onto a wheeled gurney that was fixed to the left wall by two spring
clamps to prevent it from rolling while the vehicle was in motion.
They put Hatch on another identical gurney along the right wall.
Two paramedics crowded into the rear of the ambulance and pulled the
wide door shut behind them. As they moved, their white, insulated nylon
pants and jackets produced continuous frictional sounds, a series of
soft whistles that seemed to be electronically amplified in those close
quarters.
With a short burst of its sireD, the ambulance started to move. The
paramedics swayed easily with the rocking motion. Experience had made
them sure footed.
Side by side in the narrow aisle between the gurneys, both men turned to
Lindsey. Their names were stitched on the breast pockets of their
jackets: David O’Malley and Jerry Epstein. With a curious combination
of professional detachment and concerned attentiveness, they began to
work on her, exchanging medical information with each other in crisp
emotionless voices but speaking to her in soft, sympathetic, encouraging
tones.
That dichotomy in their behavior alarmed rather than soothed Lindsey,
but she was too weak and disoriented to express her fear. She felt
infuriatingly delicate. Shaky. She was reminded of a surrealistic
painting This World and the Next, which she had done last year, because
the central figure in that piece had been a wire-walking circus acrobat
plagued by uncertainty. Right now consciousness was a high wire on
which she was precariously perched. Any effort to speak to the
paramedics, if sustained for more than a word or two, might unbalance
her and send her into a long, dark fall.
Although her mind was too clouded to find any sense in most of what the
two men were saying, she understood enough to know that she was
suffering from hypothermia, possibly frostbite, and that they were
worried about her. Blood pressure too low. Heartbeat slow and
irregular. Slow and shallow respiration.
Maybe that clean getaway was still possible.
If she really wanted it.
She was ambivalent. If she actually had hungered for death on a
subconscious level since Jimmy’s funeral, she had no special appetite
for it now-though neither did she find it particularly unappealing.
Whatever happened to her would happen, and in her current condition,
with her emotions as numb as her five senses, she did not much care
about her fate.
Hypothermia switched off the survival instinct with a narcotizing pall
as effective as that produced by an úalcoholic hinge.
Then, between the two muttering paramedics, she caught a glimpse of
Hatch lying on the other gurney, and abruptly she was jolted out of her
half-trance by her concern for him. He looked so pale. But not just
white.
Another, less healthy shade of pale with a lot of gray in it. His lab
turned toward her, eyes closed, mouth open slightly-looked as if a flash
fire had swept through it, leaving nothing between bone and skin except
the ashes of flesh consumed.
“Please,” she said, “my husband.” She was surprised that her voice was
just a low, rough croak.
“You first,” O’Malley said.
“No. Hatch. Hatch needs … help.”
“You first,” O’Malley repeated.
His insistence reassured her somewhat. As bad as Hatch looked, he must
be all right, must have responded to CPR, must be in better shape than
she was, or otherwise they would have tended to him first. Wouldn’t
they?
Her thoughts grew fuzzy again. The sense of urgency that had gripped
her now abated. She closed her eyes.
2
Later In Lindsey’s hypothermic torpor, the murmuring voices above her
seemed as rhythmic, if not as melodic, as a lullaby. But she was kept
awake by the increasingly painful stinging sensation in her extremities
and by the rough handling of the medics, who were packing small
pillowlike objects against her sides. Whatever the things were-electric
or chemical heating pads, she supposed they radiated a soothing warmth
far different from the fire burning within her feet and hands.
“Hatch needs warmed up, too,” she said thickly.
“He’s fine, don’t you worry about him,” Epstein said. His breath puffed
out in small white clouds as he spoke.
“But he’s cold.”
“That’s what he needs to be. That’s just how we want him.”