Darkening Skies (18 page)

She
could hear Mark coughing, his own smoke inhalation as bad as hers.

Her lungs screamed for air and her injured ankle scarcely worked, buckling under her weight so that Mark had to half-carry her, but she forced herself to move, and they staggered together down the corridor, a green exit sign dimly visible through the smoke. He dragged her the last few metres, fumbled for awkward seconds with the lock before it finally gave, and pushed her out into the fresh air of the back lane.

‘Careful – steps,’ he said, his arm a vice around her waist, the only thing preventing her from falling down the steep stone stairs.

The air was cooler on her face, but she couldn’t breathe it, and the stairs faded out of focus and then out of her vision as she slipped into blackness.

Mark caught her weight before she collapsed to the ground. His own chest struggling for air, fear for her safety and pure adrenaline kept him going, lifting her and forcing his legs to carry her beyond the burning building. His eyes glued to her face, he watched intently for signs of breathing, of a pulse. She
had to
breathe. He had to make her breathe. Ten seconds, fifteen … far enough away to be safe for now, he dropped to one knee, then the other, lowering her to the stairs leading into another building.

She
moved her head, coughed, muttered a swear word, and the surge of relief at seeing her taking in air almost made him light-headed.

‘Hold still, Jenn. You’re safe.’ The words grated against his raw throat. ‘You’re safe now.’

She tried to push herself up anyway but groaned and closed her eyes and he shifted so that he cradled her head in his arm.

He could hear sirens in the distance but his vision centred on her, nothing else. Her hair fell back from her face, faint bruising visible on her jaw and cheek from Mick’s assault, and her lips moved as she tried to swallow. He kept his fingers lightly on her wrist, monitoring her pulse. Other than her ankle, he could see no injuries from the explosion, no burns, but she’d collapsed, fainted, and that worried him.

Her reddened eyelids fluttered open again and she looked straight up into his face. ‘Mark. You’re bleeding.’

‘I’m okay.’ He wiped a new trickle of blood off his cheek with the back of his hand. His head pounded, every breath clawed through his throat and lungs, his eyes stung, but it didn’t matter. He had to get an ambulance for Jenn.

Lifting her head gently, he moved from under her. ‘Just lie here, Jenn. Get your breath back. I’ll go for help.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she protested, but he didn’t wait to argue with her.

He pulled his phone from his pocket to call an ambulance but he could hear sirens of emergency vehicles approaching. Ignoring the drumbeat throbbing in his head, he forced himself to run up to the main street to direct them around to the lane. About to turn the corner, he almost barrelled into someone running
towards him. Steve Fraser. He’d probably come straight from the police station in the next street after hearing the explosion. Steve grasped him by the arm. ‘Mark! Thank God. Is there anyone else in there? There’re two cars.’

‘Jenn’s out – around here.’ When he turned he saw her sitting up and clasping her ankle. So much for resting. ‘Need an ambulance.’

‘Already coming,’ Steve said. ‘Call went straight in when I heard the explosion.’

Echoing his words, the resounding crash of structure collapsing rolled through from the street, and the back door to his office building blew open, less than twenty metres from Jenn. If the fire spread …

Jenn clambered to her feet in the few seconds it took Mark to reach her, Steve close behind him.

‘Just strained,’ she insisted breathlessly when he put his arm around her to take some of her weight. ‘Not broken. I can hop.’

By unspoken agreement, one on either side of her, Mark and Steve supported her, almost carried her, so that even her good foot hardly touched the ground as they hurried up the lane to the safety of the main street. Mark flagged down the ambulance as it approached and it pulled in beside them.

In the flurry of questions and oxygen masks and monitors, Mark sat on the old stone gutter and kept Jenn in his sight while a paramedic helped her on to a gurney and attended to her. Gary Meadows, the senior paramedic, gave him an oxygen mask and hunkered beside him to inspect the wound on his head.

‘Do you know what hit you?’ he asked.

‘No idea. Could’ve
been anything.’ A piece of glass, fragment of brick or wood or metal. Something larger would have knocked him out or killed him.

‘We’ll take you both down to the hospital. Doc Cameron will want to take a look at you.’

Scans and observations for the next few hours – standard drill for head injuries, and he’d go along with it for a short while because he understood the risks and wasn’t stupid. And because they’d take Jenn there, and he would stay until assured she wasn’t badly injured.

Mark inhaled more of the oxygen and attempted to slow his adrenaline-loaded metabolism. His pulse rate and blood pressure still spiralled higher than normal, chafing for action. His thoughts raced just as fast, questions of who and how and why spinning without answers, but he kept coming back to the one stark fact: Jenn could have died. She could have died or been badly burned or injured more severely in the blast. He scarcely believed that they’d both come out of the inferno alive.

She lay on the gurney, her hair dark against the white pillow, eyes closed, but even with the oxygen mask obscuring much of her face he could see her wince as Gary’s offsider wrapped a brace around her ankle.

He started to stand, to go to her, but Gary pushed him down with a firm hand on his shoulder.

‘I can see another cut on your head, round the back here.’

Mark acquiesced only because he had no place by Jenn’s side. She’d shown clearly enough over the years that she didn’t need or want him.

Now
that Gary had drawn attention to the back of his head, he registered the small stinging pains against the background of other aches.

Gary made quick work of checking and cleaning blood from the cut and although his professionalism never faltered, in the absence of his usual steady chatter Mark sensed the new distance, as if their many years’ acquaintance and their several seasons together on the Birraga cricket team no longer counted.

Something cool pressed against his skin, and Gary confirmed he had more than the current incident on his mind when he abruptly asked, ‘I don’t suppose the blow to your noggin has knocked your memory back?’

‘It doesn’t usually happen like that,’ Mark explained. ‘The memories are gone, never laid down in my long-term memory.’ And he had to live with that empty space, rely on others to fill in the gaps. Like an ambulance officer who’d been at the scene. ‘Were you on duty, the night of the accident?’

‘Me? No. It was a month or two before I moved to Birraga.’

‘Do you know who was?’

‘Shorty Cooper, I think. Not sure who was with him. Might have been the guy I replaced. Sad case, that was. Depression, stress, trauma – I don’t know what the problem was but it got to him bad and he ended it.’

Dead. Another potential witness no longer able to talk. Coincidence or something else? Mark’s suspicions kicked up a few notches. Even more so because Shorty – six-foot-five Will Cooper – had left the ambulance service after a year or two, taken over his father’s car yard, and married Dan Flanagan’s daughter.

Closing her
eyes to regain some sort of equilibrium didn’t shut out reality, or Mark’s conversation with the ambulance officer. Gary, he’d called him. It shouldn’t surprise her that Mark was on first-name terms with just about everyone.

It got to him bad and he ended it
… One of the paramedics who attended the original accident was dead? She opened her eyes, gripping her fingers tighter around her bag containing the newspaper reports and Wolfgang’s images. Larry evasive and scared, an ambulance officer dead, and Wolfgang telling her to be careful? And all three of them witnesses to the scene of the accident.

Rationally, that added up to quite enough to invoke suspicion, justify questions. But, off kilter from the shock of the explosion and close escape, the uneasiness rising within her didn’t need rational justification.

Gary and his colleague were doing paperwork at the door of the ambulance. She beckoned to Mark and pushed the oxygen mask up as he rose quickly and came to her side, resting a hand on the edge of the gurney, but not touching her. For all that she could cope alone, didn’t need anyone, a small part of her craved that human connection, and noted its absence.

Not important. The situation had become life-and-death last night, with Jim’s passing, this morning with Doc Russell’s, and now even more imperative with Mark’s and her close call. Her voice was still as croaky as a crow’s but that gave her an excuse to whisper, ‘Where did Fraser go?’

‘Not far. Just over there.’ He nodded towards the intersection. ‘Talking with a constable.’

‘Tell
him to come to the hospital. With a laptop. Please. We need to see – to copy – the images. Before something else happens.’

The harsh line of his mouth and unsmiling eyes reflected her unease. ‘Yes. I was thinking the same thing. I’ll go and tell him.’

He left his oxygen mask on the mattress and walked away, responding to Gary’s protest with the assurance he’d be back in a minute.

‘We’ll get you both down to the hospital,’ Gary told her, as they readied the gurney and loaded her and it into the ambulance.

Birraga hospital. Again. The prospect made her even more nauseous than the smoke inhalation did and she had to fight the wild urge to scramble off the mattress and escape the ambulance to the open space outside. She bit her lip, willing the tears of desperation away. Just for a couple of hours. Just until she could breathe comfortably. Just until Mark’s head wound was examined and X-rayed, because she doubted he’d stay at the hospital if she didn’t. She’d worked among death and danger in war zones and natural disasters; she’d confronted criminals and powerful people and unravelled corruption and vice. Birraga hospital contained nothing that threatened her.

Except her memories and the pain of her past.

She caught a glimpse of Mark through the open door, and heard Gary ask, ‘Are you okay to ride in the front?’

‘Yes, sure.’ He stepped into her view, hand on the door as he looked in at her. ‘You’re okay in there?’ She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway, and he added, ‘Steve’ll come as soon as he can.’

Gary
filled in more paperwork during the short distance down the main street to the hospital. It was just three minutes before the ambulance stopped outside the emergency department. Gary slid the gurney out into the fresh air, and Mark was waiting, walking in through the automatic doors alongside her.

Conscious of his head injury and the pallor beneath his tan, she wanted to protest that he should be lying on the gurney, not her, but in her distracted state she’d left it too late, and they were already inside.

At least the nurse who’d been on duty last night recognised her and directed Gary to take her to the cubicle furthest from the bed where Jim had died. Mark took a seat by her side instead of following instructions to take the next bed. Dishevelled and grimy with dust and ash, his eyes reddened with irritation, blood drying on his neck and shirt – he had to be feeling as shitty as she did, but even in boyhood he’d put others first. Put her first.

A rare man, Mark Strelitz, and she should be thanking him for saving her life, for getting her out of the inferno, for staying with her … yet the words were sucked in to the whirlpool of her emotional overload and she hated her own inadequacies, her failure at something so simple.

He waited until the nurse left them before he asked in a low voice, ‘Do you want to tell me what you’ve found?’

Facts. She could deal with facts. Grasping the distraction, grateful for it, she wriggled up to a sitting position, the pain in her ankle sharp but bearable, her breath only catching slightly with the movement. Much better, being upright, rather than the disturbing vulnerability of lying flat on her back, helpless.