Gamma Blade by Tim Stevens Read Free Book Online Page A

out of the back of the ambulance.
    Beth stood. Instinctively, she placed the palm of her hand on her belly.
    She looked toward the line of storefronts and buildings where Venn had run to. A scattering of bewildered-looking pedestrians milled about, but there was no sign of Venn.
    The feeling of dread, so familiar and yet so terrifying each time it came, cut through her heart.
    She hadn’t heard gunfire. That was a good thing. It probably meant Venn had either lost the guy, or had caught up with him and subdued him without needing to fire a shot.
    As she watched the street, a dark figure emerged from the end of a narrow alleyway between two tall buildings. It was a man’s shape, lean and wiry, dressed all in black. His features weren’t discernible in the shadows. Beth thought that he was white, or maybe a light-skinned Latino.
    He wasn’t running, exactly, but he wasn’t strolling either. Rather, he came out of the alley at a lope, glancing from side to side. Like a wolf, skulking through hostile territory.
    As a physician, Beth had learned to trust her instincts. Not blindly, not in the face of reason and evidence. But when something felt wrong about a patient’s presentation, even when in most respects the patient appeared entirely healthy, she’d come to recognize that her years of training and experience had embedded an intuition deep within her which she ignored at her peril. They’d talked about this, Beth and Venn. He told her that cops got to be the same, after long enough in the field. You got a prickling, a gut-sense, that something wasn’t right, and more often than not when you followed where that sixth sense was going, you wound up discovering things most people would have missed.
    Beth had that feeling right now.
    The man who’d appeared at the mouth of the alleyway, and who’d turned to his right and begun striding down the street, was connected with Venn.
    Beth glanced down at the man on the ground. She saw that the two EMTs had collapsed the legs of the gurney and were easing him onto it, in preparation for transport in the ambulance.
    She wasn’t needed here for now.
    Beth began to trot across the sidewalk toward the darkness of the alleyway entrance.
    Behind her, she heard a second ambulance arrive in a wail of sirens. Or maybe it was a police  car.
    She reached the dark aperture and looked down it, at the high walls which narrowed toward the slit of an exit at the other end.
    She saw a mound of shadow on the ground, limned by the light of the distant cross-street.
    Beth broke into a run.
    She dodged a dumpster halfway along, felt plastic sacks and crumpled tin cans scattering beneath her feet.
    As she drew near, she watched the shape on the ground take form. A man’s body, big, rangy, sprawled unnaturally, on its knees, with the head and torso sagging forward over the legs.
    She saw the gleam of light off the cropped scalp.
    Oh my God.
    It was Venn.

Chapter 9
    It was like a rerun of the procedure Beth had gone through a few minutes earlier.
    She slipped her fingers across his jawline and down his throat, feeling for the carotid pulse on either side.
    At the same time, she peered at the dark blotch on the curve of his occiput, just above the nape of the neck.
    There was a smear of blood there, and a growing contusion beneath.
    A smear, and a bruise. Not a crater.
    After a heart-stopping second, Beth felt the throb of a pulse against her fingertips on both sides.
    And, an instant later, she felt pressure against her hands as he reared up and back.
    He groaned, long and low, like a crypt door opening after centuries of being sealed.
    Venn slumped forward once more, his head not quite meeting the concrete.
    Beth slid her hand down and across his chest and grabbed him. Hugged him close. Pressed herself against his back, not as a doctor, but as a woman discovering the man she loved was alive, when she’d been convinced he was dead.
    He was alive.
    Through the surge of relief that threatened to