her head on the pavement again, then stepped over her to get to Joe with a wild swing.
Joe blocked the first punch with little effort—the dumb punk didn’t know what he was dealing with as he boxed for his workouts—but the guy pulled a knife and lashed out. Joe threw another punch and landed it, even while feeling a hot lightning-quick slice across his ribs. Now he was really ticked. The guy ran deeper into the alley with Joe in pursuit, soon disappearing over a large trash bin and tall crumbling brick wall. Joe skidded to a brief stop and watched in disbelief. For a scumbag the man was agile. Probably from a lot of practice in assaulting innocent people.
The girl! Holding his side, he sprinted back to where she lay. Out cold.
Benny met up with him. “I called the police. You okay?”
“Just a superficial wound.” Still, he checked it briefly since an adrenaline rush could mask pain. The last thing he wanted to find out was that the cut was deep enough to cause evisceration and he hadn’t noticed. Fortunately the only thing he saw was oozing blood, nothing gushing. He’d throw a thick absorbent pad over his middle as soon as Benny got back with the trauma kit, oxygen bag and backboard. He didn’t want to bleed all over the poor lady. “Bring our equipment, okay?” He grabbed a pair of gloves from Benny’s belt, and knelt in front of the young woman as Benny took off for the ambulance. “I’m a paramedic, miss. Are you okay?” he said loudly and clearly. She didn’t respond.
She’d hit her head hard when she’d fallen—correct that, had been punched to the ground. He tried to rouse her with a firm hand on her shoulder. “Hello? You okay, you awake, miss?”
He watched the rise and fall of her chest. At least she was breathing normally. He felt her neck for the carotid pulse and found it. Rate and strength normal. Good. He scanned her body for bleeding or other signs of obvious injury. Maybe the scumbag had stabbed her too. Then he used the palms of his gloved hands to sweep the underside of her arms and legs to check for bleeding, and did the same beneath both sides of her back. So far so good.
There was a fifty-cent-sized pool of blood behind her head, but he didn’t move her neck, not before he and Benny had placed a cervical collar on her. Her assailant had run off with her purse and she didn’t appear to have any other form of ID. He checked her wrist and then her neck to see if she wore any emergency alert jewelry. No such luck. They’d have to wait until she regained consciousness to find out who she was.
Even under the dim lights in the alley she had an obvious black eye, and because the dirtbag had yanked off her torso-anchored purse strap the sweater she’d been wearing had been pulled halfway down her left arm...which was covered in bruises. She’d just been mugged, but these marks weren’t fresh. Anger surged through him. She’d been beaten up long before today.
What kind of guy treated a woman like that?
He shook his head. Of all the lousy luck. She hadn’t stepped off the bus five minutes ago and had already gotten mugged and knocked unconscious. The only thing she had going for her on this nightmare of a Friday night was him. He shuddered for the young stranger over what might have played out if he hadn’t been here.
Maybe it was those thick eyelashes that seemed to glue her eyes shut, or her complete vulnerability, being unconscious in an alley, or maybe it was the obvious signs of abuse, but for whatever reason Joe was suddenly struck with an uncompromising need to protect her.
From this moment on tonight he vowed to take responsibility for the out-of-luck Jane Doe. Hell, if anyone had ever needed a guardian angel, she did.
Benny had moved the ambulance closer, and brought the backboard and equipment. Joe let Benny apply a large sloppy dressing around his middle as he checked her airway again, noting she had good air exchange. He worried, with the head injury, that she might vomit and wanted to be near if she did to prevent aspiration.
“We’re going to give you some oxygen and put a collar round your neck,” Joe said calmly, hoping she might already be regaining consciousness and hear him explain everything they did to her. They worked together and soon had Jane on the backboard for stability. Joe secured her with the straps, never taking his eyes off her. She had definitely been knocked out cold, yet still breathed evenly. A good thing. But he knew when unconscious people woke up they could often be combative and try to take off the oxygen and cervical collar. Hell, after what she’d just been through, could he blame her if she woke up fighting?
With her long dark auburn hair spread over her shoulders and her hands strapped to the transport board, she made the strangest image.
An urban Sleeping Beauty.
“Ready for transfer?” Joe said, breaking his own thoughts.
“Don’t you want to wait for the police?”
“If they’re not here by the time we get her in the back of the van, you call them again and tell them to meet us at the clinic. She might have a skull fracture or subdural bleed for all we know, and needs medical attention ASAP.” He knew the next forty-five minutes were all she had remaining in the golden hour for traumatic head injury. “I’m going to call Dr. Rothsberg and let him know what we’ve got.”
He jumped into the back of the van first to guide the head of the gurney on which they’d placed the long spine board and patient as Benny pushed from the back, then he rolled the gurney forward and locked it in place with sprung locks on the ambulance floor.
He’d ride in the back with her. If she woke up, confused and possibly combative, he wanted to be there. Plus it would be his chance to do a more thorough examination.
Joe did another assessment of Sleeping Beauty’s condition. Unchanged. Then he made the call. Unexpectedly, Dr. Rothsberg said to bring her to the clinic instead of county. Which was a good thing, because Joe would have taken her home before he’d consider delivering a Jane Doe to county hospital to potentially slip through every conceivable crack due to their overstretched system.
He stripped off the makeshift dressing and his shirt to assess his own wound, which was long and jagged, still wept blood and would definitely need stitches. Now that he was looking at it, it burned like hell. Benny had a short conversation with the police, who’d just arrived. Great timing! He showed them where they’d found her and where the attacker had fled over the wall then left them to look for witnesses as Joe cleaned and dressed his own wound. Damn, the disinfectant smarted! One of the policemen took a quick look inside the ambulance, saw the victim and Joe with his injury, nodded and took off toward the alley.
Benny closed the back doors of the van, got into the driver’s seat then started the ambulance. “They’ll take our statements at the clinic later.”
“Good,” Joe said, taping his dressing, constantly checking his patient as he did so.
As Benny drove, with their lights flashing, Joe checked her vital signs again, this time using a blood-pressure cuff then a stethoscope to listen to her lungs. He opened her eyes, opening the blackened eye more gingerly, and used his penlight to make sure she hadn’t blown a pupil. Fortunately she hadn’t, but unfortunately he’d had to move a clump of her hair away from her face in order to do so. It was thick and wavy, and, well, somehow it felt too intimate, touching it. It’d been a while since he’d run his fingers through a woman’s hair, which he definitely wasn’t doing right now, but the thought of wanting to bothered him.
By the status of her black eye, it’d been there a few days and definitely looked ugly and intentional. Someone had punched her. That was a fact. There was that anger again, flaming out of nowhere for a woman he knew zero about.
