“It’s not back there. It feels as if my left ear’s gone. I can hardly hear anything.”

She scooted behind Lucy so that she was sitting behind her, her legs stretched out on either side of her, her back against the wall, and she carefully felt the back of Lucy’s heavily bleeding scalp.

“My hand’s pretty numb,” Scarpetta said. “Guide my fingers, Lucy. Show me where it hurts.”

Lucy reached back and took her hand and guided it to a spot.

“Right there. Goddamn that hurts. I think it might be under the skin. Shit that hurts. God, don’t press on it, that hurts!”

Scarpetta didn’t have her reading glasses on and couldn’t see anything but a blur of bloody hair. She pressed her bare hand against the back of Lucy’s head and Lucy yelled.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” Scarpetta said very calmly, kindly, almost as if she was talking to a child. “The bullet must be right under the scalp, and that’s why it’s hurting when we apply pressure. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance will be here any minute.”

There were furrows around Berger’s wrists, and her hands were bright red and were very stiff and awkward as she opened several large white bath sheets and tucked them around Lucy’s neck and under her legs. Lucy was naked and wet and must have just stepped out of the shower when Morales shot her. Berger got down on the floor next to them, and blood got all over her hands and her blouse as she touched Lucy and told her repeatedly that she would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

“He’s dead,” Berger told Lucy. “He was about to shoot Marino, to shoot all of us.”

The nerves in Scarpetta’s hands were waking up and angry, a million pins sticking, and she vaguely perceived a small, hard lump at the back of Lucy’s skull, several inches to the left of the midline of it.

“Right here,” she said to Lucy. “Help me, if you can.”

Lucy lifted her hand and helped her find the perforation, and Scarpetta worked the bullet out, and Lucy complained loudly. It was medium-to large-caliber, semi-jacketed, and deformed, and she handed it to Berger and pressed a towel firmly against the wound to stop the bleeding.

Scarpetta’s sweater was soaked with blood, the floor around her slippery with it. She didn’t think the bullet had penetrated the skull. She suspected it had struck at an angle and expended most of its kinetic energy within a relatively small space within milliseconds. There are so many blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp, it bleeds alarmingly, always looks worse than it is. Scarpetta pressed the towel very firmly against the wound, her right hand on Lucy’s forehead, holding her.