Chapter 6
SIX
Stunned, Madoc stared after Gus who’d stalked off, tension pouring off him in waves. What the fuck did the guy think he was doing walking onto a scene without a backup?
His job. The one you said he wasn’t good at.
Shame washed through Madoc in a hot wave. Gus’s eyes had gone wide as Madoc had laid into him, face slack like he’d been slapped, and Madoc had steeled himself for the discipline he had coming for being so far out of line with his bitching he’d practically left the state. But then Gus had gone oddly quiet, voice flat when he spoke and expression distant, gaze skittering past Madoc like he couldn’t stand the sight of him.
And Madoc knew he’d brought this on himself by being a self-centered dick. He didn’t even know where the venom that had poured out of him during the drive over had come from. Annoying nicknames and occasional mischief aside, Gus was a great partner who not only kicked ass at the work but always showed Madoc respect.
Respect I don’t deserve after the things I said.
Hastily, Madoc went around to the back of the truck and helped unload the gurney. Gus didn’t say a word the whole time, his normally expressive face stiff as they wheeled everything over to the pub doors.
The guy in the cowboy hat rolled his eyes. “Come on. That asshole doesn’t need an ambulance.” He waved wildly at the doors of the pub. “He needs to be arrested for ripping me off!”
Gus looked past the dude to the cop. “Hey, Pete. Patient inside?”
“In back by the restrooms,” Officer Pete confirmed. He was a burly guy with deep brown skin and a wry air, though the quelling look he shot at the cowboy hat dude bought them some silence. “White male, young, looks like an OD. There’re a couple of girls in there with him, but they’re high as kites too.”
Inside, the pub was packed but eerily quiet, a strange, spiky energy in the air that set Madoc’s teeth on edge. But he knew from one look that the patient they found on the floor in the back hallway was very fucked, his skin slick with sweat and so pale it verged on blue.
“What’s your friend’s name?” Gus asked the girls kneeling on either side of him, and the one nearest him raised a hand to her dark hair.
“Brendan.” Her eyes were huge as she looked between Madoc and Gus, her pupils dilated wide. “We were at the bar, and he went to use the bathroom, but when he didn’t come back, we found him like this with some big guy in a hat standing over him and yelling about money.”
Gus pressed his fingers against Brendan’s neck, then pulled his penlight from his pocket. “Pulse is weak,” he said to Madoc before peeling back Brendan’s eyelids. “And his pupils are pinpoints.” Looking between the girls, Gus asked, “Has Brendan been using opiates tonight?”
“I don’t know,” replied the girl with the dark hair. “We haven’t been together the whole time.”
Tucking his penlight away, Gus rubbed the knuckles of his right hand hard up and down Brendan’s sternum. “Brendan!” he said loudly. “Time to wake up, buddy!”
An ugly noise came out of Brendan, like a deep gurgling snore that was lodged deep in his throat, and when Gus met Madoc’s gaze for the first time since they’d arrived on the scene, Madoc already knew what his partner was thinking.
“I’m gonna hit him with the NARCAN,” Gus said, turning toward the bag while Madoc looked at the second girl, a blonde who’d gone very pale.
“Holy shit,” she said, staring at Brendan. “Is he gonna die?”
“We’re trying to make sure he doesn’t,” Madoc replied. “We think your friend is OD’ing and my partner’s going to give him some medicine to help. What did you all and Brendan take—coke or meth, some kind of upper?”
“It was c-coke,” the blonde stammered, tears standing in her eyes. “We’ve been partying all day, snorted some right before we came in here.”
Madoc pursed his lips. He suspected Brendan was speedballing, the coke that had already been in his bloodstream now mixed with a depressant like heroin and God knew what else, the push and pull of the competing drugs throwing his body into a deadly chaos.
The NARCAN spray in one hand, Gus tilted Brendan’s head back with the other, and Madoc slid his own beneath the kid’s neck for support. There was a crash from somewhere in the bar followed by shouting, but neither looked away from their patient.
Gus inserted the nozzle’s tip into the kid’s left nostril and hit the plunger, then did the same into the right nostril. “Open your eyes, Brendan!” he called. “It’s time to?—”
A glass hit the wall at the end of hallway and shattered, the pieces skittering over the floor. Flinching and with the girls’ screams in his ears, Madoc grabbed his radio.
“A1, what’s the ETA on P1 at 45 Province Street?” he asked.
“P1 is on scene,” Connor replied before the dispatcher could. “But half the bar is out here brawling and BPD’s trying to clear a path for us to come in.”
“They’re brawling inside the bar too, P1,” Madoc said over the yells echoing from the bar down the hall. “And it’d be great if we had some help!”
“Unbelievable,” Gus muttered, then flinched when another glass hit the wall, quickly followed by a loud crashing that sounded like falling furniture. “What the fuck is going on out there?”
Madoc glanced over his shoulder toward the bar. “I’ll go?—”
“ No .” Gus grabbed Madoc’s arm, his face and voice fierce. “Don’t you dare move. Those are pub glasses hitting the wall and if you think I’m letting you walk out into that, you’re crazy.”
After a second dose of NARCAN failed to rouse Brendan and his pulse faded further, they began CPR with Gus performing the chest compressions while Madoc used a bag-valve mask to keep Brendan breathing.
“We’ll go to Plan B if we have to,” Gus said, his voice strained from his efforts. “Carry him out the fire door and hope for the best.”
Madoc bit his lip. Brendan might stand a chance if he got some NARCAN through an IV, but as the seconds ticked by, so did his life.
“Maybe we should—” he started, only for Brendan’s body to jerk hard.
“His eyes are open!” the blonde girl exclaimed. “Bren? Are you okay?”
Sweaty and breathless, Gus sat back on his heels with a grunt Madoc could feel. They’d done it—kept this dumbass alive so he could stare up at them like they were out of their minds.
“Welcome back, kid,” Gus said. “Good job scaring the shit out of your friends and my partner. Can you grab the gurney?” he asked Madoc. “I want to get him off the floor in case we still have to make a run for it out the back.”
Body buzzing with its own kind of high, Madoc set the mask aside and climbed to his feet. He’d gone just a few steps when a scream froze his blood.
“GET OFF ME!”
“Yo, I need some help!” Gus shouted. He had his hands on Brendan’s shoulders when Madoc looked back, and he grunted when a flailing fist caught him in the face. “Buddy, you gotta chill!”
“FUCK YOU!” Brendan bellowed as he thrashed and fought, the stimulants in his system coming on strong now that the opiates had been neutralized by the NARCAN.
Dashing back, Madoc tried to grab hold of Brendan’s legs to keep him from kicking, but it was like fightingtwo people at once, the kid’s bottom half twisting and bucking while his upper half kept throwing punches. Brendan’s dark-haired friend scrambled off to the side, but the blonde remained, gripping his left arm hard and screeching at him to chill out.
Then Brendan heaved mightily and jerked the girl into Madoc with a teeth-rattling jolt that sent them both sprawling and left Gus on his own. Pulling his legs into his chest, Brendan kicked out hard in a jackknife move that caught Gus in the chest with one booted foot. Gus yelped sharply but somehow hung on, until Brendan kicked a second time and sent Gus tumbling backward into the wall.
Oh, fuck.
“Gus!” Madoc shouted as thunder crashed into the hallway, more hands helping him secure Brendan, paramedics and other officers swarming around him and everyone speaking at once.
Someone—Olivia, Madoc thought—was talking about sedating the patient, while he tried to get a look through the tangle of bodies to Gus who sat hunched with his left shoulder against the wall, Pete the cop squatted beside him.
That could have been me .
“Go, we’ve got this,” Olivia said in Madoc’s ear, and he quickly scuttled his way around the crowd to his partner just as Connor did the same.
“He can’t catch his breath,” Pete was saying. “I can’t tell if he just got the wind knocked out of him or if he’s really injured.”
“The kid kicked him.” Madoc ghosted a hand over the one Gus had pressed against his sternum, his stomach bottoming out. Gus looked awful, his face a terrible shade of concrete gray, and while his prosthesis was lighter than an actual limb, it could easily have torqued his knee or hip when he’d fallen. “Gus?”
“Uh,” Gus managed to croak, his eyes watering as he tried to get air. “Am … okay.” Reaching up, his fingers trembled as he pulled Madoc’s hand away from his radio and the orange button they used to initiate system-wide calls for assistance. “Mayday for … ’mergencies,” he said on a short gasp.
Pete made a face. “I’d hate to see your idea of an emergency, Dawson, because you look like shit.”
Abruptly, Madoc’s fear transformed into a fury that scorched his insides. They shouldn’t have come into this pub without backup. And damnit , Gus should have let go after Brendan kicked him the first time instead of hanging on like a bullheaded asshole who always had to be right.
“Gus.” Connor set his hand just above Gus’s right knee. “Is your leg okay?”
Gus squished his eyes shut, sending the moisture that had collected in them onto his cheeks. “Y-yeah. Chest … fuckin’ hurts.”
Connor patted him gently. “I’m sure it does, hon. Let’s get you up so I can take care of you.”
Madoc wanted to argue that it was his job to take care of Gus. Yes, Connor outranked him by many degrees. But Gus was Madoc’s partner. The guy he worked so closely with it sometimes felt like they were inside each other’s heads. Who always had Madoc’s back and made sure he got home to Valerie after every shift. Who’d taken point on this call and told Madoc to stand down if he didn’t feel safe.
That could have been me.
The ride to MGH passed in a blur, Madoc’s attention on the dashboard camera every second he could spare as he drove. And it was hard seeing Gus so subdued, clearly hurting as Connor helped him ease off his uniform top and undershirt and applied a cold pack to his ribs.
Mark Mannix met them at the ED’s doors, his usual sass nowhere in sight as they wheeled the gurney and Gus into triage. And though Gus was grumbling now about being able to move around on his own, the knot in Madoc’s gut didn’t loosen at all.
After an X-ray revealed Gus’s upper right ribs were badly bruised rather than broken, he was given some pain relief and seemed to breathe easier. He remained stoic as Mark helped him into a hospital gown and applied ice to his injury, but Madoc knew him well enough by now to read pain in his features, despite Gus again looking everywhere but at Madoc.
“That kid could have cracked your skull,” Madoc said once the nurses and doc had filed out. “The way you hit the wall, you’re lucky you don’t have a TBI.”
“I know,” Gus said, quietly. “But I don’t, and my brain is fine.”
Madoc bit his lip. He deserved to be iced out after the way he’d spoken to Gus earlier on the truck. Knew he’d been needlessly cruel and unprofessional and that if Gus wrote Madoc up for being a disrespectful little shit, the reprimand would be deserved.
“Why didn’t you want to wait for backup?” he asked anyway. “I know we had a Code Four, but?—”
“I made a decision based on the data I had,” Gus said over him. “But if you think I’m okay with the way shit went down, you’re wrong.”
He met Madoc’s gaze at last, an intensity in his dark eyes Madoc hadn’t expected. “I’m sorry, Walters,” Gus said, his lips turning down at the corners. “I put you in a situation that got out of hand, and I know that really sucks.”
Madoc’s stomach roiled at the words. He didn’t want this apology. Gus couldn’t have guessed their patient would flip his shit in such a spectacular fashion. He’d been doing his job and trying to help someone who’d desperately needed it.
“I don’t just go through the motions, ever.”
“What should I tell the commander?” Madoc asked.
“Whatever you want,” Gus said, his voice flat again. Closing his eyes, he raised the ice pack and pressed it against his chest. “It was my scene, and I’ll take the heat.”
The dismissal stung Madoc like a slap. Was this the way things were going to be now? Gus shutting him down at every turn?
“Why did you send me for the gurney?” Madoc asked.
“Because we needed it.” Gus opened his eyes. “Because that kid was not in his right mind and?—”
“Then you should have said so back there,” Madoc bit out. “You had eyes on the patient, and if you had even a second’s thought he was going to be a problem, you should have told me. We could have restrained him.”
“And you saw the guy too, in case you forgot. Unresponsive after the first dose of NARCAN, which is why I went in with a second. I’m not psychic, Walt ,” Gus bit out, contempt dripping off that wretched nickname. “I can’t predict when a patient is going to come at us swinging.”
“They’re almost always confused and agitated after NARCAN?—”
“Which is not the same thing as flipping from blue-lipped and barely breathing to Street Fighter mode. Jesus, kid. Every patient is different, and you should know that by now.”
Oh, my God.
Madoc would have laughed at the worst nickname yet if he hadn’t been so completely fed up. “No job is worth this,” he said, mostly to himself. “I don’t have to take this shit from you or anyone.”
“All right ,” Gus snapped back with real temper at last. “I don’t want to do this now.”
“I have to file a report,” Madoc reminded him. “You don’t want to press charges against the patient, fine, but command is still going to want to know what happened.”
“So, tell them. You clearly have an opinion on how things went down, and you can put that in your fucking report.”
Gus tensed then, his knuckles going white around the cold pack and his face crinkling up so Madoc’s stomach fell right to his feet. Mark was there before Madoc could move though, muttering softly as he fussed over Gus. A big guy walking in behind Mark was the one who caught Madoc’s attention, however, especially after Gus took one look at the dude and the cold control he’d surrounded himself with instantly thawed, leaving him looking more shaken than Madoc had ever seen.
Holy cats, is this Ben? But why would Mark call him ?
Without thinking, Madoc took a step closer to the bed. “You’re not the sister,” he blurted, instantly regretting the inane comment when the big guy frowned beneath his short beard.
“True, but you shouldn’t assume. I’m Ian, the ex,” he said, going to Gus’s side.
Madoc recognized the name immediately. Ian had been there for the aftermath of Gus losing his leg. Was here for Gus again now, taking up position by the side of the bed. Trying to support Gus while Madoc had wanted to argue.
“Ian’s a nurse,” Gus said coolly to Madoc, already back in control. “Between him and Mark, I’m in good hands. Head back to the station, Walt, and get busy telling everyone how I fucked up.”
An ache burrowed in behind Madoc’s sternum as he followed Mark to the nurses’ station to sign off on some forms. He hated knowing Gus believed Madoc would throw him under the bus. Even more that Gus was blaming himself for the call having gone bad because Madoc hadn’t done shit to convince him otherwise.