Page 76 of Manner of Death
All he had to do was miss it.
He didn’t let himself think. Just as the SUV surged ahead again, Sawyer jerked the wheel to the right and slammed on the brakes. His car slowed some as he started down the embankment ahead, but not enough. Just as the nose of his car hit the water, he saw a wheel bounce off toward the road.
Then he was upside down, and then…
Then he was in darkness.
The wheel meandered back along the road a ways, past the SUV that had skidded to a stop, finally rolling past a beat-up Ford Focus whose driver was confused when she saw it.
When she noticed damage at the edge of the bridge’s guard rail, she slowed down to look at the water as she passed. A second later she stopped and smacked on the car’s emergency lights, swearing as she fumbled for her phone.
The SUV was gone before she got there.
Chapter 21
On the one hand, Bashir wasn’t being called out to a death scene. As he drove like hell toward the hospital, he kept reminding himself of that. Detective Walker had told him to come to the emergency room. He wasn’t being summoned in any official capacity as the medical examiner. All of those were better than the worst-case scenario.
On the other hand, he was getting called into the emergency room because someone had tried to kill—and almost succeeded in killing—Sawyer.
He was alive. That much Bashir knew. Stable, too, but Bashir knew more than a lot of people how quickly that could change. All the way to the emergency room, he mentally relived moments in his ER and ICU rotations when people had been seemingly stable—or didn’t even have life-threatening injuries or conditions—and then crashed.
As he whipped through city streets, he remembered the man who’d brought his teenage son in after a car accident. The boy had broken his arm and needed to be seen. Dad had insisted he was fine. Then everyone was scrambling into the son’s room because Dad had collapsed on the floor, and it was only much too late that everyone learned he’d hit his head at some point. There was nothing anyone could do, and the kid left the hospital with a broken arm, a devastated mother, and some emotional trauma that Bashir hoped he’d received some good therapy for.
Sawyer was stable… for now. He’d been stable when Detective Walker called.
Who was to say that in the twenty-one minutes since they’d hung up, Sawyer hadn’t coded? Who was to say they weren’t doing CPR on him right this minute? Or that Bashir wouldn’t walk into the lobby, only to be intercepted by a grim-faced Detective Walker telling him he and Sawyer would never resolve their problems?
Bashir had a reputation for being even more calm and level-headed in the face of death than most of the cops on the force, but there was nothing calm or level-headed about him as he sprinted into the ER. He clipped his shoulder on the automatic door because it didn’t open fast enough, and he stumbled a couple of steps before righting himself and hurrying up to the front desk.
“I’m looking for Detective Sawyer Villeray.” The words tumbled out in a panicked, breathless rush. “I was told he was—”
“Are you a relative?” the woman asked with all the unflappable chill of an ER nurse. “I need your name and—”
“He’s with me.” Detective Walker appeared, her expression grim and eerily calm. “This is Dr. Ramin. I called him in.”
The nurse scowled, but then signed Bashir in and gave him a visitor badge. The process took about two minutes, every second of which Bashir was losing his damned mind, especially while Walker’s expression didn’t change. She offered nothing to let him know either way about Sawyer’s condition, and the longer she went without saying, “For the record, he’s fine,” the more sure Bashir was that Sawyer wasn’t fine.
Fuck. He’s dead, isn’t he?
Bashir was two seconds away from throwing up when he and Walker stepped away from the desk and into the hallway. She was striding up the hall like a woman on a mission, and he finally couldn’t take it.
“Detective.” He halted. When she faced him, he asked, “Is he okay or not?”
The pained expression that crossed her face almost dropped him to his knees, but just before his balance was going to give out, she said, “He’s in rough shape, but he’ll be okay.”
All the air rushed out of Bashir so fast, he had to lean against the wall and let the room slow down. He wasn’t usually this reactive to anything. Situations like this usually had him doubling down on the calm, shutting out all the emotions until logistics were dealt with and he could finally collapse. This time, he’d shot right past logistics and into full-on uncharacteristic panic, and realizing his biggest fear hadn’t played out…
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. Then he glared at her. “Do you think you could’ve led with that? Maybe not let me think he was fucking dead or something?” His own outburst startled him, and clearly Walker wasn’t expecting it either.
“I… sorry?” She tilted her head. “I didn’t think the two of you were…”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care about him!” He barked. “For fuck’s sake.” He pushed himself off the wall. “Can we just—can I see him, please?”
She stammered a little, then started walking, slower this time. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”
He grunted in acknowledgment. “What happened, anyway?”
“He was staking out someone.” She glanced at him. “Your, um… Your colleague.”