Page 107 of Crosscurrent

“No, no, no!” Reagan dropped down beside him and pressed both hands hard into his side. The trauma-calm dropped over her face like a visor. The dark spreading under Tom’s side was a thing Gabe would not let himself name.

"Tom." Her voice didn't rise. It never rose, and that was the worst of it. "Tom? Stay with me. You hear me? You stay with me."

Cara, her face white with strain, slid down to the floor at Reagan’s side while Skye stacked the confiscated weapons on the small dining table.

Bennion came up out of the dark onto the boards, shotgun slung, the swamp running off her. "Both boats are sinking," she said, flat as ever. "Theirs and ours. Ours took rounds in the fight. She's already going under. Nobody's leaving here by water."

Beyond her, through the open door, up the long road, a string of red and blue had finally begun to swing through the cypress. Too late now to do anything but count.

They had won. Cartwright and a handful of Neptune crew were in zip ties. The network was safe. Every name in Ray's book was alive tonight, or already gone somewhere no one could follow.

Wade filled the doorway, his gaze going immediately to Reagan and Tom. He swung around toward Gabe. “Nobody left for your boy out there to round up, I’m thinking.” He jutted his chin at Tom’s prone form. “He good?”

“No!” Reagan stiffened, but never took her attention off Tom. “I need an ambulance ASAP.”

Gabe exchanged a look with the older man. They had patrol cars, but even at top speed, they had to be an hour, maybe two, from any kind of lifesaving help.

What they needed wasn’t an ambulance. What they needed was a miracle.

48

Helpless and useless at her friend's side, Cara couldn't stop staring at the blood running down Tom's side onto the rough planking. "Reagan. Talk to me. Is he⁠—"

"Don't." Reagan didn't look up. Both hands buried in Tom's side, blood welled dark between her fingers however hard she leaned. "Don't ask me that. Just keep that light steady, and don't let go of his hand."

Cara had his hand. She'd had it since she'd crawled to him across a floor still hazed with gunpowder. His fingers were too cold, his breathing too thin, his skin way too white.

"Pressure's dropping." Reagan said it low and flat, to no one. "I need a trauma bay. An OR. Things that do not exist in a fish cabin on stilts." She leaned harder. "Stay with me, Tom. You hear me. You do not get to do this."

"How long?" Cara forced the question out. "How long does he have?"

Reagan looked up, finally. The answer was on her face before she said it. "Not the two hours it'd take to drive him out of here."

The boats were both on the bottom of the bay. Thibodeaux's patrol cars would arrive any second, not that it would help. She squeezed Tom’s frigid hand. “Hang on. We’ve got you.”

The same thing Gabe had said to her. Was it just a day ago? Two? She hoped Tom heard her. And she prayed the silly, meaningless words would give him hope.

Then she heard it.

The miracle came out of the black night with its lights off and its engine screaming. The drone of an engine climbing over the marsh. The floatplane swooped out of the sky onto the black bay in a long tearing sheet of spray, pontoons throwing white, and swung up to the broken dock.

Cara was up and out the cabin door before she'd decided to move, Tom's hand passed off to Owen, her boots loud on the canted boards. A plane was a chance, and she meant to be on the dock to meet it.

The cockpit door flew open. Nomad leaned out and took his time looking them over, the two boats going down at the pilings, the cuffed men on the boards, and Gabe and Wade standing on the edge of the dock, arms akimbo. "Somebody order a ride?"

"How'd you know we needed you?" Cara's voice came out shaking.

Nomad shrugged, already swinging down onto the pontoon. "You were late. And if there's one thing I know about my man Wade, it's that he is never late. Not ever." Halfway down the float he stopped, toeing a thick coil of cottonmouth off the pontoon into the bay. "Find your own ride, dude." He grinned up at them. "So I figured he was dead, or in a bad way."

His eyes went past her then, through the open door, to Reagan crouched over a man who wasn't moving. Every ounce of the clowning went out of him at once. "Right again," he said. "Looks like our first stop's the closest ambulance shack."

They carried Tom out on the door. Wade at the head, Gabe at the foot, Reagan walking alongside with her hands pressed exactly where they'd been since the lights came up. Cara stood on the pontoon and held onto the wing strut while they lifted him in, Owen and Skye watching from the doorway of the cabin. Tom's face remained rigid and drained of color. He didn't wake.

"Ten four." Inside the cockpit, Nomad clicked off the radio. "Nearest ER is ten minutes away by air. They'll have an ambulance standing by, then it’s a two-minute ride from the airfield. The lighter we travel, the faster we get there."

"Just me, then." Reagan climbed in after him and didn't look back, and that was how Cara knew. There was no guarantee the rest of them would see Tom awake and talking again.

The instant Reagan was aboard, Nomad spun up the engines, turning the ungainly craft in a neat circle, then the floatplane blasted back down the canal, trailing thick wakes of white water that slapped into the leaning docks. The sound of it thinned as it rounded the first bend, and then it was gone, and the marsh folded back into its own enormous quiet.