I stopped for a woman dying on the roadside and lost my job for being late, but when I came back for my desk, my whole life changed…007
Her fingers clamped around my right forearm.
Not a weak, pleading grasp.
An iron, mechanical vise that dug through my suit sleeve, the gold ring biting straight into the bone of my ulna with enough linear force to leave purple hematomas beneath my skin.
She pulled my face down until her lips were half an inch from my ear.
Her breath smelled of pure metallic ozone and sublingual nitroglycerin:
*”The manifest…”* she rasped.
The word was paper-thin.
A dry husk dragged over broken flint:
*”…the manifest in the console… Sebastian… don’t let… don’t let Carter touch the seal…”*
Then her pupils dilated until the gray of her irises vanished completely into black.
Her head snapped backward against my knee.
Her heart stopped.
***
CHAPTER 2: THE SIX MINUTES ON ROUTE SIX
I had not frozen.
When you spend twelve years as a volunteer search-and-rescue paramedic in the Clear Creek drainage before taking a desk job in marketing, your hands remember what your brain wants to panic over.
I ripped her cashmere lapels open, popping two mother-of-pearl buttons that skittered across the gravel into the ditch.
I checked the airway.
Clear.
I positioned the heel of my left hand over the lower third of her sternum, locked my right fingers over my knuckles, straightened my elbows, and drove forty pounds of linear downward pressure into her thoracic cage:
*CRACK.
