I told myself. “Ya can’t book ’em till ya catch ’em,” Sergeant McGinnis had said in the police academy. “And can’t catch ’em till ya find ’em.”
“And can’t find ’em if they’re dead,” one of the smartass rookies would always whisper.
I used my right hand to twist down my handle and pushed loose the passenger door. Each movement sent a spike of pain up my side, but I was able to crawl up on the seat cushion and pull myself out onto the wing. I stood. My left knee was creaky. An ankle throbbed. Over the wall of sawgrass I could see the roofline of the fish camp in silhouette against the pink glow of sunset that still lightened the horizon. Gunther had brought us to within 150 yards or so. I didn’t know how I’d get him the rest of the way.
I crab walked across the fuselage to the other wing and wrenched open the pilot’s door. Gunther’s seat belt was either unhooked or had snapped. If he had a neck injury, I couldn’t help it now. We were both soaking wet. It was getting dark and even a seventy-five-degree South Florida night was going to play hell with our body temperatures. Gunther had an open fracture and was probably bleeding internally. I’d taken enough emergency medical courses as a cop to know we were in deep shit. I looked again at Gunther. He was 230 pounds and unconscious. Even if I could get him out, I’d never be able to carry him 150 yards. I got that old cop feeling of hearing shots and wanting to go the other way. Fight or flee. Self-preservation. The sky still glowed in the west. I bent over, got a grip under the pilot’s arms and started pulling.
It took another twenty minutes to get him out. My rib cage screamed. Part of me was glad the big man was out cold. At least he couldn’t consciously feel the pain of his broken femur as I jerked him out onto the wing. He groaned only once and I saw his eyes roll up. I bent my face