Excerpt of Fatal Trauma by Richard L. Mabry

Dr. Mark Baker swept his straw-colored hair away from his
eyes, then wiped his forearm across his brow. He wished
the air-conditioning in the emergency room were better.
Patients might complain that it was cool, but if you were
hurrying from case to case for eight hours or more, it
was easy to work up a sweat.

“Nobody move!”

Mark spun toward the doors leading to the ER, where a
wild-eyed man pressed a pistol against a nurse’s head.
She pushed a wheelchair in which another man sat slumped
forward, his eyes closed, his arms crossed against his
bloody chest. Dark blood oozed from beneath his splayed
fingers and dropped in a slow stream, leaving a trail of
red droplets on the cream-colored tile.

Behind them, Mark could see a hospital security guard
sprawled facedown and motionless on the floor, his gun
still in its holster, a crimson worm of blood oozing from
his head. Mark’s doctor’s mind automatically catalogued
the injury as a basilar skull fracture. Probably hit him
behind the ear with the gun barrel.

The gunman was in his late twenties. His caramel-colored
skin was dotted with sweat. A scraggly moustache and
beard framed lips compressed almost to invisibility.
Straight, black hair, parted in the middle, topped a face
that displayed both fear and distrust. Every few seconds
he moved the barrel of the gun away from his hostage’s
temple long enough to wave it around, almost daring
anyone to come near him.

The wounded man was a few years older than the gunman—
maybe in his thirties. His swarthy complexion was shading
into pallor. Greasy black hair fell helter-skelter over
his forehead. His face bore the stubble of several days’
worth of beard.

“I mean it,” the gunman said. “Nobody move a muscle. My
brother needs help, and I’ll kill anyone who gets in the
way.”

Mark’s immediate reaction was to look around for the
nearest exit, but the gunman’s next words made him freeze
before he could act.

“You the doc?”

Now the gun was pointed at him. Mark thought furiously of
ways to escape without being shot, but he discarded each
plan as fast as it crossed his mind. “Yeah, I’m the doc.”

The gunman inclined his head toward the man in the
wheelchair. “He’s . . . he’s been shot.” He snatched two
ragged breaths. “I want you to fix him, pull him
through.” He punctuated his words with rapid gestures
from the pistol. “If he dies . . . if he dies, I’m going
to kill everyone in here.” The gunman turned back toward
his hostage. “Starting with her.”

Mark’s eyes followed the gun as it traversed once more
from him to the nurse pushing the wheelchair. To this
point his attention had been focused on the gunman, but
now that he recognized the hostage, he knew the stakes
were even higher. Although her red hair was disheveled,
her normally fair skin flushed, there was no mistaking
the identity of the woman against whose head the gunman’s
pistol lay. The nurse was Kelly Atkinson—the woman Mark
was dating.