Emergency Reunion

by Sandra Orchard

“Look at that.” Zeke stopped the cruiser at the end of the lane closest to the main entrance and jutted his chin toward Ted swallowing an elderly woman in an exuberant hug outside the door. “I bet she can tell us all you want to know about him.”

  Cole shifted in his seat for a better look. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Sure. Mrs. Eden, my favorite high school English teacher.”

  The idea that Zeke had a favorite teacher, let alone one who taught English, left Cole a little stunned.

  “Didn’t you have her?”

  “No, I’ve never heard of her. She must’ve retired before I got to high school.” His partner had a good ten years on him at least, but Ted didn’t, so how’d he know the teacher?

  Zeke whipped into a parking spot. “No problem. I’ll ask her.” The instant Ted disappeared into the mall, Zeke shoved open his door and headed off the elderly woman.

  By the time Cole stepped up beside him, the woman was twittering about how wonderful Ted looked now that he’d gotten off the drugs and had put on weight.

  “He almost died, you know. Oh, my. It was horrible. I lived next door to the family then and I still remember how hysterical his mother was as the paramedics worked on him.”

  At the word paramedic, Cole jumped into the conversation. “How long ago was that?”

  The woman slanted a stupefied glance his way. “Were you one of my students?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t think you looked familiar.”

  “Do you recall how long ago Ted almost died?”

  Her gaze drifted to the sky. “Three years ago now, I think. He got addicted to painkillers after he hurt his knee playing basketball.”

  “Do you happen to recall if a female paramedic responded to that call?”

  Mrs. Eden’s wrinkles realigned into a beaming smile. “Oh, yes. Hers was the first face he saw when he came back to us. Made quite an impression. He talked about her for months.”

  Cole exchanged a victorious look with Zeke. This explained the man’s obsession.

  “His heart had stopped, you see.” Mrs. Eden went on, “And she jolted him back to life with one of those defibrillators.”

  A report of a car accident came over Cole’s radio, injuries reported, which meant an ambulance would be dispatched. Cole called in an estimated time of arrival of three minutes.

  They thanked Mrs. Eden and hurried back to the cruiser. Zeke flipped on the sirens and swerved onto the street. “Sounds to me like Ted’s more interested in being Sherri’s protector than hurting her.”

  Yeah, which meant their best hope of nabbing the real creep was to tail her runs. Oddly, Zeke seemed as eager as he was to do it.

  Six minutes later, they pulled into the grocery store parking lot where two paramedics already were helping a young female victim. Sherri wasn’t one of them. The accident amounted to the driver’s bumper tapping the cement abutment and triggering the airbag, which in turn had gashed her arm. There was no exterior damage worth noting. Zeke thumbed a text message into his cell phone as Cole wrote up a report.

  “Is the other team back at the station?” Cole asked the paramedics.

  “They were when we left. Been a dead day.”

  Dead was good if it meant Sherri was keeping out of trouble. A call crackled over Cole’s radio. “Attention all units, 10-79 at East End Mall. All available units report in.”

  Bomb threat.

  * * *

  Sherri and Dan parked outside the mall’s south entrance, and a mall security officer held open the door.

  “The kid’s in the food court. Straight ahead.”

  “Thanks.” They rushed the gurney inside as curious shoppers scrambled out of their way. The going got slow as they neared the food court and a thickening crowd. “Make way. Let us through,” Dan yelled.

  “The paramedics are here,” someone shouted and the crowd that had been circled around the victim parted like the Red Sea.

  A frantic-looking teenage girl was kneeling beside a male, about eighteen, triggering memories of Sherri’s frenzy after Cole’s collapse last night. Her heart thumped at the thought of how that had transpired, but she didn’t regret confiding in Cole. And he’d been right. She’d slept through the night without a single nightmare for the first time in months.

  “You have to help him. He can’t breathe,” the girl said. “He’s allergic to peanuts.”

  The boy, dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, was clasping his throat and gasping for air, although his color didn’t indicate a lack of oxygen. Reaching his side, Sherri fixed her stethoscope into her ears and exchanged a skeptical look with Dan, who’d already grabbed the vial of epinephrine and a needle from the trauma bag.

  A fire alarm sounded.

  Sherri could scarcely hear her patient’s breathing over the surge of blood pulsing past her ears, but the boy was definitely pulling in air. She scanned the faces of the people around her who were now breaking away from the scene. What had happened to the security guard?

  A loud voice came over the PA. “We need to evacuate the building. Please proceed to the nearest exit in an orderly fashion.”

  Great.

  “This is not a drill,” the voice over the PA went on. “I repeat. This is not a drill.” The alarm resumed its blare, and Sherri pivoted on her knee to tell Dan they should load the teen on the gurney.

  Another kid shoved a cloth over Dan’s mouth and shouted, “It’s a bomb!”

  “What are you doing?” Sherri clawed at the kid’s hand and screamed for help as Dan went limp, but no one paid any attention.

  Everyone started screaming. And racing for the exits. Everyone except the teens circled around her and Dan and their questionable patient.

  Her throat closed up. Oh, God, help us, please.

  The patient smashed his head into Sherri’s nose and sent her reeling backward. Pain exploded in her head. Blood spurted from her nose. As she struggled to her knees the girl pounced on their trauma bag. The kid holding the cloth to Dan’s face snapped a handcuff on Dan’s wrist then shoved him under a table and snapped the other cuff to the table’s center pole.

  Two guys grabbed her hands and pinned them to the floor as another pawed at her pockets.

  She thrashed and kicked and screamed.

  The girl, who moments ago had been pleading with Sherri to save her friend, stomped on Sherri’s stomach. “The vials are in her belt, idiot.”

  Sherri roared in pain as a blur of blue sprang at the girl.

  The punks let go of Sherri’s hands and she curled onto her side, clutching her stomach.

  * * *

  Cole tried to reach Sherri on her cell phone as their cruiser chewed up the five blocks back to the mall. Sirens rose up from every direction of the city, and he prayed that Sherri’s ambulance wasn’t one of them. “She’s not answering.”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Zeke asked.

  “That we need to locate Ted?”

  “Yeah.”

  By the time they reached the mall, frenzied shoppers were pouring out the doors.

  Cole scanned the sea of faces. “It’ll be impossible to find him in this crowd.”

  “His car’s still where he parked it.”

  “Good. Does the department have bomb-sniffing dogs?”

  “One.” Zeke snaked their cruiser around the frantic shoppers, blipping the siren to get people to move out of the way. “But from the look of the frantic evacuation, mall staff have already located it or something suspicious.” Zeke rammed the brake, and Cole grabbed the dash, his gaze slamming into that of a pigtailed girl standing frozen in the center of the roadway.

  The sheriff himself snatched her up and pressed her into the arms of a screaming mother. Then, slapping the hood of their cruiser, he said, “Take the east entrance. Help get people calmed down.”

  “Has the bomb been located?”

  “No, but after the fire alarm was pulled, someone yelled bomb and everyone panicked.”

&n
bsp; “We need to see the surveillance feeds,” Cole said. “We think we know who’s behind this.”

  The sheriff shot them a skeptical look, but must’ve seen Cole’s certainty, because a heartbeat later, he said, “Okay, I’ll let mall security know you’re on your way. It’s that door there. One flight down. And stay off your radios.”

  Radio silence was standard protocol with a bomb threat. They didn’t want a radio transmission inadvertently setting off the bomb. Cole’s mind flashed to last week’s blast, and his steps faltered as not-so-phantom pain knifed through his skull. Gritting his teeth, he shoved through the crowds battling to exit.

  “This way.” Zeke pointed to a flight of stairs, but two steps down, he grabbed a hoodie-clad teen by the arm and spun him toward Cole. “Look who we have here.”

  “Eddie? What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in school.”

  Eddie jerked his arm from Zeke’s hold and stuffed his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie. “School ended half an hour ago.”

  Gripped by the fear that the bomb threat was meant to lure Sherri into a trap, Cole yanked Eddie out of the flow of people. “Were you meeting that guy? Is he here?”

  Eddie didn’t meet Cole’s gaze.

  Cole gave him a hard shake and raised his voice. “Is he here?”

  Eddie shrank back, his hands fisting in the hoodie’s front pocket.

  Suddenly, a different picture materialized in Cole’s mind. A drug buy. He yanked Eddie’s hands from his pocket, but it was empty. “Answer me.”

  “I was just hanging.”

  Zeke clapped Cole on the shoulder. “Unless the kid knows where the bomb is, he needs to get out.” Zeke pointed to the glass doors that the last of the customers were scurrying through.

  Eddie’s face blanched “I don’t know nothing about a bomb.”

  Cole released his brother. “Get out of here. Go home.”

  “C’mon.” Zeke tugged Cole down the stairwell. “The caller said the bomb was set to blow at four.”

  Cole glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes.

  Cole trailed Zeke into a room full of monitors being scanned by a mall security guard and a lone deputy. “You see who pulled the alarm?”

  “No.” The deputy fiddled with dials on the control panel. “I’ve been rewinding surveillance footage to five to ten minutes before the call came in to see if I could spot anyone abandoning a suspicious package.”

  “Good. We’re looking for a lanky male custodian. Have you seen him or anyone acting suspicious?”

  “Nah.” The guard’s gaze bobbed from the monitors to Zeke and back again. “Everyone’s scrambling to get out.”

  Cole rewound a feed from the mall’s south end.

  “What are paramedics doing in there?” Zeke pointed to the monitor and snatched up his phone.

  At the sight of Sherri and Dan pushing a gurney through the south entrance, Cole’s heart chilled. “When was that image shot?”

  The deputy squinted at the screen. “A couple of minutes before we received the bomb threat.”

  “Yeah,” the security guard said. “We had a guy choking or something in the food court. Had to call 9-1-1.”

  Cole grabbed the joystick that remotely controlled the camera near the south entrance and panned it to the limit of its range. He couldn’t see them anywhere. “Have they already left? Where were they headed?” Cole demanded.

  “I, uh...” the guard stammered, his gaze shooting to Zeke, who was talking on the phone.

  The deputy fast-forwarded the feed Cole had been rewinding. “They didn’t leave the way they came in.”

  “Dispatch says they haven’t reported back in,” Zeke relayed. “The call was for an anaphylactic reaction in the food court area. They’ll have a deputy sweep the area.”

  Cole scanned the labels under the TV screens, found the one marked Food Court. “The screen’s black. Why’s the screen black?”

  The security officer flipped a couple of switches. “I don’t know. It should be on. Someone must have covered it.”

  Cole raced out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” Zeke shouted after him.

  “To find her!”

  * * *

  Sherri’s heart shattered at the sound of fists connecting with Cole’s flesh. He’d taken down the girl like a flash of lightning, but the punks had tackled him just as quickly. Squinting at them, Sherri strained to climb out of her pain and help him—she blinked—not Cole? Ted?

  The girl rolled to her feet and thrust vicious kicks at his head.

  “Help,” Sherri cried, but couldn’t croak out a sound louder than a squeak. She felt around her belt for her radio. Where was it?

  Dan stirred, let out a low moan.

  Spying his radio on his hip, she clenched her teeth against the pain and struggled to her knees to crawl to him.

  “Smash his phone,” one of the punks yelled at the girl, who redirected her kicks from Ted’s head to a cell phone on the floor.

  “C’mon, we got to get out of here,” a kid sporting a backpack yelled.

  The guy who’d been pretending to be in anaphylactic shock rammed one last hard jab into Ted’s kidneys. “Cuff the woman.”

  The greasy-haired teen who’d pawed her pockets earlier turned back to her with an ugly gleam in his icy-blue eyes. He twirled a pair of cuffs around his index finger and sneered.

  “You want to die beside your partner? No problem.” He snapped open a cuff and lunged.

  She rolled out of his reach and swung her leg, taking his legs out from under him.

  His chin clipped the edge of the table as he went down. “Oh, you’re going to pay for that,” he roared, calling her obscene names as he scrambled after her. Then all of a sudden he flipped onto his back.

  “Run!” Dan yelled and hinged up his leg for another kick at the guy.

  Sherri lurched to her feet.

  But her fake patient snatched up the cuffs and grabbed her wrist before she could so much as turn on her heel. She memorized his face—pug nose, yellow-brown eyes, scraggly blond hair, the faint trace of a scar on his upper lip.

  “Hurry,” the girl shouted at him, then looking around, added a note of fake hysteria to her voice. “There’s a bomb. A bomb! We have to get out.”

  He shoved Sherri down, kneed her head under the table and cuffed her to the same pole as Dan. “C’mon,” he said, grabbing his friend, who’d pinned Dan’s free hand under his foot and was glaring at her as though he wanted blood. He spit in her face and then took off.

  Dan tugged his cuffed wrist, clanging the cuffs uselessly against the metal pole. He rammed his shoulder up into the table as if he might shove it off the pole. Then pulled out his multipurpose tool and started sawing at the links. Sherri grabbed the radio from his belt and depressed the call button. “This is M2. We have two paramedics and—” she glanced at Ted’s prone body “—an unconscious male trapped in the mall’s food court. I repeat—”

  “No, don’t use the radio,” Dan shouted. “It could trigger a—”

  Blast!

  ELEVEN

  Fifty yards from the chest-high wall circling the food court, Cole dove for cover behind the nearest pillar. Smoke spewed through the air. He squinted in the direction the blast had sounded, but couldn’t see any flames or structural damage. “Can you see where it originated?” he called to Zeke, who’d ducked for cover behind a kiosk.

  “That trash can to the right of the food court, I think.”

  Were they looking at a smoke bomb? Something to cause panic, but no real harm? Or a teaser to something bigger?

  Heart pounding, Cole stuck his head out from behind the pillar and squinted through the smoke. “I don’t see Sherri and Dan. Do you?”

  “No.” Zeke sprinted to a nearby pillar, but shook his head from the new vantage point.

  Cole checked in with the sheriff on his cell phone. “Did the paramedics get out?”

  “Negative. Did you see where the explosion hit?�
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  “Next to the food court. A smoke bomb by the looks of it and no sign of the paramedics.”

  “I want you out of there. The next one may not be just smoke.”

  Cole’s stomach bottomed out. Sixty thousand square feet to search and Sherri could be anywhere.

  “I see their gurney.” Zeke pointed to the far end of the food court.

  Another boom split the air.

  Zeke dove for cover once more. And...was that Sherri’s cry?

  “Get out of there,” the sheriff repeated more adamantly.

  Spotting fresh plumes of smoke spewing from another trash can, Cole stuffed the phone in his pocket and sprinted for the chest-high block barrier between him and the dining area. “Sherri? Dan? Are you here?”

  A third boom drowned out any answer, and the sprinklers kicked in.

  “Sherri!” Cole shouted, squinting through the spray of water.

  “Cole! Cole! Over here.”

  He heard her but couldn’t see her. Ducking behind the cover of the barrier, Cole drew his gun and motioned to Zeke to skirt it in the other direction.

  “Cole?”

  The fear in her voice gnawed at his heart. “I’m here,” he assured, staying low as he hurried toward a break in the wall. “Are you alone? Where’s Dan?”

  “He’s here, too. They handcuffed us to a table before they ran off.”

  Cole edged around the corner of the wall, wanting to get a visual of the area before he made himself a target. At the sight of Ted sprawled on the floor between the tables, pushing to his knees, Cole stepped into view. “Get back on the ground. Hands where I can see them.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” the man blurted, dropping his face back to the tile. “I was trying to help her.”

  “It’s true.” Sherri crab walked from under a table as far as her cuffed wrist would let her.

  At the sight of her blood-crusted face, Cole’s stomach roiled. He never should’ve let her out of his sight.

  “A bunch of drug-seeking teens staged a peanut allergy,” she went on.

  Zeke rushed in and cuffed Ted anyway. “For all we know he was in on it or on the bomb threat, along with who knows how many others.” Zeke’s pointed look left no doubt he was thinking of Eddie, who they’d caught rushing out of the mall within minutes of the bomb threat. Zeke hauled Ted to his feet and updated the sheriff over the phone as Cole unlocked Dan and Sherri’s cuffs.