the dead man beside her, finally forcing herself into action. Carefully she leaned over the figure and started CPR.
Five puffs in, then push, push, push.
“Let me help you.” A man in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit touched her shoulder and she nodded, not allowing herself to wonder what was going on around her, never missing a breath. She blew expelled air into the stranger’s body, while the other good samaritan pushed down on his chest.
The stranger remained dead.
“There’s one alive by the Bronco. I don’t think the car’s a risk to blow up. Do you want to try him?” the man asked, gently squeezing her arm as he coaxed her to her feet.
Molly stood up and nodded, feeling her lip tremble and her eyes sting. She moved away as if walking through sand. A rock, zinged out from under the tire of a vehicle on the freeway above, smacked into her forehead above the eye. It hurt like mad, but for some reason Molly welcomed the pain.
She heard a squeal of tires behind her and shouts, then two young women, dressed in bicycle pants and U.C.L.A. T-shirts, ran past her. They began working on one of the other accident victims, an older man with white hair. When he lifted his hand, all three women grinned.
Encouraged, Molly fell to her knees next to the remaining man. He had on a heavy windbreaker zipped up tight. His pulse was so weak she could hardly feel it, and his dark skin had paled, particularly around his mouth. Glancing back at the off-ramp entrance, she saw both lanes were blocked by cars and several people were running around.
The pickup driver and a teenager with dreadlocks were working together and lighting a string of flares around the blocked lanes.
Molly tilted the man’s head back, then blew sharply through his dry lips. Her hands fumbled with his windbreaker, stopping at the hard lump over his heart.
Damn if he wasn’t wearing a gun! A bigger one than she had picked up before, to judge from the outline of it. The weapon was strapped against his chest.
“What in the hell was going on out here?” she asked in fear and anger. No one answered her.
Visions of high-speed chases and deranged drug dealers flooded her brain. She blanched, but pushed on. A second worry, that this scene somehow had something to do with the murder trial she was going to testify at, Molly dismissed. Get a grip, she scolded. Lives were depending on her.
The scream and whine of emergency vehicles began to fill the air.
The girls had saved the white-haired man, Molly thought. Maybe she could save this one, too.
“Please stay in your cars and proceed.” This static-tinged command blared out of a patrol car’s loudspeaker as two black and whites rolled up and parked a yard from Molly. She left the gun where it was and slipped her hand beneath the holster to do chest compressions. Suddenly the man’s body jerked, and he inhaled and began to gag.
Molly turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke, which was when she saw the hole. It was about the size of a pencil, neat and clean, right in the center of his left shoulder blade. Blood soaked his entire back.
“We’ll take over, miss.”
The paramedic’s hand on Molly’s shoulder made her gasp. She stood. “His pulse is low, about thirty-three. I’ve been doing CPR for three minutes. And I think he’s got a bullet in the back,” she added.
Hearing this information, the paramedic didn’t even blink, but turned and ordered, “Get me an IV and plasma. Possible gunshot.”
A uniformed cop beckoned Molly and the two coeds. They followed, and Molly saw there was now an entire fleet of police and rescue trucks. The authoritarian honk and blinking lights of a fire engine clogged her senses along with the sounds of radios, dispatchers, air brakes and the whacka, whacka, whacka of a hovering news helicopter. It buffeted the group below with hot gusts of air.
“Hell of a job, ladies,” offered a smiling highway patrolman, his beige uniform impossibly clean. “We could have used you after the last earthquake.”
The group stood silent, watching as the ambulances loaded up their badly battered or lifeless cargo. One of the policemen, a man about sixty with a precision salt-and-pepper haircut and a fat polyester tie, took Molly aside to ask a few questions.
“Molly Jakes. I work for Pacific Communications,” she answered.
“Phone number?”
She gave him her work number, craning her neck to look at the firemen, all yellow jackets and boots. They were spraying foam on the Bronco, and she thought of herself sitting next to it five minutes before.
“What were you doing out at 3:00 a.m., Miss Jakes?”
“I was going home. I live just up the road, in Mission Verde.”
He stared at her. “Didn’t you have something to do with the Brooker murder case?”
Weakly she nodded, cursing the fact that she was now so well-known by the authorities in her own town. She had preferred her law-abiding, anonymous life. Being known by sight by a cop gave her an odd feeling. She explained that she was a witness, though only a material one. For a moment, she was afraid he was going to make her go to the station. But he let it drop.
Molly gave him her address, telling herself that the edge in his voice wasn’t really thankless. Molly had a tendency to apologize for other people; it was her way of retaining her optimism about the human race.
This guy is obviously tired, she told herself. He seemed to be near retirement age, and Molly imagined he was sick of being called out on these middle-of-the-night disasters.
“Where were you coming from?”
“Summer Point Towers. Eighteen ten Summer Road. I got a call that there was an emergency at that location where my phone crew was doing an installation.”
“How long were you there?”
“Not long. It turned out the call was a mistake by the dispatcher.”
“That happen often?”
“No, thank God.” It had never happened before, not to Molly anyway. But she wasn’t going to get into that with the cops. She was going to raise hell with dispatch, but it certainly wasn’t a big deal.
The cop raised his eyebrows, then glanced in the direction of her parked car. “You went alone?”
“Yes.” She swallowed the words “I’m a big girl, Officer,” and with this little defiance felt her equilibrium take a turn for the better.
“Okay, Miss Jakes. We’ll be calling you tomorrow, I mean later today, to get you to come in and give a complete statement of what you saw here tonight.”
“Fine.” She wanted to ask what he thought had caused the accident, but the cop took a couple of steps toward one of the coeds, probably to ask her the same basic questions. Molly clasped her hands over her forearms and looked down to see why they felt so dry and tight. She had brown splotches on her T-shirt and skirt, and all over her arms. For a moment, she was nauseous, but forced herself to breathe deeply and headed for her car.
A
