The Dodge Ram pulled up in front of a faux adobe style home with a sand-and-rock yard and a remarkable absence of any foundation landscaping or tree life. The house stood isolated from other homes in an area that had grown up rather free-form, a cluster of two or three structures here and there, a few standalones like this one, and lots of barren open space.
Luke Blount braked gingerly, aware of the critically injured passenger in the back seat. James jumped out and took the two concrete steps to the front porch. He arrived at the front door and pounded on it three times.
It was opened by a wholesome blonde woman, early 30s, who would have been pretty if she had taken some time with her hair, clothes and makeup. When she recognized James she flashed a broad, warm smile.
"Jimmy!" she said and pulled him into an embrace. "What on earth are you and Luke doing here at this time of night?"
"Is Bill home, Cassie?" James asked.
Cassie flashed a mock scowl. "It's almost 11. Where'd you think Daddy'd be at this hour? He's not only home, he's near passed out."
"You gotta get him out here," James said. "We found a guy hurt bad. He needs a doctor."
"So take him to Kingman General. It's seven miles up the road. You know that."
"Can't," James said. "I'll explain later. Just get your daddy, please."
Cassie motioned for him to come in and waved a hello toward Luke in the truck. "I'll try," she said. "Tryin' ain't always enough."
James fidgeted around the sparely decorated living room while his Cousin Cassie Firth tried to wake her father, William Firth, James's uncle, his mother's brother, family black sheep, board-certified internist and world-champion drunk. He had slipped from respected physician to ridiculed lush after loss of his wife to breast cancer 11 years earlier. James always thought Cassie never married because she felt obligated to stay home and look after her father. And it was a shame, too, because Cassie had been a looker. Still could be if she bothered.
Christ, what was taking so long? He and Luke had to get home, divvy up the elk meat, cut it up and get it stored in freezers before they could go to bed. James had nearly decided there would be no sleep for him this night when Cassie reappeared leading a man who was 62 but appeared 20 years older. He was rubbing his palms up and down over a stubbled face lined by broken blood vessels and punctuated by bloodshot eyes that couldn't quite seem to focus.
"What's the problem, Jimmy?" he said, the accent of unmetabolized alcohol clear in his speech.
"Me and Luke found a guy out in the desert hurt pretty bad," he said. "He needs medical help, but we can't take him to the hospital."
"Why not?"
"Too many questions. Who is he? Where'd we find him? What the hell were we doing at the Lake Mead Rec Area in the middle of the night? Questions we can't, or don't want to answer, if you get me."
Bill Firth nodded. "You were shopping for groceries again."
"Yeah, somethin' like that."
"When are people gonna forget I used to be a doctor?" Bill said. "I forgot it a decade ago. Your new friend outside?"
James nodded.
"Lemme get some boots on."
xxxxxxx
Though Firth walked a bit unsteadily, he seemed to be focusing better by the time he yanked open the back door of Luke's truck. He regarded the body lying there as James played a flashlight from head to toe.
""Holy shit," Firth said. "What meat grinder did this guy fall through?"
"I kinda figure from the clothes he's a bike rider," Luke said. "Route nine's about 150 yards or so above the spot we found him, so he mighta got hit up on the road and come over the crash barrier."
Firth shook his head. "If he fell down Pyramid Canyon, he should be dead."
"He pretty much is," James said.
Firth began assessing his patient and remembered enough of his medical school training to locate the broken bones and the worst of the wounds without excess delay.
Cassie joined them now and peered over her father's shoulder. After she got past the emotional shock of all the blood and the sadness of the injuries, she couldn't help notice the man beneath the damage: the strikingly handsome face, the almost-hard body, the obvious and ample endowment.
Unless he's keepin' a spare pair of socks packed in there, he's somethin' else," she thought. It wouldn't be an imposition to ask me to nurse him back to health.
Then she saw the wedding band on his left hand. She exhaled a sigh of disappointment.
Firth turned to her, unsure what the sigh meant but certain he needed her help. "Get some of those moving pads out of my closet and lay 'em over the guest bed. Put a couple of clean sheets over those. He's still bleeding some, and they'll protect the bed."
He turned back to Luke and James. "We'll need to carry him inside and back to the bedroom. And you're gonna have to be gentle. He's got clear head injuries. His left fibula is broken just above the ankle, the left radius is broken just below the elbow. He's got some broken ribs, and it looks like he's got a penetration wound to his chest. God knows what's goin' on inside him. I can straighten, splint, cast and tape up the broken bones. I can give him bed rest to help him recover from concussions. I can't do anything for him if his skull's fractured or if he's bleeding internally. I should call 911."
"You can't," Luke said. "Your family's got to come before him."
"You ever hear of the Hippocratic Oath?"
"You ain't the exactly the right person to be fallin' back on medical principles."
"Yes, I am. One of those principles is, 'First, do no harm.' I tossed my shingle the day I realized my emotions and a bottle were standing between me and the welfare of my patients." Firth was sobering up quickly. "James, do you really think a man's life is a fair price to pay for you and Luke getting out of a poaching fine?"
"It wouldn't be our first, Bill," James said. "So it wouldn't be just a fine. We're looking at some jail time."
Firth poked a thumb back toward the truck. "Yeah, and he's facing a death sentence."
James adopted an expression of determination. His uncle didn't have the emotional energy to fight it. Besides, he acknowledged to himself, James was right. He really had no right to invoke the Hippocratic Oath. Even though he still had a license to practice medicine – he'd stepped out of that picture before he could be pushed – he no longer considered himself a doctor and no one else did, either. Just a drunk with some surgical tools and a couple of leftover script pads.
He nodded. "Just get him on the bed and let me figure it out," he said.
The only tools Firth had to conduct an examination and make medical decisions was an old stethoscope, a pen light and his eyes. He didn't even own a BP cuff any more. If he could equate saving this man's life to a war, it would be like using BB guns against nuclear missiles. The first thing he would have to do is take care of whatever had penetrated the man's chest. Without access to an x-ray, he had no choice but to probe and pull, if he could even reach the unknown projectile.
He pulled his old medical bag out of the back of his closet, rummaged around for the implements he needed and sterilized them in a pot of boiling water on the stove. As he watched the water begin to move as it neared 212 degrees F, he admitted the enormity of the battle he faced.
I never should have let these boys talk me into this. I'm a drunk, not a doctor.
But when Firth finally got up the nerve to swab the skin with alcohol and begin his probe, he was able to locate and extract a one-inch piece of broken green glass. It might have been part of a beer bottle, he thought. But at least it was out.
He didn't realize that during the extraction process the glass fragment had broken in two. What he pulled out of the injured man's chest was about the same size as the shard left behind.
xxxxxxx
Firth sat at his kitchen table and made a list on one of his old purchase orders.
"Cassie, I want you to take this to the medical supply place first thing in the morning, and I mean at 7 a.m. sharp," he said. "Ask for Joe Seavers, you remember him, right? If he asks why I need this stuff, tell him I'm trying to make sure I've got some of my old basic skills, that I'm sobering up and thinking about going back into my practice in like a free clinic or something."
Cassie almost did a double-take.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"No, but it will get me what I need for the guy in the back room." He tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to her. Then he pulled over his old script pad and wrote a prescription for the strongest antibiotic he remembered. He handed that to her, too. "Go get this filled now. Go to Tillman's. They're open all night. There's nothing here that should raise suspicions, but if somebody asks, I cut myself and it got infected. Nobody's gonna doubt that an old drunk could do that. Okay? You good with doing this?"
She wasn't, but she nodded. He needed the reinforcement.
"You think you can save him?" she asked.
He sighed deeply.
"He's in shock, maybe comatose. Indications are the head trauma is severe. He had multiple deep wounds that already show signs of infection. Something entered his chest, and it sounds as if his left lung has collapsed. One of his broken ribs might even have punctured it, which would mean internal bleeding. And I'm treating him in my back bedroom with medical science that's 50 years old. That should give you a pretty good idea what my prognosis is.
"Now while you get that prescription for antibiotics filled, I'm gonna go back there and clean him up and see if I can brace his head and his limbs so he doesn't do more damage before I can make some splints and casts in the morning."
xxxxxxx
Nothing happened overnight.
The search crews found nothing.
The interviews with park visitors yielded nothing.
A methodic search of Grissom's Tahoe found nothing.
Everyone knew, though none dared voice it, that if Grissom wasn't dead already, his hours were limited and growing shorter with every degree the desert sun rose above the horizon.
So it was that Catherine and Sara set off for Pyramid Canyon at 3 a.m. with Catherine driving, Sara riding shotgun and Brass and Nick in the back seat. None of them could have stayed behind in Vegas while the search proceeded without them. Sara had been agitated all night. She wouldn't attempt to sleep. She wouldn't lie down. She made pot after pot of coffee and drank most of it. By the time the team was ready to hit the road, her nerves were in high jangle.
"Listen to me, kiddo," Brass said from the back seat as he leaned forward and put a hand on Sara's shoulder. He handed her a small throw pillow he had swiped from the living room sofa. "I want you to find a comfortable position and put your head back on this and try to sleep for an hour. I swear to you if I hear anything, I'll wake you up."
Sara nodded. Then she placed the pillow in her lap and continued at full alert in the front passenger seat. Brass shook his head and sighed.
Catherine reached a hand across the console and covered Sara's clenched fist.
"We'll find him, Sara. It will be all right."
When Sara responded, everyone in the truck could hear that her teeth were clenched, that the strain of the hours of waiting and worrying had taken their toll.
"Don't you dare patronize me, Catherine, any of you. How dare you tell me it will be all right. You have no idea." Her voice began to rise. "I was out in that sun for 15 hours, and when the medics got to me I was about 15 minutes away from the point of no return, when I would have died, or worse, spent the rest of my life in a chronic vegetative state. And I hadn't fallen off a cliff. I wasn't losing that much blood. If Grissom's alive, he's dehydrating a lot faster than I did. He's pretty much out of time already. So don't tell me everything going to be fine. Just don't …" Her voice trailed off and ended in a choked sob.
Catherine left her hand covering Sara's, willing it to become a conduit to wick away the younger woman's anguish and transfer it to an additional set of shoulders.
xxxxxxx
They got to the staging area for the Grissom search just after 4 a.m., as the first light appeared on the eastern horizon. The Park Service briefing depressed them. Grissom had not been found. The IR-equipped choppers picked up nothing except a painfully sad final battle between a sick pronghorn and a coyote, a fight the coyote was preordained to win.
"Survival of the fittest. Weeding out the sick and the lame," a park policeman explained, realizing too late the analogy didn't sit very well with those so personally and professionally close to the man whose life they were hoping to save. The officer's name was Ron Percival. When he realized his faux pas, he instantly regretted it.
"A couple of our guys rappelled the full length of the slope," he said, continuing quickly. "They only had headlamps to see by. It was a dangerous mission. But we hoped we might find something that would tell us what happened to Grissom."
"And?" Brass said.
"He fell a long way, maybe 160 yards. We found a high-end helmet, smashed, and a pair of dark safety goggles." Percival reached into a bag and pulled them out. Sara examined them with a flashlight and nodded, flinching just a little. Percival noted there were no tears and admired her stoicism. "We also found some stones and rocks with blood on them. We marked them but didn't move them. Down near the bottom, we found a lot of blood up against a scrub pinion. We figure that's what stopped his freefall. He was lying there a while, judging from the amount of blood. But the fact he was bleeding is proof he wasn't dead when he hit the tree."
"Where is he now?" Sara said, her voice not much more than a whisper. "He couldn't have just gotten up and wandered off."
Percival bit his lip, started to say something, stopped and reordered his thoughts.
"Well, yes, he could have," he said. "He'd probably have been pretty out of it, in shock, you know, but we've seen people in trouble out here do some remarkable things."
"So how do we find him?" Nick asked.
"The thing is," Percival said, "if he's stumbling around out here, the choppers should have found the heat source last night."
"Just spit it out!" Sara demanded. "What are you saying?"
Percival looked at her, and his heart broke for her. Her face was morphing expressions as fast as he could identify them: pain, fear, grief. And now, finally, tears glistened in her eyes. A symphony of anguish.
"The chances are, he would have been too weak to have gotten very far on foot," he said. "When we find him … if we find him … I don't think we'll find him alive. I'm really sorry."