Breaths. Compressions. Breaths. When she didn’t respond, I shocked her again. Alternating CPR. Then again. After the third shock, her eyes flittered. She sucked in part of a breath and a pulse registered in her carotid.
I laid the girl in the grass. Her body was vomiting again. I say “her body” because she wasn’t conscious enough to know it. I turned her head sideways and attempted to clear her airway so she wouldn’t aspirate the contents of her stomach. In the distance I heard sirens. Then I heard the signature whop-whop of a helicopter. This girl was suffering drug and alcohol poisoning on a level I’d seldom if ever seen. It was possible she’d already suffered brain damage, and I had no idea if she’d ever open her eyes again. Given the limited open ground, I turned to Summer and Ellie and said, “You two should get inside.”
As the helicopter hovered and then began to descend to the pad, churning up pieces of debris like a whirlwind, they ran inside. The helicopter touched down, and before the paramedics had time to exit and assess her, I carried her up the dock house steps and to the rear-opening door of the bird and slid her onto the stretcher, which they were in the process of removing. Observing the girl’s condition, one paramedic listened to me while the second, a woman, climbed back inside and began working on her. In the fifteen seconds it took to inform the paramedic, the woman had inserted an IV, shot something directly into the girl’s heart, and intubated her, giving her oxygen.
In thirty seconds, as the sheriff’s deputies appeared in the driveway, the helicopter was airborne again and disappeared over the rooftops. Summer appeared to my left, hanging on my arm. Her face posed a question her lips did not articulate.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. We may have been too late.”
The sheriff’s deputies had been prevented from entering the grounds by a locked front gate. While they worked to open it, I began to focus on the next few minutes. They would want a statement from us, and I knew I didn’t want to give it. No time. So I turned Summer and Ellie around and pointed. “Boat. Now.”
They understood. We returned down the walkway to the dock, loaded into Gone Fiction, and untied her ropes. Reversing quietly, I backed out of the dock and then slid the stick forward. By the time the deputies made it through the house and into the backyard, we had cleared the pilings and were moving back toward the IC. The nearest deputy, some jacked guy wearing shades and SWAT gear, ran to the water’s edge and told me not to move any farther. I slid the throttle to full and we shot forward into the ditch and out of his line of sight.
Chapter 28
Once into the open water, I dialed Colorado. He answered after the second ring. I told him what had just happened and asked him to call the local sheriff’s office, explain who I was, and tell them we’d be at the hospital if they wanted my statement. I also asked him to find out what he could about the girl in the helicopter and where they were taking her. If she lived, I wanted a few words with her.
He hung up, and I returned to Summer and Ellie, who were both huddled on the back bench, riding in silence with stunned looks on their faces.
Summer sat staring at a silver chain draped over her right hand, at the end of which dangled an odd-shaped piece of honeycomb. One hand was holding the other. Both were shaking. As was she. She was close to cracking. She was holding Angel’s Jerusalem cross. The one I’d seen her wearing when we met in the chapel.
“Where’d you find that?”
She spoke through tears while looking in the direction of the helicopter, which was now little more than a speck in the sky. “In the hand of that girl.”
I returned north. Ellie appeared on my right side. Hanging on to the T-top with one hand, the envelope with the other. “Did you save that girl’s life?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
She touched her nose. “What did you give her?”
“It’s called Narcan. When someone uses heroin or hydrocodone, any kind of opioid, the drug binds to receptors in their brain. It blocks pain. Slows their breathing. Calms them down. In the case of an overdose, it can be fatally calming