Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,2

get a blood pressure check, and look for lacerations. Webster was twenty-one and a rookie.

“Where?” he asked.

“Near the garden store where 42 takes a bend.”

Four minutes out. Max. Maybe less.

“Victim wrapped herself around a tree,” Burrows said.

Burrows was a beefy guy with cropped blond hair where he still had it. His uniform shirt was missing two buttons, which he tried to hide with a zippered vest. The guy had a bad scar on his right cheek from a melanoma he’d had removed a year ago. He fingered it all the time.

Because he was a probie, Webster was the packhorse. Burrows, his superior, carried only the med box and his own protective clothing. Webster dealt with the oxygen, the trauma box, the c-collar, and the backboard.

“Fucking freezing,” Burrows said.

“Whatever happened to the January thaw?”

In the distance, a cop with a Maglite directed nonexistent traffic. Burrows made a fast and expert U-turn, pulling to a stop on a flat piece of shoulder thirty feet from a Cadillac that had rolled and come to rest upside down.

“Just kissed the tree,” said Nye, a weasel with a chip the size of Burlington on his shoulder. “And what I want to know is what’s a fucking girl doing with a two-ton Cadillac?”

Not a girl, Burrows and Webster discovered. A woman, twenty-four, twenty-five. No seat belt. The Cadillac was at least a decade old with rust in the wheel wells.

“Unresponsive,” Nye’s younger partner, McGill, said as he moved to make way for Burrows and Webster. The medic and the EMT knelt to either side of the partially ejected patient. The shock of glossy brown hair in the artificial light registered with Webster, replaced immediately by acronyms: Airway. Breathing. Circulation. ABC. He maintained spine stabilization and took the vitals. Burrows handled the airway.

“A hundred twenty-two over seventy,” Webster read out. “Pulse sixty-six.” Even in the cold Vermont air, he could smell the alcohol. “ETOH,” Webster reported. “Lips are blue.”

“Respirations?”

“Eight.”

“She’s in trouble.”

“She reeks.”

Still, Webster knew, they couldn’t assume.

A star pattern on the windshield had produced facial lacerations on her forehead. A crushed window had loosened a shower of sparkles. Webster gently brushed the glass from her eyes and mouth.

“Anyone know her name?” Burrows asked.

Webster watched the Weasel reach for the woman’s purse, which had lodged under the car.

Nye opened a wallet. “Sheila Arsenault.”

“Sheila!” Burrows said in a loud voice. “Sheila, wake up!”

Nothing.

Burrows administered a sternal rub to wake the dead.

The woman lifted her head in the direction of the pain. “Fuck,” she said.

“Nice girl,” Nye said.

“Responsive to painful stimuli only,” Burrows stated for the record as he fastened the c-collar onto the woman’s neck.

“Can we do a clothes drag onto the board?” Webster asked.

“Go around,” Burrows said as he removed the rest of the glass from the woman’s face and slapped on a non-rebreather mask. He made a slit with his trauma shears down the length of the denim sleeve of her jacket. He started a line in her arm.

From where Webster knelt on the other side of the car, he could see a piece of metal he couldn’t identify, its sharp edge pushing into the woman’s belly, making the front tails of a light blue shirt bloody. A sheared-off piece of the dashboard? Something that had come up from the floor? Through a slit in the metal, he saw Burrows working on the woman.

“Belly cut,” he called out to Burrows. “Looks superficial. If Nye and McGill can bend this piece of metal a half inch toward you, you might be able to slide her out. I’ll put a pressure bandage on her as soon as the metal is clear. You have yours ready when she comes through.”

“Blood?”

“Yes, but not a lot. Wait for my count.”

With his flashlight in his teeth, Webster pulled a pressure bandage from his pack. He reached forward to the metal barrier and wedged the bandage as best he could against it and thought that if the maneuver went wrong, he’d get a hand sliced open for his reward. He felt an obstruction at the place where the metal reached her skin. A set of keys and something furry. He unbuckled the woman’s belt, eased the free end through a loop, and got the keys, the rabbit’s foot, and the belt. He tossed them over his shoulder. He held the pressure bandage at the ready. He saw that the fastening of her jeans wouldn’t get past the opening either. “I’m cutting her pants off,” Webster said.

Nye, the cop, whistled.

With practiced moves, Webster slit the