They stood inside the doors to the ambulance bay in the Mercy General ER with the leader of the Search and Rescue team, Tom Scott, forty-something and built like an NFL linebacker—a mountain of muscle with the chiseled face of a cartoon superhero.

Hicks came back from the trauma unit with a grim face and a nod. “It’s her.”

“She was about fifty yards off a fire road up in the Dyer Canyon area. The dog found her. We were up in that general area looking for a guy. My young dog took off. He’s just in training. I was gonna give him hell for that. So I went after him and when I came over the rise, here he was trying to drag this woman by the arm. He’d pull on her and bark at her and pull on her some more.

“Thank God for him. There’s a lot of chaparral and scrub up there. We wouldn’t have seen this lady. The chopper had gone over that area earlier and didn’t see anything.”

“What kind of shape is she in?” Mendez asked.

Scott rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Bad. GSW to the left shoulder. Looks like a through-and-through, but red and hot and full of pus. Broke her right ankle like nothing I’ve ever seen. Snapped both bones clean. You could turn her foot clear around.”

“Oh my God,” Mendez said.

Hicks went a little pale at the vivid description.

“Severely dehydrated. Severely hypothermic,” Scott went on. “She was absolutely delirious when we got to her. Hallucinating, the whole nine yards.”

“Is she conscious now?”

“No. I’ll be really surprised if she makes it. I don’t know what all she went through out there, but it was terrible. She had what looked like rat bites on her hands, on her legs, on her face. And stink! Like we pulled her out of a Calcutta sewer.”

“Did she say anything when you found her?” Mendez asked. “Did she identify a perp? Anything?”

“No. She was babbling. Incoherent. By the time we got her in the chopper, she was out. I’ve never seen a BP that low and still have a pulse.”

He nodded out the glass doors at the Search and Rescue vehicle where his partner was waiting. “I’m gonna go get my paperwork in, but I’ll meet you guys out at the scene and show you everything.”

“Shit,” Mendez said as he watched the big man walk away. “We can’t catch a fucking break.”

“Us?” Hicks said, looking back toward the trauma unit. “You should see her. If you’ve got any favors to call in with the big guy upstairs, it’s time to use them.”

Mendez crossed himself. “God help her. God help us. The sooner the better.”

Chapter 67

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