Winter in Manhattan had once been a season Beth enjoyed. As a little girl, she could remember spending hours walking the busy Upper East Side streets with her mother, snow crunching beneath her boots as she peered into the windows at Tiffany's and eyeing all the beautiful sparkling diamonds. Her mother had once told her that if Beth were to make the right choices in life, one day would she not only own one Tiffany necklace, but several. And, shopping at Barneys wouldn't be a dream but rather her reality.
Having grown up in the dominate Irish working class neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen in the Manhattan borough, Beth most certainty dreamed of the day where she would live on Park Avenue and marry an investment banker enjoying the simple life of drinking tea in the afternoon with other wealthy wives and walk the snowy streets with her two or three Yorkshire Terriers hand in hand with her husband at night.
However, nearly two decade after she had first envisioned those dreams, Beth had never made them her reality. Now, at twenty-eight, she had followed the footsteps of her father and brothers, working her ass off in school and eventually getting a job with the Fire Department of New York as a paramedic at EMS Station 7. Although she had never found her way out of Hell's Kitchen, was seemingly content with where life had brought her.
Now seasoned as an FDNY Medic, Beth sat in the passenger seat in the cab of the ambulance as she fiddled with the volume of the radio; turning it down as she no longer wished to listen to bickering between one medic unit and the dispatcher. It had been going on for the last ten minutes and it took nearly every ounce of self-control she had not to pick up the mike and tell them both to shut and grow up. Knowing it was generally frowned upon but done often, Beth grabbed a Marlboro Light and a lighter from the stash in the glove compartment and lit up as she waited for Brandon, her partner of the last three years. He had promised he would only be gone for five minutes, ten minutes ago.
A blast of cold air hit Beth like a thousand knives to the face as she rolled down the window and blew out a large cloud of smoke. It had been an uneventful shift so far, only a few medical calls, a fire which they had been called off of and a stabbing which the rival Medic Unit 33 had beaten them to. For early December, this was unusual as she and Brandon would run between five to ten "man down" calls as the homeless would be found unconscious and needing transport for hypothermia.
Midway through her cigarette, the driver door opened and Brandon slid into the seat handing off a fresh cup of hot coffee to his partner. Beth flicked her ashes and accepted the coffee appreciatively.
"The fuck took you so long?"
Beth's New York accent was thick. Brandon often made fun of it, mimicking her as he had grown up in the Midwest.
"I can't help it that chicks dig guys in uniform." He joked.
Beth had found it rather odd that he had returned without a coffee as it was midnight and they were both running out of steam. He seemed rather hyped up and chipper leaving her to assume he had chugged it on his way back from the coffee cart on the corner three blocks away. With the amount of time it took him, she was thankful they hadn't been sent out on a run. She realized she had jinxed them. As soon as she was about to open her mouth and tell him those exact words when their radio tuned.
"Medic Unit-24."
"Medic Unit-24, go 'head dispatch." Beth answered.
The female voice of the dispatcher, who Beth knew as Ashley from their days in high school, filled the small space of the ambulance cabin.
"Reports of a man down on 10th Avenue and West 48th Street by the Clinton Community Garden. Pedestrian called it in, status of patient is unknown, law enforcement is en route. 10th Avenue and West 48th Street, law enforcement is en route."
"10-4, Medic 24 is en route; 5 minutes out."
Tossing her cigarette out the window, Beth rolled up the window and put her seatbelt on as Brandon turned on the lights and sirens, pulling away from the curb. They would make a few extra circles around the block to ensure NYPD would arrive first and secure the scene and true to her word, they pulled up no more than five minutes later.
The once pitch black streets were illuminated with the mixture of flashing blue and white lights, and the flash of their red ones made the scene even brighter. Stepping out of the cab, Beth blew into her cupped hands having forgotten her gloves back at the station and grabbed her jump bag from the back, slinging it over her shoulder, Beth her partner and two officers who crowded around a man lying down in the middle of the sidewalk. Without an assessment, Beth and Brandon and the cops already knew what they were dealing with. The white, frothy sputum coming from the man's mouth indicated a possible opiate overdose.
Dropping her jump bag, Beth knelt down, and placed two fingers on man's carotid artery. There was a pulse, but it was weak and thready. She took his pulse and counted his breaths.
"Sir," Beth called out, accepting the penlight Brandon handed her. "Sir, FDNY, can you hear me?"
Lifting his eyelids and shining her light, Beth made note of his pupils. They were pinpoint and unresponsive to light.
Standing back up, Beth nodded towards her partner. "Get the stretcher; let's start and IV and push 2mg of Narcan."
It was Beth's job to work on the patients that night, and as she tried her best to find a usable vein (his arms were full of track marks) Brandon drew 2mgs of Narcan into a syringe. As she was getting ready to push the drug used to reverse an opiate overdose, the two cops and Brandon stood ready for the response they were expecting when the drug hit his bloodstream.
Slowly and carefully, Beth pushed the drug through the IV and as soon as she finished quickly moved back. Sure enough, not even two minutes later, their unconscious male was no loner unconscious and immediately jumped to his feet.
"You fuckin' bitch!" Spat the addict. "Just ruined my high, I spent 20 bucks on that shit."
Beth was used to the verbal abuse; early in her career she hated being called every word from bitch to cunt but she learned to let it roll off her back especially when it came from the mouth of a junkie.
The two cops tried to calm him down but all he did was spit another, "Fuck you, pigs."
Before he had a chance to rip his IV out and set out on another quest to score more drugs, Beth stopped him. "Let us take you to Roosevelt to get checked out. You'll have a bed to sleep in for the night and get a decent meal."
She was always good at talking certain people down. Although he stayed silent for several minutes, their unknown patient nodded. "Alright. I'm John."
"Okay, John, why don't you hop on the cot so we can get you in the ambulance and I get a set of vitals you." Beth pointed to the stretcher as Brandon removed the backboard from it. John did what he was told.
Rolling the cot to the open back doors of the ambulance, Beth and Brandon gave each other a look that read they knew they would be running overdoses for the rest of the night. Brandon was in position to slid and lock the stretcher into the back when the sound of gun shots rang out.
The scene went from clam to chaos in a matter of seconds. The two officers took cover from the opposite side of their squad cars and returned fire as Beth dropped to her stomach. John had other ideas as he unbuckled himself from the cot and took off running. Reaching for the portable radio attached to the shoulder of her heavy jacket, Beth called out to dispatch desperately.
"We have shots fired! Shots fired at West 48th street and 10th Avenue!"
When the sound of gun shots stopped, Beth looked over to her partner, who lay on his back. She noticed he was holding his stomach. Dashing over to Brandon, Beth looked down at his bloodied, shaking hands. It had taken her several minutes to realize what happened. Brandon had been shot. When her training finally kicked in, Beth called out to the officers and told them what to grab from the ambulance.
"Mayday, mayday." Beth tried to hide the shaking in her voice as she forcefully spoke. "Paramedic down. I repeat, paramedic down."
In a matter of minutes, Beth had cut through Brandon's jacket and shirt, applied pressure to the bullet wounds she found in his side and abdomen, had him boarded with an oxygen mask and en route to Roosevelt hospital. As she stayed in the back to attend to her partner, one of the officers at the scene drove the ambulance as there was no time to wait for another unit.
Beth worked quickly and desperately to do what she could to save his life, but the blood loss was far too great and he quickly decompensated into shock. She was stained with his blood as was the ambulance. Watching the cardiac monitor, Beth hopped up on to the cot, straddling Brandon as she began chest compressions the second his rhythm went asystole.
"Don't you quit now on me, Brandon!" She yelled, feeling his ribs crack and break beneath her bare hands. "Fuck! C'mon, Brandon!"
Beth couldn't take her eyes off the cardiac monitor, the sound of the flatline echoing louder than the sirens that blasted outside of the ambulance. When they pulled up into the bay at the Emergency Room, a trauma team was waiting and opened the doors. Not stopping her chest compressions, the trauma team managed to get the heavy cot out of the ambulance with both Brandon and Beth and raced him to the ready trauma room for assessment.
Beth shouted out Brandon's history which she knew by heart and refused to accept the fact of reality.
He was gone.
The amount of blood he had lost was too great and he had been without a pulse for too long.
"Why aren't you intubating him?" Beth cried out, unwilling to get off the cot and stop compressions.
A quiet trauma nurse, who was beyond sympathetic, grabbed Beth's wrists stopping her. With tears flowing down her face, Beth let out of a cry of grief and anger. She wanted to slap Brandon for quitting on her but the sight of his ashen skin, blue lips and lifeless face stopped her. Two other medic who had been in the emergency room on another call entered the room somberly and eased their sister off the cot. Her legs were beyond shaky; she was amazed she could stand as they led her to the hall to where she collapsed to the floor and bashed her fist against the floor several times.
Her adrenaline was running at such a high rate that Beth hadn't noticed she too had been hit by a bullet. Only, it had been stopped by the bulletproof vest she just so happen to put on six hours ago when their shift had begun. In silence and shock, Beth sat on the floor with her back pressed up against the wall. She only looked up when she noticed two pairs of legs in her eyesight. She knew who they were from NYPD.
"Beth?"
She met the eyes of a female detective who looked at Beth with a sadden expression. Her voice was light. "I'm Detective Eames and this is my partner Detective Goren we're from Major Case Squad and we'd like to speak with you about what happened tonight. We're very sorry for the loss of your partner."
Reaching out a hand, Detective Robert Goren grabbed it helping the young redheaded woman to her feet. There were no words that could be exchanged between the three as Alex Eames placed her hand on the small of Beth's back and led her out to a waiting car to take her to the station.