Protecting His Witness. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      The smile faded the moment she stepped out into the living room again.

      There was no one lying on the floor by the back entrance.

       Chapter 2

      For one frantic moment, Kasey thought the stranger had either left, or, worse, lay in wait for her somewhere in the house.

      But then she saw him. It took a second for her heart to stop pounding as she realized that the stranger had just moved. He was still on the floor, but now closer to the kitchen. She guessed that he must have come to, tried to get up and collapsed when he found that the effort was too much for him.

      But why the kitchen? Why hadn’t he tried to go out the door?

      “You were probably disoriented,” she said under her breath as she crossed to him. She knelt down, setting the basin with its supplies next to her. “I can certainly relate to that.”

      Every day, when she first woke up, she had to take stock of where she was and who she was. There were times when it all felt so jumbled up in her brain, she wanted to give up running, give up hiding and just return to her old life.

      Which, she guessed, she’d probably be allowed to live for a total of ten minutes before word got around that she was back and among the living. And someone decided to do something about the latter.

      Was that who this man was on her floor? Someone running from something?

      Or was this an elaborate plan to flush her out, she wondered, her fingertips growing icy. Someone sent to get her, once and for all. She knew there was always a chance of that, but getting shot just to lull her into a false sense of security seemed like quite a stretch.

      When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. It was one of the mantras she’d been taught in medical school and it applied not just to the field, but to life. The unconscious man in her living room was probably a horse, not a zebra. Some poor victim, not a hit man.

      And if he was to continue being a horse, she had to help him live. And pretty damn quick.

      She raised his blood-soaked shirt away from his body. It was a bullet wound all right. Right there just under his arm. She’d seen worse, but there was no such thing as a good bullet wound. Slipping on a pair of plastic gloves she’d picked up at the local drugstore, she took a sterile swab, soaked it in peroxide and proceeded to clean the wound.

      With each stroke, Kasey raised her eyes and watched the unconscious stranger’s face with apprehension. But there was no reaction, no indication that he was only pretending to be unconscious. No involuntary wincing. He was out cold.

      “Lucky for both of us,” she murmured. “I’m probably a little rusty at this.”

      The wound cleaned, she reached for the scalpel she’d scrubbed less than five minutes ago.

      Poising the blade over the bullet’s point of entry, she told him, “This is going to be the hard part.” Still nothing.

      Which was good. But she still wished she had something to knock the man out in case he woke up and began to struggle. But things like that, other than 101 proof whiskey, couldn’t be purchased in the local pharmacy. Besides, she honestly never thought she’d need something in the way of an anesthetic ever again. She’d left that life behind, not willingly, but of necessity. It all boiled down to the same thing. She wasn’t a practicing doctor anymore.

      Very carefully, she began to probe the wound. Glancing up at the stranger’s face, she saw him tense even though he was in another realm where hard-core pain didn’t exist. Her patient continued sleeping. Satisfied that, at least for the time being, he was unaware of what was happening, she probed deeper. Just where had this bullet gone?

      After a couple more minutes, she was finally rewarded with the feel of metal against metal.

       Gotcha.

      Holding her breath, she secured the bullet and gingerly retracted the instrument until she could pull it free of the flesh around it.

      Like a fisherman who had managed to finally pull a marlin out of the water, she held up the tiny bit of mangled metal, examining it against the overhead light. She shook her head.

      “Not much to look at, is it?” she marveled. Small but deadly was an apt description. She wondered if the man on the floor knew how close he came to never seeing another sunrise. “Bet that could have ended your life with no effort at all if it’d hit just a little bit higher and to the left. Talk about lucky…”

      Again she shook her head, awed how some people died after tripping on the sidewalk and hitting their head, while others walked away from what appeared to be certain death after taking a fall from a second-story window. Or catching a bullet just beneath their rib cage, she thought, amazed.

      Cleaning the wound a second time, Kasey then picked up the sutures and very carefully sewed up the small hole. She wished she had access to some antibiotics to insure against infections, but he would have to take care of that for himself. Once he was awake.

      It didn’t take long to finish stitching him up, even though she took her time, studying his face after every stitch was taken.

      “You really are dead to the world, aren’t you?” she marveled. Finished, she put what was left of the sutures into a small white envelope and sealed it again.

      There wasn’t much.

      “Now what?” she asked herself out loud, looking down at her patient.

      He was still unconscious, still in her house. What did she do with him? She had no one to turn to, no one to go to for help. And that was strictly her own doing. Edwin Owens, the owner of the used bookstore Rare Treasures, had indicated that he was very willing to be her friend. Very willing to be more than that if she wanted him to be. But while he seemed like a nice man, she knew better than to make friends or form attachments. Friends asked questions, they noticed things about you. Things they could repeat, however innocently, to people who might come looking for you.

      So this was better, remaining an isolated mystery. It was also far less complicated. Now that she thought about it, this path she’d been forced to choose was also a great deal more lonely. Until right this minute, loneliness had not been a real problem for her. God knew she had more than enough on her mind to keep her occupied and busy. Too busy to feel lonely.

      But right now, if not an actual shoulder to lean on, she could have really used an extra pair of hands to help her with this man.

      Blowing out a long breath, Kasey shrugged as she put everything back into the basin and went back to the bathroom with it. There was no point in dwelling on what she didn’t have. She would have to make the best of it.

      The way she had these last endless months.

      Switching off the bathroom light, she went to the minuscule linen closet next. It was hardly big enough to hold a handful of towels and the extra bedding she kept there for cold winter nights. Grabbing the pink flannel blanket and the lone pillow from the top shelf, she returned to her patient.

      On her knees, Kasey gently raised his head and slipped the pillow under it, then threw the flannel blanket over him. She spread it out, making sure all of him was covered.

      “Who СКАЧАТЬ