Backfire

22

San Francisco General Hospital

Fifth floor

A shout came out of the chaos. “The shooter’s on the roof of the elevator! Officers down!” Officer Eddie Hughes stumbled out, panting and coughing, holding his bloody arm and trying to keep Deputy Marshal Allen Milton upright, blinded by the blood streaming down his face. Both men still had their guns in their hands.

SFPD officer Jay Mancusso staggered out, his Glock at his side, his eyes tearing from the smoke, coughing. He wheezed out, “He threw a smoke bomb down through the top of the elevator and opened fire. Barbieri, she’s with Judge Hunt. I don’t know-” And he bent over in a fit of coughing. At least he hadn’t been shot that Savich could see.

The orderly was trying to pull himself up, blood soaking his white pants.

All of it had happened in seconds.

Savich was coughing, fighting to see through the gray haze of smoke still clouding the elevator. A frantic voice came through the chaos, “Judge Hunt! How is Judge Hunt?”

Savich managed to push his way in, and his heart stopped. Eve was lying stretched out on top of Ramsey, and she wasn’t moving. He was afraid to touch her. “Eve? Answer me!”

Slowly, Eve raised herself off of Ramsey. She was in pain, obvious to Savich, but he didn’t see any blood. She turned to look at the myriad faces staring down at her, then settled again on Savich’s face. He helped her slide off the bed. She stumbled, and he helped her right herself. “Sorry, the bullets knocked me silly. I’m okay.” She pulled away from him and looked down at Ramsey’s white face. “Ramsey-talk to me.”

He opened his eyes. “Hi, Eve.”

“Are you all right?”

A doctor and a nurse squeezed into the elevator beside them and eased them aside to tend to Ramsey. “Yes, I’ll live.” He coughed and moaned. “All the smoke and gunfire. How is everyone else? How are you, Eve?”

“I’ll live, too. He shot me three times in my back, missed my head, thank goodness, or I’d be a goner. The impact knocked the breath out of me, that’s all.” She gave a wild grin, even though she felt like she’d been whacked by a two-by-four too many times. “Thank the good Lord for Kevlar.”

A doctor tapped Eve on the shoulder. Ramsey gave her hand a squeeze, and reluctantly, Eve released his. They wheeled him out of the elevator. He said to all of them, “I’ll be all right, don’t worry about me.” Three doctors, including Dr. Kardak, panting from running from surgery to get here, hovered over him as they wheeled his bed down the hall, two SFPD officers and one deputy marshal flanking them.

They heard Ramsey say, “You’d be wheeling me down to the morgue in the basement if not for Eve. I’m going to kick her butt for taking such a chance.”

Eve waved into the elevator car. “It looks like a war zone in here.” She pointed up, nearly groaning at the pain in her back. “Would you look at the ceiling? Our guys shot the crap out of it. They fired nonstop, but I don’t know if we hit him.”

She closed her eyes. It had looked like the end, but no one was dead. She sent a prayer of thanks upward. “Please tell me you got this idiot.”

Savich said, “Sherlock and Harry are on it; they’ll be here soon.”

Harry Christoff gently picked up an elderly man by his elbows and set him aside. He shoved two police officers out of his way and stood in front of Eve, panting from running down three flights of stairs. He took in her tearing eyes, her blond straggling ponytail, her smoke-blackened face. “Good grief, woman, look at you. You’re all right, aren’t you?” He saw that she was hunched over and touched her arm.

Eve smiled at him. “I’m okay, thanks to the miracle of Kevlar. We all survived.”

Sherlock burst out of the stairwell, panting.

Savich said immediately, “Ramsey’s okay. Everyone’s alive. Is he still inside the building?”

She started toward Eve, but Eve said quickly, “I’m in one piece. Did you get the guy?”

Sherlock ignored the god-awful mayhem in front of her and forced herself to calm. “He made it out of the elevator shaft. We started a search, but we can’t lock down the whole hospital. He’s probably out on the street by now.”

“How could he have pulled this off?” Eve asked.

Sherlock said, “Okay, he had to case out the elevators and hang out close enough to the ICU to find out when Ramsey was going to be moved. It looks like the shooter called both of the east elevators to the roof. There’s an access hatch up there for servicing. He immobilized one of them and settled himself on top of the working elevator when it was called down. He loosened the ceiling hatch and waited. We don’t know how long he was up there, but he must have cut this pretty close, otherwise someone would have called for service on the immobilized elevator, and he didn’t want that.”

“But how did he know?” Eve smacked the side of her head. “Am I an idiot or what? I’ll bet even the dishwashers in the cafeteria kitchen knew when Ramsey was being moved.”

Sherlock said, “It’s even better than that. He didn’t even have to look in. The shaft acoustics are incredible, so he could hear Ramsey being pushed into the car, got himself set. The moment the car started up, he shoved the hatch aside, dropped the smoke canister in, and started firing. He couldn’t see any better than you guys could through all the smoke, but he must have seen where Ramsey’s bed was, focused his fire there. Eve, what happened inside?”

Eve tried to straighten, but a jab of pain punched her ribs. She felt Harry’s hand tighten on her arm. She said, “I didn’t think; I threw myself on top of Ramsey, and right away three shots hit me in the back-in the blessed Kevlar. He kept firing, but our guys were firing back, so his shots were pretty wild. Whatever he hit was random after that. I’ll tell you my heart nearly stopped while I was lying there, thinking of how helpless Ramsey was.” She paused for a moment. “You know, I’m betting the shooter thinks he killed Ramsey.”

Sherlock stared at the blood splattered on the elevator walls, stared at Eve and at Harry standing behind her. She knew that three close-range shots in the back, even through Kevlar, would make you feel like you’d been beaten with a baseball bat. “If you hadn’t been wearing the vests, he’d have killed all of you.” She felt such rage she was shaking with it.

Sherlock asked Officer Mancusso, “What about Hughes and Milton? How badly are they hit?”

Officer Jay Mancusso said, “Deputy Milton’s head wound looked bad, but they always do. I heard one of the doctors say it was only a scalp wound, though. Eddie Hughes-he got it in the arm, through and through. The orderly who got shot in the leg went right off to the ER.”

A nurse, still looking on, called out, “Doug was pressing on his leg wound himself. You’d better believe he was hollering for the trauma team. He’ll be all right.”

Jay said, “Both Eddie and I got two shots in the Kevlar, but we’re okay. We didn’t get hammered like Deputy Barbieri.”

Savich said, “Eve, tell us what else you remember.”

“Jumping on Ramsey, covering him as best I could, screaming at the orderly to take cover. There was so much gunfire after a second or two, most of it from our guys, shooting wildly upward through the thick smoke, and then there wasn’t any more return fire. The shooter was gone.”

Sherlock patted her arm. “Yeah, he got out, but guess what? I’ve got some good news I haven’t told you-one of you wounded him. I saw some blood drops on the top of the elevator car, bloody handprints on the shaft ladder, and a couple of drops on the roof and in the stairway. Then he must have managed to get himself bandaged enough so he didn’t spill anymore. That means we can spot him on the security cameras, see how badly he’s hurt, but best of all, we’ll have his DNA.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or Sue’s DNA.”

“Excellent,” Savich said. “At last we’ve got a break.”

Harry cupped his elbow around Eve’s arm and said without looking at her, “You think you got any broken ribs?”

“They feel like they’re in splinters. Don’t worry, I’ll get it checked out.” She knew she wouldn’t be up for smelling the roses for the next couple of days. Bruises would cover her back. She prayed no ribs were cracked. She wondered who’d managed to nail the shooter. DNA. Dillon was right, at last they’d caught a break.

The last people Eve wanted to see here came running up in the next moment. She walked toward them, away from the elevator, and said quickly, “Emma, Molly, Ramsey’s all right. The doctors took him back to his new room. He wasn’t hurt, I swear. He’s okay.”

Emma clung to her mother and swallowed, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Neither could Molly. Emma stared at Eve and the drifting dirty smoke, and then she looked toward the elevator. “How can everything be okay, Aunt Eve? I can see the blood.”

“I’m not lying to you, Emma.”

Emma still stared into the bloody elevator.

One very old man called out from a doorway, “Is Judge Dredd dead?”

Emma turned on him. “Don’t you say such a thing! My daddy’s fine.”

Eve said, “Some people were hurt, Emma, but not your dad. I promise.”

They looked up to see Dr. Kardak walking toward them. He said, more to Emma and Molly than to them, “Judge Hunt is well. We’re all a little shaken, but we’ve checked him out thoroughly, and he wasn’t injured. We’re settling him in his new room.” He gestured toward Molly. “I suggest, Mrs. Hunt, that you and Emma stay here a while longer before you come back.

“As for you, Deputy Barbieri, I understand you were injured. You need to come with me.”

Once they stood in an empty hospital room, Dr. Kardak said to Eve, “Take off the vest, Deputy Barbieri. Let’s see the damage.”

When Eve and Dr. Kardak came out a few minutes later, three pairs of eyes fastened on them. The doctor said, “She won’t be having much fun for a couple of days; there’s going to be a lot of bruising from the impacts. I didn’t feel any cracked ribs, and that’s good. We’re going to get an X-ray to be sure.” He pulled a pad out of his coat pocket and wrote a pain prescription for her. A nurse trotted over and handed her a pill. “Take this, it’ll help.” She closed her hand over Eve’s wrist. “Thank you for saving Judge Hunt.”