Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (i can read books TXT) 📕

beside Ann Marie Marciniak and told her to lie still as I pressed a cloth napkin to the gash in her thigh. The wound was not arterial but deep enough she still needed pressure applied until paramedics reached her. Also, she was lucky whatever had caused the injury didn’t appear to be inside. Bart Novak’s suit was covered with juice and food but he had no visible injuries. Unhurt but disheveled, Mayor Green and Judge Chancellor came up behind me and asked how they could help. I showed Ophelia how to hold the librarian’s wound closed while keeping pressure on it and told the judge he could relieve her if her fingers cramped. Meanwhile, Pete checked on the Lockwoods and the others at the table and announced their injuries were superficial.

We went to the next table, RESERVED #7. The metal legs had splintered from the blast, which explained some of the shrapnel-like wounds I had seen so far. The table had flipped, covering Matt Donatello’s wife and their twins. Sharon and at least one of her sons were crying beneath it. Pete and I eased the table off them. He knelt to check their injuries as I pivoted the table, now on its edge, to the wall.

“Matt, main hall ASAP,” I said. “Your family’s hurt but alive.”

I heard the big man swallow. “On my way!”

Then I stepped over to the other two who had been seated at RESERVED #7, Randall Torrance and Chelsea Carpenter. Randall was dead, his face dotted with cuts and one side of his chest blown open—as if he had attempted to throw his body on the drone but hadn’t been quick enough. Carpenter was still alive but twitching, thick red hair fanning out beneath her head like a matted halo and her chin ripped open in a horizontal flap that suggested the metal-covered edge of the flipping table had given her the mother of all uppercuts. Before I knelt beside her, I could see most of the trauma was below her waist. Her legs were gashed, slashed, shredded. Blood pumping out of a tear in her right inner thigh told me her femoral artery was damaged. The two cloth napkins I pressed into the wound soaked through fast. I wadded three others I could reach into another makeshift compress and replaced the first, pushing hard enough to make her cry out in pain. Holding the rapidly reddening napkins in place with my right hand, I took hold of her trembling right hand with my left.

“Help is coming, Chelsea,” I said. “Try to hold on.”

Shivering and wincing at the pressure, she looked at me, looked past me, and half smiled, white teeth stained red. “It’s checkmate, Rimes,” she murmured. “S’what I get.”

“What?”

Her breathing was ragged, slowing. “Hated him for Willa—” Then the breath went out of her but her eyes held me for a long moment before their light followed.

When I stood, I was surprised to see James Torrance coming up behind me, tears streaming down his face as Marlo Vassi clutched his arm.

37

“Matt! Sergeant Piñero!” Mark was almost breathless. “One of our people found our man Ferguson dead in a storage room off the west end of the shopping concourse. DPS personnel will be standing outside till police get down here. I’m on my way to your current location. Rimes, looks like you were right.”

“Jesus!” Matt said, the voice in my earbud a half-echo of his actual voice nearby.

“Detectives will be there in a couple minutes, Mr. Donatello,” Rafael said, his double voice even more disconcerting because he was closer to me. “They’ll secure things for the CSU. But we got the place locked down. Nobody in, nobody out. With two dead here and one where you are, this hotel is a bombing and triple homicide crime scene. We got people at every exit. He won’t get out.”

“They,” I said. “At least two guys. Wally Ray and Stanley Maxwell, AKA Duke.”

“Mark, we ought to try Protocol Thirty-one.” The quiver in Matt’s voice, probably a mixture of exhaustion and relief, had nothing to do with the earbud.

“Good idea,” Mark said. “I’ll activate it on the way. Got another idea too.”

I was in the main hall, standing between Rafael and Travis. Less than ten feet away, Matt and Sharon were seated in chairs, each embracing a twelve-year-old too big for a lap, but neither parents nor children seemed ready to part. Bobby and Kayla were in other chairs, drinking from plastic water bottles as an EMT evaluated them. Elsewhere, firefighters and paramedics were treating cuts and abrasions. Those few with more serious shrapnel injuries, like Ann Marie Marciniak and Sam, who had glass in one eye, were already on their way to area hospitals. Unhurt conference attendees staying in the hotel had been told to return to their rooms and lock their doors. Those without rooms were milling about, chatting, staring at cell phones, leaning back in chairs and closing their eyes. Judge Chancellor was giving a statement to a detective. Mayor Green and Marlo Vassi were seated on either side of James Torrance, comforting him. Nearby were the covered bodies of his son and Chelsea Carpenter, whose red hair spilled past the edge of the tablecloth atop her. I looked at her hair, thinking.

“Big ass hotel for a room-to-room search,” Cissy said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“That’s why I want you to keep looking at the monitors,” I said. “Tucker might know our suite number, so keep the Brink’s bar under the doorknob and stuff towels in the crack at the bottom. To keep him from sliding something inside.”

“We’re okay. Pete and Manuel are here with us while Drea rests,” Cissy said.

“But an envelope with white powder that might be poison could force you all into the hallway. Block the damn door!”

“She’s got it,” Yvonne said. “Do what you need to do but come running if you hear gunshots on seventeen. Pete’ll need help. Meanwhile, I’ll increase camera rotation rates.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Our folks are checking their