LITMIR.BIZ

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      Benny had moved the ambulance closer, and brought the backboard and equipment. Joe let Benny apply a large sloppy dressing around his middle as he checked her airway again, noting she had good air exchange. He worried, with the head injury, that she might vomit and wanted to be near if she did to prevent aspiration.

      “We’re going to give you some oxygen and put a collar round your neck,” Joe said calmly, hoping she might already be regaining consciousness and hear him explain everything they did to her. They worked together and soon had Jane on the backboard for stability. Joe secured her with the straps, never taking his eyes off her. She had definitely been knocked out cold, yet still breathed evenly. A good thing. But he knew when unconscious people woke up they could often be combative and try to take off the oxygen and cervical collar. Hell, after what she’d just been through, could he blame her if she woke up fighting?

      With her long dark auburn hair spread over her shoulders and her hands strapped to the transport board, she made the strangest image.

      An urban Sleeping Beauty.

      “Ready for transfer?” Joe said, breaking his own thoughts.

      “Don’t you want to wait for the police?”

      “If they’re not here by the time we get her in the back of the van, you call them again and tell them to meet us at the clinic. She might have a skull fracture or subdural bleed for all we know, and needs medical attention ASAP.” He knew the next forty-five minutes were all she had remaining in the golden hour for traumatic head injury. “I’m going to call Dr. Rothsberg and let him know what we’ve got.”

      He jumped into the back of the van first to guide the head of the gurney on which they’d placed the long spine board and patient as Benny pushed from the back, then he rolled the gurney forward and locked it in place with sprung locks on the ambulance floor.

      He’d ride in the back with her. If she woke up, confused and possibly combative, he wanted to be there. Plus it would be his chance to do a more thorough examination.

      Joe did another assessment of Sleeping Beauty’s condition. Unchanged. Then he made the call. Unexpectedly, Dr. Rothsberg said to bring her to the clinic instead of county. Which was a good thing, because Joe would have taken her home before he’d consider delivering a Jane Doe to county hospital to potentially slip through every conceivable crack due to their overstretched system.

      He stripped off the makeshift dressing and his shirt to assess his own wound, which was long and jagged, still wept blood and would definitely need stitches. Now that he was looking at it, it burned like hell. Benny had a short conversation with the police, who’d just arrived. Great timing! He showed them where they’d found her and where the attacker had fled over the wall then left them to look for witnesses as Joe cleaned and dressed his own wound. Damn, the disinfectant smarted! One of the policemen took a quick look inside the ambulance, saw the victim and Joe with his injury, nodded and took off toward the alley.

      Benny closed the back doors of the van, got into the driver’s seat then started the ambulance. “They’ll take our statements at the clinic later.”

      “Good,” Joe said, taping his dressing, constantly checking his patient as he did so.

      As Benny drove, with their lights flashing, Joe checked her vital signs again, this time using a blood-pressure cuff then a stethoscope to listen to her lungs. He opened her eyes, opening the blackened eye more gingerly, and used his penlight to make sure she hadn’t blown a pupil. Fortunately she hadn’t, but unfortunately he’d had to move a clump of her hair away from her face in order to do so. It was thick and wavy, and, well, somehow it felt too intimate, touching it. It’d been a while since he’d run his fingers through a woman’s hair, which he definitely wasn’t doing right now, but the thought of wanting to bothered him.

      By the status of her black eye, it’d been there a few days and definitely looked ugly and intentional. Someone had punched her. That was a fact. There was that anger again, flaming out of nowhere for a woman he knew zero about.

      He decided to insert a hep-lock into her antecubital fossa so the clinic would have a line ready to go on arrival. A head injury could increase cranial pressure and so could IV fluid. He didn’t want to add to that, and so far her blood pressure was within normal limits. While he performed the tasks he thought about everything that had happened to his patient prior to winding up in that alley.

      She’d gotten off the bus and hadn’t waited to collect a suitcase, which meant all she’d carried with her was in that large shoulder bag. And that was long gone with the punk who’d knocked her cold and jumped the wall. He tightened his fists. What he’d give to deck that guy and leave him in some alley.

      If Joe added up the clues he’d guess that the lovely Sleeping Jane was running from whoever had bruised her arms and blackened her eye. She’d probably grabbed whatever she could and snuck away from...

      “Who are you?” Joe asked quietly, wondering if she could hear him, knowing that unconscious people sometimes still heard what went on around them. “Where did you come from?”

      He lifted one of her hands, that fierce sense of protectiveness returning, and held it in his, noticing the long thin fingers with carefully manicured but unpainted nails, and made another silent vow. Don’t worry, I’ll look out for you. You don’t have to be afraid where I’m taking you.

      * * *

      They arrived at The Hollywood Hills Clinic, nestled far beneath the Hollywood sign at the end of narrow winding roads with occasional hairpin turns. The swanky private clinic that hugged the hillside always reminded him of something Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed for the twenty-first century, if he were still alive. The stacked boxy levels of the modern stone architecture, nearly half of it made of special earthquake-resistant glass, looked like a diamond in the night on the hillside. Warm golden light glowed from every oversized window, assuring the private clinic was open twenty-four hours. For security and privacy purposes, there were tall fences out front, and a gate every vehicle had to clear, except for ambulances. They breezed through as soon as the gate opened completely.

      Benny headed toward the private patient loading area at the back of the building. Joe put his shirt back on and gingerly buttoned it over his bandaged and stinging rib cage.

      He still couldn’t believe his good fortune over landing the bid as the private ambulance company for James Rothsberg’s clinic only two short years after starting his own business. He’d been an enterprising twenty-three-year-old paramedic with a plan back then, thanks to a good mind for business instilled in him by his hard-working father. James must have seen something about him he liked when he’d interviewed him and Joe had tendered his bid. Or maybe it had had more to do with the nasty info leak the previous ambulance company had been responsible for, exposing several of the A-list actors in the biz on a TV gossip show, making Joe’s timing impeccable. He used to think of it as fate.

      James’s parents—Michael Rothsberg and Aubrey St. Claire—had had enough info leaks in their lives to fill volumes. Everyone, even Joe, remembered the scandal, and he’d only been in his early teens at the time. Their stories had made headlines on every supermarket rag and cable TV talk show. Everyone knew about their private affairs. After all, James’s parents had been Hollywood royalty, and had been two of the highest-paid actors in the business. Watching them fall from grace had become a national pastime after a nasty kiss-and-tell book by an ex-lover had outed them as phonies. Their marriage had been a sham, and their teenage children, James and Freya, had suffered most.

      James had told Joe on the day he’d hired him that loyalty to the clinic and the patients was the number-one rule, he wouldn’t tolerate anything less, and Joe had lived up to that pledge every single day he’d shown up to work. He’d walked out of James’s office that day thinking fate was on his side and he was the luckiest man on earth, but he too would soon experience his own fall. Like James, it hadn’t been of his own making but that didn’t mean it had hurt any less.

      These days Joe didn’t believe in fate or luck. No, he’d changed his thinking on that and now, for him, everything happened for

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