In Too Deep: Station Seventeen Book 3

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “Okay.” Slater’s voice was low and steady, right there next to her, and the sound of it allowed Quinn to exhale, just the tiniest bit. “We can do that. You don’t need the gun.”

  The snake tattoo jerked again, harder this time. So much for being able to breathe.

  “Yeah, I do. Because my brother is at a safe house, and this here is a kidnapping. You’re both comin’ with me, and you’re either gonna save his life, or I’m gonna end yours.”

  Fear climbed the back of Quinn’s throat, hot, involuntary tears burning behind her eyelids. But Tattoo Guy either didn’t notice, or—more likely, since he was, you know, pointing a freaking gun at her—didn’t care.

  “Listen real careful, ’cause I’m only saying this once. The three of us are gonna get in that ambulance of yours and put it in the alley beside this building, all nice and out of sight. Then we’re gonna take a ride in my car, and you’re gonna patch Jayden up real good. You even think of bein’ a hero”—he paused to nail Slater with a glare that made Quinn’s hair stand on end—“and I will shoot her in the face so many times, her dental records won’t even have a prayer of holding up. And if you run”—she felt Tattoo Guy’s stare on her like a living, slithering thing—“I’ll do the same thing to him. You hear me?”

  Quinn nodded. Slater must have, too, because the next thing she knew, Tattoo Guy was ordering them to turn around. Stepping up behind them, he pushed the gun between Quinn’s shoulder blades. The cold, unforgiving press of steel made her flinch as her heart slammed even faster, but she forced the thought of the gun and the images that went with it all the way out of her brain.

  Okay. Okay. This is still a call, with a patient who needs help. You know how to do this. You can do this. You’re going to be fine.

  She repeated the words in her head with every step toward the ambo even though she knew deep down they were a lie. She’d been around patients who were combative. People who had tried to hit her, bite her, and threatened to kill her if she so much as laid a pinky finger on their pulse point. But this was different. This man had a gun jammed directly over her spine, just behind her heart.

  Quinn knew the sort of damage the weapon would inflict. She knew it would rip through flesh. Bones. Organs. She knew it could take long, terrifying minutes to bleed out from even the deadliest of wounds. She knew, because she’d seen it happen.

  And now it was going to happen to her.

  Luke lay on the floor of the black Cadillac Escalade he’d been forced into at gunpoint and wondered if he was going to die today. It was a fucked-up thought, but the abstract weirdness was the only thing between him and pure panic.

  And wasn’t that just even more fucked up? But when life went on a bender of bad and nasty, Luke buckled down. He put things at arm’s length. He took care of business and fixed things. He didn’t feel. Just did.

  He couldn’t die today. He couldn’t leave Momma Billie and Hayley. Not when they depended on him so much. He couldn’t die, and he sure as shit couldn’t let Quinn die.

  Not. Goddamn. Happening.

  Luke pulled in a deep breath and took in his surroundings as best he could, which—considering current circumstances—amounted to jack with a side order of shit. After they’d successfully hidden the ambo, their kidnapper had forced both him and Quinn into the back seat of the Escalade, then instructed them both to lie on the vehicle’s floor. The wedge of space was barely big enough for Luke’s six foot one frame alone, so he’d sardined himself into it as best he could and let Quinn lie curled in at his side. Her heart was beating against her chest, and therefore also his, like a fleet of hummingbirds, her breath moving against his neck in shaky, frightened bursts, and the feel of it would rip his guts out if it wasn’t so busy making him angry.

  Yeah, he needed to lose all this emotion before it got him into trouble. Or worse.

  Releasing the air from his lungs, he flattened his palm against Quinn’s back. He couldn’t risk actually saying anything to her with their kidnapper only a handful of feet away in the driver’s seat. The guy might have nine kinds of psycho in his dark, don’t-give-a-shit stare, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He was covering his tracks to get them where he needed them to be.

  Which didn’t really bode well for what might happen after they were done.

  He shoved the thought aside, concentrating on the feel of Quinn’s back against his hand. Luke knew she was terrified—Christ, at this point, he was pretty fucking scared, too. But they’d both need every last one of their wits if they were going to live through this, so he channeled his energy into slowing his breathing so she might feel it and slow hers, pressing his palm over the damp cotton of her T-shirt to hold her close.

  He should’ve asked her out. No, screw that. He should’ve kissed her, deeply, relentlessly, the way he’d wanted to since the minute he’d seen her that very first time in Station Seventeen’s common room.

  The Escalade slowed marginally, taking a series of turns that told Luke they had to be getting close to their destination. Quinn’s body—which had gone a bit more lax against his—snapped right back to bowstring status against his rib cage.

  It’s okay. It will all be okay. Hoping the message came through in his touch was a last-ditch effort, and a crazy one at that. But since he was fresh out of options, Luke would scrape for anything he could to get them through this.

  “Don’t move,” their kidnapper said, pulling to a stop. He hadn’t let go of the gun during the drive, keeping it out of sight in one hand while steering the vehicle with the other. Now he trained the thing back on them with just as much menace as before, so Luke lay still and waited for instructions. The reality was, if the man’s brother was injured badly enough to kidnap two paramedics, then he needed them. At least for a little while.

  “I’m gonna open the door, and you’re both getting out, nice and slow. We’ll get your fancy bags from the back, and then you’ll go inside and fix my brother. You got me?”

  “Yes,” Luke said, and Quinn echoed with her own affirmative. The guy scrambled out of the driver’s side, tugging the door behind it open a second later. He swung a wild gaze over the surroundings Luke couldn’t yet see before motioning with the gun for Quinn to get out. A few awkward movements later, the two of them were standing in the driveway of a small, run-down house clearly in the heart of Remington’s North Point.

  “Go.” Grabbing Quinn by the back of the shirt—shit, Luke wanted to throat-punch this guy into next week just for putting that look on her face—he shoved the gun against the back of her ribs, forcing her toward the back of the Escalade while effectively keeping the gun from plain view.

  “We’ll do what you’re asking,” Luke said, trying like hell to keep his voice venom-free. “You don’t have to do that.”

  As if he’d sensed Luke’s desire to put the focus on himself rather than Quinn, the guy pressed the gun into her back even harder. “Shut up and get the bags, hero. You’re wasting time, and that makes me antsy.”

  Luke didn’t wait. Reaching into the back of the Escalade, he grabbed his first-in bag and the portable monitor they’d liberated from the back of the ambulance. Quinn shouldered her own bag, reaching into the pocket of her navy blue uniform pants likely out of sheer habit, and no, no, she needed to stop before—

  Their kidnapper snapped the gun from her shoulder blades to the back of her neck in less than a second. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Gloves!” she cried out, holding them up as proof. “If I’m going to treat your brother I need gloves!”

  He bit out a nasty curse. “Don’t be makin’ no sudden moves like that.”

  “How else am I going to do my job?” Quinn snapped. Her defiant tone shocked Luke firmly into place, but not before making his gut bottom out somewhere in the area of his shins. “Judging by the amount of blood on your shirt, I don’t think you want me to take my time, so yeah. I need to glove up now.”

  Their kidnapper’s eyes went wide, but only for a split se
cond before his gaze turned feral. “You’re gonna want to keep this bitch in check,” he said to Luke. “Before I decide I don’t need both of you.”

  Luke didn’t pause. Didn’t think. Just stepped into the man’s line of sight and stayed there. “I can promise that you do. Now do you want to scare her so badly she can’t work, or do you want to show us where your brother is so we can start helping him out?”

  The cadence of his words was steady even though his hands were shaking too hard to control, but the shift in focus did the trick. The guy strong-armed them over the cracked concrete driveway, past a row of anemic shrubbery to a front door that looked better suited for a bank vault than the dilapidated rancher it was connected to.

  “It’s chill,” he barked out a second later, when a man in a backwards baseball hat welcome wagoned them by raising the gun in his grasp. Christ, these guys had a lot of hardware. “It’s me. Damien. I brought help for Jayden.”

  Baseball Hat gave Luke and Quinn a once-over and frowned. “Boss Man tell you to?”

  For the first time since he’d jumped out from behind that shipping crate, Damien paused. “I had to do somethin’, man. Jay’s my brother.” Poking his gun back into Quinn’s spine, he ordered, “Walk. Both of you. That way, down the hall. Stop when you get to the first bedroom.”

  The directions, it turned out, were totally unnecessary. A steady trail of blood led the way, some in tiny drips, some in bigger, oily-looking puddles, and Luke’s shoulders took an involuntary trip around his spine. His heart slammed despite the deep breath he’d just sent down the hatch, but he forced himself to focus. He’d worked in life and death situations before. Run into burning buildings. Scaled rooftops. Pulled mangled bodies from car wrecks. He could do this. If it would save his life—Quinn’s life—then he would buckle the fuck down and face whatever danger was in front of him in order to help this guy.

  Luke stopped just outside the bedroom door. His boots squeaked and slid over the blood spattered on the floorboards, but he didn’t have time to let the grisly details sink far enough into his brain to scare him. Damien called out, pushing both Quinn and Luke forward at the same time. Since Luke’s only options were to open the door or be crushed up against it, he went for Plan A and twisted the knob, stumbling his way inside the room.

  “Damien.” A huge hulk of a man dressed in head-to-toe black pushed up from the chair beside the bed taking up most of the space in the room. His body coiled in an immediate and utterly menacing defensive stance, his shoulders snapping into place around what would be the guy’s neck, if he had one. Instead, they simply went from those linebacker-esque muscles right up to the back of his shaved head, his nearly black eyes glinting in the daylight fighting to get past the window blinds. Luke’s boots slapped to a halt at the sight of the guy, who—of course—had rested his hand on the gun prominently visible at his hip.

  “You have guests,” the man said, his voice sending frost over Luke’s spine. His tone of voice suggested that a) he was as surprised to see Luke and Quinn as they were to be there, and b) said surprise was taking a backseat to his extreme irritation.

  Damien, however? Didn’t seem to get the memo. “Jayden needs help,” he said, his agitation visibly growing at the sight of the young man lying on the bed, bleeding freely from a wound in his chest. The kid’s chest rose and fell in rapid, wheezing breaths, and if he was conscious, it was only just. The dirty-copper smell of too much blood hung heavily in the air, punching Luke in both his throat and his fear center simultaneously, and shit. Shit, this was bad.

  Damien rambled on. “You said no hospitals, so I got the next best thing. I ain’t letting my brother die. Especially not by the hand of no fuckin’ Scarlet Reapers.”

  The big guy’s stare turned cold and flat as he moved it first over Luke and Quinn, then back to Damien with a frown. “Let them get to it, then. In the meantime, get someone in here to watch them work. You and I need to have a word.”

  Forget bad, Luke thought as Baseball Hat stepped into the room and Damien and his boss stepped out. This was going to end horribly.

  Luke just didn’t know for who.

  6

  The man in front of her was going to die. Not that a little thing like inevitability would keep Quinn from doing all that she could to save him. But if her life, and Slater’s, depended on this guy waking up tomorrow, she was well and truly fucked.

  Quinn thrust the thought aside before it submarined what little calm she’d been able to regain. She had a patient. A purpose. Something to focus on other than the gun being pointed at her chest.

  “Okay, we need to get him on the monitor, and I’m going to need to get a look at what we’re dealing with here.” She shifted toward the bed, reaching into her first-in bag for a pair of shears to do away with Jayden’s shirt.

  Up came the gun of their guard, a skinny guy with the same snake tattoo on his forearm that Damien had, and Quinn jumped reflexively.

  “They’re trauma shears,” she said, holding them up in a solid mix of terror and exasperation. “I need to cut his shirt off so I can see the wound.” For Cripes’ sake, they weren’t even pointy! What could she possibly do with them—snip her way out of danger?

  After a minute, the guard said, “Fine. Just don’t make no sudden movements.”

  Right. No sudden movements in a trauma. He might as well have asked her to conjure a Bentley out of thin air.

  Shaking off her ragged nerves, Quinn covered the three steps between her and her patient while Slater moved to stand across from her on the other side of the bloodstained double bed. She propped her first-in bag next to Jayden on the mattress, taking a lightning-fast visual inventory of her patient.

  Breathing—barely. Bleeding—profusely. One visible chest wound. No good options.

  Quinn leaned down, making fast work of turning his shirt into scraps. “Hey, Jayden. My name is Quinn, and this is Luke. We’re here to help you, okay?”

  Her stomach clenched at the sight of the gaping bullet wound shredding the real estate between his right shoulder and his sternum, and the feeling didn’t improve at the sound of his low, raspy moan.

  “It…hurts…” he coughed out. His skin was beaded with a heavy sheen of sweat, his lips chalky against his pale brown skin, and oh God, they had to control this bleeding and get him to a hospital. Like ten minutes ago.

  “I know it hurts, but I need you to stay with me, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, Quinn reached into her first-in bag for some QuikClot pads. But her efforts were cut short by the cold, hard press of a gun in her ribs.

  “Jesus!” Quinn blurted, fear and adrenaline spurting through her chest. Luke snapped to attention, his ice-blue eyes flashing fiercely, but she gave up the slightest head shake. She couldn’t let Slater get shot. Especially not over something as stupid as a knee-jerk reaction she should have been able to control.

  “I said no sudden movements,” their guard said, and screw this. If Quinn had any freaking prayer of saving Jayden, or at the very least keeping him from flatlining before she could convince someone to take him to the hospital, she was going to have to be able to move.

  But before she could get that little nugget down the chain of command from her brain to her mouth, Slater shocked the hell out of her by interrupting. “Look, man. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to reach into our bags to get supplies, and we’re going to need room to move. Taking care of your buddy here will be a whole lot more effective and a whole lot less nerve wracking if you don’t shove that thing around every time we do.”

  The guy pulled the gun from Quinn’s rib cage, his stare sliding into a sneer as he shoved it toward Luke instead. “You think this is about you bein’ comfortable, bitch?”

  “Do you think I’m going to be able to help him if you blow a fucking hole in me by accident?” Slater shot back.

  Quinn’s heart thundered, each beat pulsing the word no against her eardrums, and finally, she scraped in a breath. “You’re not going to need
to shoot anyone,” she said, her throat threatening mutiny at the thought. Breathe. “All we want to do is help Jayden, okay? That’s all. But my partner is right. We’re going to need room to make that happen, and we’re wasting time by arguing about it.”

  “Fine. Whatever,” the guard said after a pause and one last dark look at Slater. “But either of y’all tries anything funny, and I’mma kill you both.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Please baby Jesus, let it not be necessary.

  Not wanting to lose any more time or dwell on the terrifying thought of either her or Luke getting shot, Quinn grabbed a fat stack of QuikClot pads from inside her bag. Luke got the monitor leads in place as she pressed the pads over the wound. Blood squished through her gloved fingers, and damn it, that bullet had to have hit something really major. The freaking problem was, there were too many possibilities for her to know exactly what had been damaged while she and Slater were flying blind in a crappy flophouse bedroom with nothing but a pair of first-in bags and a portable monitor.

  She grabbed more pads and slapped them into place, but not before registering the tightness on Slater’s face as he stared at the blood flowing thickly over her hands. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. They were a team. Partners. She couldn’t do this alone.

  “Hey.” Quinn tilted her head, moving into his line of sight until she caught his glacier-blue stare. He’d been managing his fear of blood ridiculously well over the last couple of months, but God, this bullet wound was one hell of a trial by fire. “I need you to stay with me here, too. Okay?”

  Slater blinked exactly once, then nodded firmly. “Copy that. I’m with you. Pulse is tachy at one-eighteen. BP is sixty over eighty.”

  Not good. Not even close. Placing one more QuikClot pad over the wound, she pressed down, the give of Jayden’s chest sending a ripple of dread all the way through her.