“Sixty over forty,” Juana reported. Moving so fast her actions were a blur, she started an IV line in Milla’s arm and hooked up a bag of blood plasma.
He was losing her, David thought. Milla would die right in front of him, unless he snapped out of his shock and acted. From the position of the wound, the knife had probably hit her left kidney, and God knows what other damage had been done. She was bleeding out; she had only a few minutes left before her internal organs began shutting down—
He pushed everything else out of his mind, and shoved his hands into the fresh pair of gloves Anneli held out for him. He didn’t have time to scrub up; he didn’t have time to search for Justin; all he had time to do was reach for the scalpel that was promptly slapped into his palm and call on every ounce of skill he had. He prayed, he cursed, and he fought time as he cut into his wife’s body. As he’d suspected, the knife blade had hit her left kidney. Hit it, hell; it had all but sliced the organ in half. There was no saving the kidney, and if he didn’t get it out and the blood vessels tied off in record time, there would be no saving Milla, either.
It was a race, savage and merciless. If he made one misstep, if he hesitated, if anything was dropped or even fumbled, then he lost, and Milla lost. It wasn’t surgery as he was accustomed to doing it; it was battlefield surgery, fast and brutal, with her life hanging on every split-second decision and action. While they poured all of their available blood into her, he fought to keep it from pouring out of her just as fast as it went in. Moment by moment he stemmed the bleeding, searched out every severed vessel, and slowly he began to win the race. He didn’t know how long it took; he never asked, never found out. How long didn’t matter. All that mattered was winning, because the alternative was more than he could bear.
2
Ten years later Chihuahua, Mexico
Paige Sisk leaned against her fiancé, Colton Rawls, her eyes drifting shut as she took a big hit of weed and passed the joint to Colton. Oh, man, all those dweebs who had gone on and on about the bad things that could happen to her in Mexico were so totally wrong. Mexico was the best. I mean, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew better than to score weed in front of some Mexican cop, though she’d heard all you had to do was flash them some green and the problem went away. Like she wanted to waste her money on bribes.
They had been here four days already. Colton thought Chihuahua was the coolest. He had some serious thing going about Pancho Villa; until they got here she thought it was, like, some house where ponchos were made. The only Pancho she’d ever heard of was in an old, old western where this silly-looking dude kept saying, “Oh, Pancho,” to an even sillier dude in a big hat, but Colton said no, this Pancho was the real thing. Like there were fake Panchos. But whatever. Colton dug it. They had gone twice to see this shot-up old Dodge where supposedly the real Pancho had been turned into Swiss cheese, just like Bonnie and Clyde.
As far as she was concerned, Pancho Villa was just a dead old fart. She didn’t care about his stupid Dodge. Now, if he’d driven a Hummer, that would have been cool.
“If he’d driven a Hummer,” she said, “he could have run right over those assholes who were shooting at him.”
Colton surfaced from his fog to blink in confusion. “Who drives a Hummer?”
“Pancho Villa.”
“No, it was a Dodge.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” Impatient, she elbowed him. “If he’d been driving a Hummer, he could have smashed them flat.”
“No such thing as a Hummer back then.”
“God!” she said in exasperation. “You are so literal. I said if!” She grabbed the joint and took another hit, then got up from the bed. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” Happy to have sole possession of the joint, Colton settled back on the pillows and gave her a little wave as she left the room. She didn’t wave back. Going to the bathroom didn’t make her happy; there was only one on this floor, there was a magazine instead of toilet paper for wiping, and it smelled really bad. But Colton had insisted on staying here instead of in one of the nicer hotels, because the rooms were so cheap. Well, of course they were cheap; what fool would pay top price to stay here? And it was really close to the marketplace, which was neat.
She felt really mellow from the weed, but not so mellow that the bathroom didn’t bother her. The lock was broken, too. A shoelace had been tied around the knob, a nail driven into the frame right beside the knob, and to latch the door you wrapped the loose end of the shoelace around the nail. It did hold the door shut, but she didn’t put a lot of faith in the method. So whenever she had to be in there, she absolutely raced to finish her business.
Oh, shit; she’d forgotten to bring the flashlight. The lights hadn’t gone off yet when she was in the bathroom, but everyone insisted it did happen occasionally, and she was afraid of the dark, so that was one warning she’d listened to. She tried to hurry, but really, you can piss only so fast and she had waited until she was miserably full because she hated using this bathroom. Crouched over the toilet—no way was she going to sit on that thing—she kept going and going and going, and her legs began to ache so bad she thought she might actually have to sit down after all, and then what could she do, boil her butt?
But finally she finished, blotted herself with a page from the magazine, and groaned in relief as she stood from her awkward, crouched position. If she could ever get Colton away from Chihuahua and Pancho Villa’s bullet-riddled Dodge so they could continue their vacation tour, she was going to insist that they stay at better places.