“She’s shot in the abdomen,” he said. “Get a gurney. Now.”
The paralysis in the room broke all at once. A doctor in blue scrubs came through the doors at a run, pushing a gurney ahead of her. Walker laid Claire down as gently as his shaking arms would allow. For one second her hand found a fistful of his leather vest and held on, her eyes locking onto his. Then her grip failed and her hand dropped off the side of the gurney.
“Pulse is thready,” the doctor called out, already moving. “Call surgery. Get two units of O-negative on standby.”
Walker stood in the corridor and watched the doors swing shut behind them. He looked down at his own hands. They were coated in her blood, already going tacky in the cold hospital air. He did not run. He walked to the nearest wall, slid down it until he was sitting on the linoleum, and waited.
It took seven minutes for the police to arrive.
The front doors were not opened so much as breached—half a dozen uniformed officers flooding into the lobby with their hands already on their sidearms. Behind them came Detective Frank Delaney, a heavyset man in his fifties with twenty years in homicide behind him and the particular exhaustion of a man who had trained Claire Whitfield himself back when she was twenty-two years old and convinced she was going to change the department from the inside. He had been closer to a father to her than her own had ever managed to be.
Delaney’s eyes found Walker sitting against the wall, covered in blood, the winged skull patch on full display across his back. He did not ask questions. He crossed the room in three strides, grabbed Walker by the front of his cut, and hauled him up, slamming him against the concrete wall hard enough to rattle the fire extinguisher case beside them.
“What did you do to her?” Delaney snarled, his service weapon already out, the barrel pressed under Walker’s jaw.
The lobby smelled of antiseptic and wet pavement tracked in from outside, and somewhere behind the chaos a vending machine kept humming, oblivious to the dozen firearms now trained on a single man standing against the wall. Officers fanned out around them in a half-circle, weapons drawn, safeties clicking off one after another.
Walker did not flinch. He looked past the gun into Delaney’s eyes, the fury behind them thinning by the second, replaced by the flat, unsteady look of a man who has already decided the worst has happened and is only waiting to be told the details.
“I brought her here,” Walker said quietly. “Where is she?”
“Surgery.”
Walker’s voice stayed level. “You’re wasting time on me, Detective. She needs blood, not a standoff.”
Delaney’s finger tightened against the trigger guard. The room held its breath—a dozen barrels aimed at a man who had not raised his hands once.
“Get that gun out of my lobby.”
The voice belonged to an older nurse in coffee-stained scrubs who had pushed her way between Delaney and Walker without so much as a flinch at the weapons around her. She had worked twenty-two years in this emergency room, had buried a husband who wore a badge for nineteen of them, and had long since stopped believing that either side of that line held a monopoly on decency.
“If you want to shoot him, take it outside. We’ve got trauma coming through those doors any minute.”
Delaney’s jaw worked. The adrenaline in him wanted an outlet and had not found one it liked. Slowly he lowered the weapon, though he did not holster it. He turned Walker around, slammed him face-first into the wall, and cuffed him hard enough to leave bruises.
Walker let it happen without a sound.
They put him in the back of a cruiser and drove him to the third floor of a building that smelled of bleach and old coffee and the particular grief that soaks into concrete after enough years of bad news being delivered inside it. The interrogation room had one steel table, two chairs, and a camera blinking red in the corner.
Delaney came in twenty minutes later with a folder and a cup of coffee he never touched. He threw the folder on the table.
“Her name is Claire Whitfield,” he said. “She is twenty-four years old. Eleven months on the street. She’s in surgery right now with a punctured liver, and the surgeon gives her one chance in five of seeing morning.”
Walker looked at the wall behind Delaney’s head. He did not offer sympathy. Coming from him it would only have sounded like an insult.
“You want to explain,” Delaney said, leaning forward, “why a patched member of the Hells Angels with a record longer than my forearm is the one who dragged her out of that ditch?”
“I found her,” Walker said. “Under the Route 9 overpass.”
Delaney gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s not on her patrol route. And a rookie doesn’t go writing tickets under a dead overpass at three in the morning. Maybe you ought to ask her dispatch why she was out there alone.”
Walker met his eyes. “Or why nobody backed her up.”