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Chapter 11

Gene stormed into CID late that night, his anger renewed as soon as he walked through the doors of the police station. He was delighted to see that Terry, Bammo and Poirot had all listened to him and were still sitting in their chairs, lights on and fags lit.

Gene walked to the centre of the room, staring at each man in turn. Finally he spoke.

"Poirot. Give me the gun."

Carefully, as though the gun might explode, Poirot handed the weapon to Gene. Gene opened the clip and emptied the bullets. All were there, save for the one that the surgeons had to pull out of her side.

"Full," he said dangerously. "Completely bloody full. Terry. I told you specifically to check that every gun was rid of bullets last night. And I said the exact same thing to you too Bammo. So why's my DI in a hospital bed?"

There was silence for a moment, neither wanting to upset their Guv further, but both almost wanting him to yell. This careful calm was worse than when he nearly threw suspects across the interview room.

"Can...Can I see the gun?" Bammo asked nervously. Gene nodded and handed it to the man. Bammo examined it carefully.

"We didn't see this gun at all last night Guv. We checked all the desks before we left and we didn't see it."

Gene nodded slightly. "Right," he said. "This is still bloody negligent of you both. You both are filling out all of Drake's paperwork for her, and are on strict desk duty for a month. You can go now. Don't expect this to be all though."

The men nodded and left the room thankfully. As soon as they were gone, Gene turned to Poirot.

"Look at what you've done. Instead of ten seconds to check the clip like any copper should do before ever firing a gun, you've just put your superior officer through nearly eleven hours of surgery, which she almost didn't make it through." Gene's voice was still carefully calm, but it was difficult. He needed to punch someone. Badly.

"Your miraculously aimed bullet punched a hole in her intestine and clipped her aorta. A few more inches to the left and you would have killed her. All because you didn't bloody check the clip!"

"Guv, I..."

"DID I SAY YOU COULD SPEAK?" Gene roared, delighted to use this rage for even a moment.

Poirot cowered as Gene regained his composure. He shook his head disgustedly.

"You're suspended. Active immediately. Until Drake's back on duty, I don't want to see you in this office. Give me your warrant card."

Looking at the floor, Poirot shuffled over to Gene, pulling a leather wallet out of his pocket and putting it in Gene's palm.

"Oh. And you have to take a firearms retraining course. Honestly, I let you off lightly. Do you know what this could do? Not only could you have killed Alex, but now the rubber heelers may come. And the last thing we need in this office is D&C."

Poirot said nothing, looking at the floor.

"Get out of my sight," Gene spat finally.

Poirot cowered out the door, leaving Gene alone in CID. He grabbed the gun from Bammo's desk and stuffed it in his pocket. They needed to find out where this gun came from, and now, it looked like the only person who knew was unconscious.

~(*)~

Alex lay still in the hospital bed, tubes and wires seeming to sprout from everywhere on her body. A bandage covered her head, hiding the now partially bald head, shaved to remove the bullet. Molly stared at her, a giant smile on her face. Her mum had made it through the surgery.

"Mum," she said excitedly. "The doctor got the bullet out. You're going to be okay! He said if you get plenty of rest and there are no complications, you're going to wake up. You're going to be fine!"

But even as she said the words, the lines of her mother's heart rhythm went flat as the view of the room changed. She was no longer in ICU, she was in a different ward. She wasn't the one in the chair, she was in the bed.

"Can you hear me Molls?" Evan's voice asked her. "They don't know how you're going to fare after this, Scrap," he told her. "You took so many pills. Right now, they're concerned about kidney and liver failure. It's a waiting game with results, just like it is to see if you're going to come around.

"I know why you did this, Molly. You think I don't understand anything you're going through, but your Mum went through the same thing when she was a kid. Only..." He paused a moment, clearly dealing with the demons of his past. "I'm not going to pretend that if I didn't deal with Layton on the phone he still would have shot your mother. I didn't think he was going to do it Scrap. I thought I could just phone the police and they'd raid his boat and everything would be fine. But you blame me for taking her off life support. Molls, I had seen the scans. Your mum was brain dead. She wasn't even dreaming. Her consciousness was in another world completely. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do," he said, choking up. "She was like my own child, just like you're almost my child, or grandchild, if you will. And if you die, I'm on my own. Because of me, every single member of the Price lineage is dead."

The room changed again. This time she was in a hospital room, clearly from the eighties. A sheet was over the body lying on the bed, a man in black sitting next to the body, his shoulders slumped. As Molly walked forward, the man turned. It was Gene.

"The infection," Gene said. "It killed her."

Molly started to scream. She'd lost her mum again.

"Molly! Wake up!" Tom's voice commanded her.

Molly's eyes snapped open and she looked frantically around the unfamiliar room. Finally she realised that she was in her mum's flat. It had been late when they got out of the hospital, and they had gone to Luigi's afterwards with Gene, where they were all treated to dinner by the worried owner. By the time they had finished dinner, Molly was falling asleep in the chair, worn out from a day of frantic worrying. Luigi had insisted they stay the night.

"Mum," she said.

"Gene said he'd ring us if there was any news. You okay, Molly? You look really pale and completely freaked out."

"Nightmare," she said simply.

He looked at her, his eyes asking her to explain.

"Mum was...she had an infection. And when I walked in there, she was..."

Molly couldn't finish the sentence. Tom sat on the bed next to her and put his arms around her, hugging her tightly.

"None of that's happened, Molly. Your mum is going to be fine. She'll be sleepy for a few days, but she'll come back and you two will be great together."

"You're such an optimist Tom."

"Sometimes, but sometimes you're cynical," he said kindly.

"I can't lose her again. I've already lost her once."

"Then why did you run from her? If you couldn't lose her, but you'd just been with your dad..."

"It was really, really complicated with the whole 'dad' thing," she said, waggling her fingers. "I couldn't see her at all, ever. It was like she was dead. Dad lives in Canada with his new wife."

"I thought you said he worked for The Guardian?"

"He does. There's one in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I got so used to it, I don't even think of it when I tell people."

Tom nodded. "An ocean away," he said thoughtfully.

"A world," Molly said. "That's what it felt like. No phoning her, no writing, no email..."

"What's email?"

"A kind of post system that travels extremely fast," she said, cursing her slip. "Not very popular though."

Tom merely nodded his head, frowning. "I think I might have heard of that somewhere before."

Molly shrugged. "But when I ran, I could still go back at any time. I could find Mum and apologise. But...if she dies, it'll be exactly like when I was at Dad's."

"She won't, Molly."

Molly relaxed in the warmth of his arms, praying to God he was right.

~(*)~

Amelia Peters sighed as she checked the clock for the fifteenth time that night. It was only three AM. She still had four hours to go, and the next three and a half would drag, unless they had to admit someone. As much as she hated to work through all the paperwork of an admit, tonight had been so slow that she was praying for one. There were only three patients in the ward, all of them silent as the grave.

Amelia smirked as she made this comparison. It may not be appropriate, but she had always been one for dark humour. Someone had figured out the song Another One Bites the Dust had the same amount of beats per minute that you were supposed to pump a chest in CPR. Now she would sing it to keep the rhythm, the perfect 100 beats per minute. It was small things like that that got her through the long nights on the ward.

She checked the clock again. 0315. Amelia sighed. She might as well start taking vitals now. They were supposed to be started at four, but there was no harm in going a few minutes early, was there?

She looked at all of her patients, their curtains opened, exposing them to her from the desk. Technically, she wasn't supposed to do this, but as none of them were awake at the moment, she saw no harm in keeping the curtain open so she could keep an eye on them.

Amelia walked to the patient closest to her and looked at her chart. "Alex Drake," she murmured. "Gunshot wound to the abdomen, perforated small intestine, grazed abdominal aorta."

"No wonder you're so pale, honey," she said to the unconscious woman. "You get hit in any artery and you start bleeding out like mad. Honestly, you're bloody lucky to be alive. You must have a very, very good friend upstairs." There was no response from the woman, but she didn't care. Plants didn't respond either, but talking to them was supposed to help them grow, wasn't it?

Amelia grabbed the sphygmomanometer from the wall and wrapped it around Alex Drake's arm. She then took her stethoscope and pressed it to the inside of the woman's elbow and pumped up the cuff. Slowly she let out the air, noting when the pumping sounds started and disappeared.

"Ninety-two over fifty-four. Bit low, dearie, but not too surprising to be honest. Once you get some more blood in you, it should go up."

Amelia grabbed Alex's wrist, checking her pulse for half a minute and then the number of times she inhaled. She noted with growing concern how the woman's wrist felt cold and clammy and that the pulse was weak and thready. By the end of the minute in which she took the pulse and respirations in, she knew she had to call a doctor.

Amelia ran to the med room and grabbed a litre bag of normal saline, hooking it up to Alex's drip and increasing the drip flow to 100 millilitres a minute. Only then did she ring a doctor.

Less than five minutes later, doctors were taking the woman out of the room, wheeling her back to surgery. She had been receiving blood all night. If she was going into shock now, she must still have bleeding somewhere in her stomach.

The room fell into silence as the doctors got further down the hallway. Finishing her vitals, she recorded them and then moved to Alex's vacated bed, stripping the sheets. Maybe the rest of the night wouldn't be as slow as she thought.

A/N: What happens in the final bit of this chapter is that Alex goes into shock. She has too little blood flow and so her body's cells cannot meet their metabolic needs. This means that they may not be getting enough oxygen, or a mix of other nutrients for the body. The nurse administers the normal saline at such a quick rate to increase Alex's blood flow, thus pulling her out of the state of shock, at least for the moment. This is known as a bolus.