Page 4 of Protecting What's Mine

It sounded like labor. Like birth. The back seat was on fire. Flames were eating the upholstery, the fabric on the roof. Time was up.

And then Nelson was disappearing through the sunroof. Linc sent up a prayer of thanks as the man’s loafers vanished and the distinct sound of cheers reached him over the lick and crack of the fire.

“Get out of there, chief!” Skyler yelled, reaching down for him.

He gave her his left hand and, gasping for oxygen, let her pull him toward the air, the sunshine, the blue sky that was blotted out with thick, black smoke.

“Hang on!” Reaching down with his bad arm, Linc clutched the flowers. “Okay. Get me the fuck out of here.”

“Never pegged you for a romantic,” Skyler said through gritted teeth as she hauled his two-hundred-fifty pounds of muscle and gear through the roof of the car.

They landed on the hood, and then she was shoving him over the barrier, and they were both falling. There was a loud pop behind them as one of the tires exploded.

Hands. What felt like a dozen of them grabbed him, pulled him up. They were surrounded by angels. Bloodied, bruised angels. Everyone crying and laughing at the same time. A girl in a softball uniform. A woman in a pencil skirt with bloody knees. A pizza delivery guy. A truck driver in a Jimmy Buffet shirt. Black. White. Rich. Poor. They came together to defy death.

Linc’s shoulder sang, his knuckles throbbed. But he grabbed Skyler’s arm. “Everybody move!”

There were sirens. An entire opera of them. Help was coming.

They moved as one, snaking between the stopped cars to the other shoulder of the highway. Skyler’s braid was no longer neat and tidy. Black flyaways escaped from all angles, and her dark skin was smudged with soot and dirt. She grinned at him.

“Not a bad day’s work, chief,” she said.

Nelson, arms draped over the shoulders of the glass-breaking golfers, limped ahead of them. Linc stole a glance over his shoulder, and just like that, the gas tank finally blew, shooting orange flames thirty feet into the air.

The flowers clutched in his hand were wilted and browning. But they’d survive, just like the man who’d bought them.

No. Not a bad day’s work at all.

2

On the side of the road, Linc used his left hand to apply pressure to a motorcyclist’s leg wound while an EMT worked to stabilize the unconscious woman’s spine.

He could feel, rather than see, the web of emergency responders as they infiltrated the chaos and began to carefully restore order. Fire crews would control and re-route traffic. Police departments would begin the painstaking investigation. EMTs and paramedics triaged and treated victims, arranging for transport to the nearest hospitals. Wreckers, an army of them, would be staging now, ready for the mop-up. More help arrived by the minute.

He could feel the environment shifting around them. Men and women in uniform brought with them a sense of calm, a perception of control.

But here on this scrap of crispy brown grass stained with blood, it was still life and death. The girl had been found fifteen feet from her crushed bike. Unconscious, unmoving.

The waterfall of sweat that had started in the car had yet to cease, though Linc had stripped out of his jacket. He was going to need six showers just to feel human again.

His shoulder throbbed. His right arm hung uselessly at his side, flesh still pulsed with the painful burn. But every hand with medical training was a necessity right now.

Fire departments and cops converged and dispersed around them, each with their own tasks. Traffic control. Clean-up. Patient transpo.

Linc looked down at the pale, bruised face of the woman. He didn’t recognize her. Had this happened in Benevolence, odds were he would have known her first name. Maybe even what street she lived on.

“Chopper coming?” he asked the EMT. The gauze he held to the victim’s leg was already saturated. She wouldn’t last in an ambulance.

“En route. Two minutes out.”

“She the worst?” he asked. He’d only witnessed a small corner of the carnage.

The paramedic spared him a quick glance. “Sure as hell hope so.”

But it was likely there were worse. The skeletal remains of minivans and sedans all around them predicted it.

No tarps yet, he thought grimly. But given the dozen mangled vehicle corpses, it would be a miracle if the coroner wasn’t needed.