Silent Fear (2 page)

‘This is just fuckin wrong!’ The guy with the mole punched his palm.

Seth turned him by the shoulder and said, ‘Stop looking. Come over here.’

Holly slid the laryngoscope blade over Fowler’s tongue and lifted, half her mind on what Seth might be saying to his mates and the other half focused on the vocal cords lit bright white by the laryngoscope’s bulb. She threaded the tube into the dark space between them, held it in place with one hand, and withdrew the blade.

Joe injected more drugs, and told the compressor to stay slow and smooth.

Holly connected the Laerdal bag to the outer end of the tube and squeezed. Fowler’s chest rose with the inflations. She could feel his lungs, elastic and healthy. She wondered how loud a silenced gun was. The back of her neck prickled at the thought that whoever had shot him might still be watching.
Are we targets too, for trying to save him?

‘This is terrible,’ the woman said. She sounded like she was about to cry.

‘You’re doing fine.’ Holly tied the tube in.

‘I wasn’t doing it right before, was I?’

‘It’s easy now, look. Squeeze this bag like I’m doing. Twice every time he hits thirty.’

The woman took the bag tentatively.

‘There you go,’ Holly said, glancing around the park. ‘That’s perfect. See how his chest rises?’

A few people stood in their yards or on the verandahs of the houses across the street, hands shielding their faces from the sun, but she couldn’t see anyone hiding behind the clubhouse or any of the many shrubs and trees. The ambulance would provide some protection if she could bring it in, but the grounds were bordered by short upright posts sunk into the earth at regular intervals, precisely so that nobody could drive on. There was always a gate somewhere at these parks but they were equally always padlocked, the key held by someone who’d be here if it was an official council-sanctioned sports day, but a bunch of guys chucking a footy around on a blinding summer’s day didn’t qualify.

She moved her shoulders so that her shirt collar rubbed across the back of her neck but it didn’t help with the prickling. Chances were that the shooter had fled as soon as he’d seen the victim fall, she told herself. And the cops would be here soon. She felt no better.

Focus.

‘Doing good,’ she said to the woman, and ran her fingers over Fowler’s head. There was no exit wound; there wasn’t even a lump that could be a bullet under the skin. If the hole was indeed the entry wound from a bullet, the projectile had gone round and round, probably completely destroying his brain.

‘Next adrenaline in,’ Joe said.

‘This is bullshit!’ the guy with the mole said.

The blond guy had walked a few steps away and looked like he was on his phone.

The compressor was speeding up again. How many times did she have to tell him? ‘Slower and smoother, please.’

She pulled her notebook from her pocket and said to the woman, ‘What’s his address?’

‘Oh, we don’t know him,’ she said. ‘We were just going past and came over to see if we could help. Though I don’t know how much we actually helped.’

Holly squeezed her shoulder. ‘You’ve given him every chance.’

The woman blinked back tears.

Holly stood up. The blond guy was off the phone and Seth was speaking fast and low into his ear. The younger silent man stared at Fowler, his lips pressed together so hard they were white; and the guy with the mole rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his fingers clutching his hair.

‘We’re doing everything for Paul that we can,’ Holly said to them. ‘I know how upset you are but I need your help. Who knows him best?’

‘Me,’ Seth said.

Murphy’s Law.

She handed him her notebook and pen. ‘Write down his full name and address, any health problems he had, any medication he was on.’

He frowned. ‘I don’t know about medication.’

‘What you can then.’ Holly heard a siren in the distance, then two.
Good. Great.

Joe looked at her. ‘Still asystole.’

She knew what he was getting at. With no response they could run through the rest of the protocol then call off the resus. There was no telling how these agitated men would react to her declaring him dead, though. And although no response meant there was really no chance, Fowler was young, so deserved every effort.

‘Let’s continue, then transport,’ she said.

Joe nodded.

Seth held out the notebook. ‘Here.’

In her brother’s still-familiar slanted handwriting Holly saw the name Paul Fowler, an address in Belfield and another in Brighton-Le-Sands, and a date of birth that made him almost thirty.

Seth said, ‘The Belfield place is where his ex lives. They split up six weeks ago and now he’s staying with me in Brighton. That’s my home number and my mobile too. In case you need them.’

Brighton-Le-Sands was a nice bayside suburb and she couldn’t imagine Seth living there. She glanced at his arms but the skin looked healthy, intact. He met her gaze and turned his wrists outward as if to let her see more clearly. She looked hard into his eyes, then back at the patient. There were plenty of other places to shoot up and they both knew it.

‘Thirty.’ The compressor puffed out a breath and wiped his forehead on his T-shirt sleeve. ‘My back’s hurting.’

‘I’ll take over.’

Holly moved into position opposite him, and when he reached thirty again he took his hands off Fowler’s chest and she put hers in their place. Joe checked the monitor again and injected sodium bicarbonate through the IV. The sirens drew closer. The woman adjusted her grip on the Laerdal bag. Holly felt the give and spring in Fowler’s ribs, so unlike the brittle resistance of most of their cardiac arrest victims who were generally much older. The sun beat down and she felt the heat rising off the dead grass into her face and the hardness of the dry earth under her knees and the futility of their work and the awareness that someone had done this to him and might still be watching. Maybe even one of the men around her now. She realised that she only had their word for it that he’d suddenly collapsed with no warning.

She leaned closer to the woman who was squeezing the bag with white-knuckled fingers. ‘Did you see him collapse?’

‘No. We were walking on the path along the river when we heard somebody yell out. When we looked over he was already on the ground.’

One of the sirens came close, then stopped, and an ambulance pulled up next to theirs in the car park. Joe said into the portable, ‘Stretcher please.’ The paramedics clicked their radio in reply and pulled the stretcher out of Thirty-two, bringing it rattling across the ground with the carry sheet folded on top.

A moment later a police car roared into view. Holly felt a little better and glanced at Fowler’s friends. Mole guy was pacing with his hands linked at the back of his neck and his elbows together in front of him. Blondie and Seth and the one with the bruises had moved away a little and were talking in low voices. Holly hoped the cops were taking notice.

‘Next adrenaline in,’ Joe said.

‘Let’s get ready to load,’ Holly said to the backup paramedics, men she recognised but didn’t know. ‘We’ll log-roll when the cops get here so they can see his neck.’

They knelt alongside Fowler’s body while Holly kept doing compressions, saying ‘Thirty’ when the moment came so the woman bystander could squeeze the bag. When the police officers reached them Holly stopped compressions and supported Fowler’s neck as Joe and the others rolled him onto his side. The female cop looked close, then raised her eyebrows and nodded. Holly couldn’t help glancing at Seth, but he was muttering to the blond man again, his head turned away from her.

They lowered Fowler onto his back, then lifted him onto the stretcher.

‘I want to come with him,’ Seth said. ‘I’m his best friend.’

That’d be right. Twelve years – a lifetime – since I escaped, and now he’s about to get into my ambulance.

Joe put the monitor between Fowler’s ankles on the stretcher and Holly hooked the Viva over her shoulder. One paramedic took the Laerdal bag from the woman.

The cops separated the group – the compressor and the woman as well – and told them to sit. Holly had seen it before. Detectives would be called to the scene and they’d speak to each person out of hearing of the rest. Once Fowler was declared dead this would be a homicide investigation and they’d be taking no chances. She made a mental note to put all Seth’s sneaky conversations with his mates into her statement.

‘Where will you be taking him?’ one of the cops asked.

‘Royal Prince Alfred,’ Holly said.

The cop lowered his voice. ‘Any chance?’

‘Barring a miracle, none.’

They wheeled the stretcher across the hot ground to the ambulances. Holly looked hard at the street for someone lurking behind a tinted window in a car or crouching behind a shrub. There were a couple of people standing on their house patios watching what was going on, but that was all.

Seth paced beside her. ‘Sick fucks in the world today. Play a little footy and look what happens. Get picked off, no reason at all.’

Holly ignored him.

‘The cops’ll find out why,’ Joe said.

‘There is no why,’ Seth said. He looked at Fowler, motionless on the stretcher. ‘No reason for this at all.’

Holly steered the stretcher through the gap between shrubs and bet her life that wasn’t true.

*

On the way to hospital Holly hung on to the grab bar over the ambulance side window with one hand and compressed Fowler’s chest with the other while Joe squeezed the Laerdal bag and intermittently injected drugs. Fowler’s skin was cooling, Holly could feel it even through her gloves. She looked out the front at the traffic, while the paramedic who was driving punched the horn repeatedly, switching the siren between yelp and wail to get people to hear and shift themselves. She looked at Seth in the front passenger seat, at the side of his head, his pink ear and the trim of a recent haircut behind it, thinking that someone who didn’t know better might think he’d turned his life around just as she had.

Joe injected another bolus of adrenaline and watched the monitor. Holly swayed with the movement of the ambulance as they rocketed around a corner.

‘No response,’ Joe said.

Holly glanced at the monitor. The green line showed the rhythm of her compressions but that was all.

Joe tilted his head towards Seth and raised his eyebrows.

‘My brother,’ Holly said, then mouthed the word
arsehole
.

Joe nodded and adjusted his grip on the bag. Holly pressed on Fowler’s chest and watched his body shift from side to side on the stretcher mattress with each turn in the road. His eyelids were half-open, his eyes cloudy, pupils fixed and dilated. The blood on her gloves was dry. The air conditioning was cold on the side of her face but the rest of her was hot and sweating.

‘Holly.’ Seth twisted in his seat. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

She didn’t answer and fixed her gaze out the side window. From the corner of her eye she saw him watching her, or Fowler, or both of them, then he turned to face the front again.

The paramedic had put in a code three to alert RPA that they were coming and as they swung into the ambulance bay Holly saw a nurse waiting in the doorway, hands on her hips. Her name was Claire and she hated paramedics, having been once engaged to Joe before he left her for another paramedic, Lauren, now his wife and due to deliver twins any day.

‘Joe.’ Holly nodded out the back as the ambulance reversed towards the building.

‘Shit,’ he said.

In less than a minute they were pulling out the stretcher, Holly giving the basics of the case to Claire, who stopped glaring at Joe long enough to frown.

‘Couldn’t you call it on scene?’ she said.

Holly frowned back at her. ‘He’s twenty-nine.’

‘With a mangled brain.’

Seth said, ‘That’s my friend you’re talking about.’

Claire kept her eyes on Holly. ‘We’re absolutely chockers, and you know the doc’ll call it the second we walk in.’

‘That’s up to the doc,’ Joe said.

Claire shot him a look that could freeze the sun.

The backup paramedic took over compressions and Holly started wheeling the stretcher towards the door. ‘We did our bit,’ she said.

Claire muttered something about uselessness and a cold dead body.

Seth turned bright red. ‘What did you say?’

Joe put a hand on his arm. Holly pushed the stretcher past them and into the hospital while the backup paramedics compressed Fowler’s dead heart and squeezed air into his dead lungs. A doctor and two nurses waited in the resus room. Holly parked the stretcher by the hospital bed.

‘Twenty-nine-year-old male, collapsed while playing touch football, poor CPR commenced within a couple of minutes by bystanders.’

The doctor held Fowler’s head, protecting the tube, and the rest of them lifted the carry sheet and transferred him over.

‘On assessment we found a small injury to the back of his neck, possibly a bullet wound,’ Holly continued. ‘Everyone on scene denied hearing a shot or seeing anything other than him suddenly falling to the ground unconscious.’

‘Roll him so I can see,’ the doctor said.

His name was Callum McLennan. He’d been a politician or something for a bit, Holly’d heard, but he seemed okay now.

They stopped CPR and log-rolled Fowler onto his left side. McLennan grabbed a penlight torch and examined the wound. ‘Looks like a bullet wound to me too.’ He motioned for them to lay Fowler on his back again.

Holly ran through the treatment she and Joe had carried out, the amounts of adrenaline and bicarb they’d given, while McLennan listened, his bloodied and gloved hands folded together in front of him, and the paramedic and one nurse carried on with CPR.

‘There’s been no response,’ Holly finished.

‘Nothing at all,’ McLennan said, more of a statement than a question.

‘Zip.’

McLennan nodded. ‘Let’s call it.’ He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Time of death is thirteen-oh-four.’

The paramedic stopped compressions and stepped back from the bed. The nurse disconnected the Laerdal bag and put it down.