Chapter 16
Ty
Hanna never makes it to Cal's house on Sunday.
The entire drive there she tried to build a sentence she can open with.
But her pager goes off — which is to say, her pager and mine and Cal's and Rivera's and Riley's and the rest of the shift all go off in sequence, the way they do when a dispatcher has five different rigs to roll and no time to be graceful about it.
I'm already on the truck when she pulls in.
She parks next to the ambulance in her personal car — not procedure, because Hanna wasn't on shift ten minutes ago, because she's not scheduled today… most of us aren’t, because we all heard our pagers and came.
Medical is short. Medical is always short.
She throws the car in park, sprints into the bay in civilian clothes, and gets into her turnout in ninety seconds.
Faster than anyone I've ever seen, because Hanna Larsen has the fastest hands.
"Run down."
"Multi-vehicle," Derek barks. "Three cars, one box truck, Highway 12, west of mile marker six. The truck is an LP delivery. Harrison says assume the tank. One pinned in a sedan, two walking wounded, one refusing care, truck driver concussion."
"Cal?" Hanna asks me.
"On engine. Already rolling. Riley behind him in the utility."
"Me?"
"With me on rescue. I've got extrication."
We roll.
Hanna, in the seat of the ambulance next to the new medic — Ruiz, three months out of school, white-knuckled but steady — sets her jaw the way she sets it when the thing in front of her is a thing she'll do. I see her jaw through the cab window for one second as we pull out.
I don't look at it again.
The run to mile marker six takes four minutes.
In those four minutes I do what I've done on every run since I was twenty-three, which is become the person who's on the run.
It's a trick my first captain taught me.
Brennan, you don't get to bring your day to a call.
You leave the day in the station. You pick it up on the way back in.
I leave the day in the station. I leave Ty and Hanna and Cal and the barbecue and the speech Hanna's mother saved for years.
What's in the cab with me is one thing: the puzzle.
The diagram of a scene I haven't seen yet.
The sequence in which I'll approach it. The inventory of the tools.
Derek drives like he's late for a wedding. Derek is the best driver we have.
"LP," he says. "That's gonna be the thing."
"Yeah."
"We're going to want Cal off the truck."
"Cal calls it."
"But what about — "
"Cal calls it, Derek."
"Okay."
We come over the rise.
Below us, on the shoulder of Highway 12 in the afternoon in a light going orange-soft, is the scene.
It's a bad one.
A sedan is on its roof. A crossover has gone off the berm with its front end into the guardrail.
A hatchback is spun sideways — intact but empty, the driver standing beside it with a phone to his ear and a jacket over his face, because he has, I assume, vomited.
And across the median, on its side, is the box truck: white, with a propane company logo I've seen on signs all my life, and under the truck, pooling slow and bright in the gravel, is a spreading wet I don't have to taste to identify.
The driver is already out; Rivera is with him on the shoulder, pressing gauze to a scalp laceration.
The truck isn't on fire — specifically, deliberately not on fire — and will remain not on fire for as long as it takes us to extract the pinned driver from the upside-down sedan, during which time an entire county of people will be standing within a hundred-foot radius of three hundred gallons of liquid propane leaching down a gravel shoulder in the sun.
"Cal."
"On it," Rivera says.
Cal has the engine on the highway shoulder fifty feet back. He's at the pump panel before his door is fully open.
"Foam blanket now. Ty, extrication, and I want you fast — we've got an envelope here."
"Copy."
Hanna is already at the sedan with Ruiz. The driver, a woman, is upside-down in the belt, pinned against the wheel well by a chunk of the crossover that has come through the back passenger window. She's conscious. She's screaming. She's breathing. All of these are information.
"Vitals?" I ask, approaching with the Jaws of Life machine.
"Pulse one-thirty, BP's holding, airway open, GCS fourteen." Hanna doesn't look at me. "She's got a fractured femur and I'm worried about her pelvis. Get me space in thirty seconds."
"Copy."
"Thirty, Ty."
"Copy."
Derek is on the other door with the spreaders.
We work. I don't look at Hanna. Hanna doesn't look at me.
We talk in numbers and joints and hydraulics, my hands doing the job they were trained to do, and the first door comes off in twenty-two seconds.
Hanna slips under the sill with her stretcher frame and her medical pack, and we both stop being two people and become the machine at the seam between crisis and not-crisis.
"Cal — status on the truck."
"Foam blanket going down. I want you out of there in under six."
"Copy six."
"Five if you can."
"Copy five."
Derek and I spread the B pillar. Hanna, on the inside, is talking to the driver.
The driver's name, I learn by accident, is Maureen.
Maureen is sixty-seven, on her way to visit her sister in Hamilton, and upside down in a sedan, asking Hanna whether she's going to make it in time for dinner because she's supposed to bring the ham.
Hanna says, in her transport voice: Maureen, you're going to Missoula General and they're going to give you something extremely nice for pain, and then you and your sister are going to eat the ham next week, and when you do I want a photo, because I love a ham.
Maureen laughs — better than screaming — and I don't take my eyes off the B pillar, but I'm aware, on a frequency I can't afford to be on, that I'm in love with a woman who can talk a sixty-seven-year-old with a possible pelvic fracture into a laugh about ham.
The pillar goes. The seat releases. Hanna, Ruiz, and I rotate Maureen onto the board.
Derek is already clearing space for the stretcher.
The board comes out. We get her onto the gurney.
Ruiz is hustling toward the ambulance while Hanna stays back for the secondary survey — twenty seconds on the shoulder, ear to chest — and Maureen is loaded, Ruiz is rolling, and Hanna turns back to the scene.
And as she turns, the truck shifts.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing loud. The box truck, sitting on its side on the other side of the median, moves about three inches on the jacks Cal has been setting.
It's a specific physics event: the truck isn't going to tip further, isn't going to catch, just settling its own weight differently against the jacks — and in doing so transfers four thousand pounds through a length of lever that, on the ground, terminates under the left boot of Cal Larsen.
Cal doesn't see it coming.
Cal is watching the foam blanket go down.
Cal makes the small backward movement of a man who's realized too late that the ground is now where the truck is and goes under the edge of the lever at an undignified angle.
He isn't crushed.
He's clipped.
Clipped is a different thing than crushed.
Clipped, at four thousand pounds through a lever, puts Cal Larsen on his back in the gravel with his shoulder out of the joint and his head striking the rim of the truck bed on the way down at exactly the speed and angle that takes him out of the game.
Rivera sees it first.
Rivera yells: "MAN DOWN."
Derek and I are over the median at a run.
Here is what I do in the next sixty seconds.
I don't think about Hanna.
I don't think about whether Cal is my best friend.
I don't think about the thing we did to him.
I think about GCS. Pulse. Airway. Whether his head is still attached to his neck the way it was two minutes ago. I get down in the gravel. I check his pupils. They respond. He's out — all-the-way out.
"Cal."
No response.
"Cal."
Nothing. Two inches from his face. His breath is there. His carotid pulse is there. The shoulder is unmistakably separated — the joint sitting up under the collar of his turnout where it isn't supposed to be. Blood in his hair. A lot of blood. Scalp lacerations bleed the way they do. His eyes open.
"Cal."
"Brennan?"
"Yeah."
"My shoulder." His voice is rough.
"I know."
"Ow."
"I know."
"Is my head — "
"Head's fine. You got clipped."
"Truck."
"Truck."
"Idiot."
"Yeah."
"Okay." His eyes close again. Breathing even. Pupils good.
I hear Hanna before I see her.
She's two feet behind me, in a voice I haven't heard since she was fifteen and her father's captain came to the door: "Ty. Move."
I move.
Hanna does her job.
Hanna Larsen, paramedic, is on her brother in the gravel of Highway 12 with her hands doing the small precise things hands do when the patient is also the person you've loved longest, and she can't let either fact interfere with either of them.
She checks his pupils again, palpates his neck, gets the cervical collar on.
She calls for the board. Ruiz comes back at a run.
She runs the secondary the way she ran Maureen's — faster if anything, meaner with herself about it, because she isn't letting the name on the patient affect the algorithm she was trained on.
I stand with my back turned, because looking at her face right now would break something in both of us we can't afford to break on this highway shoulder.
I go back to the truck. I do my job.