The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell Read Free Book Online Page B

tu. Ciao.’
    Outside, the day was warming up. She walked through the streets to her car, feeling guilty about not wanting to stay with her parents. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them, it was just the timing. Here was her shot at Homicide – maybe her one and only shot – and she needed to be free to spend twenty-four hours a day there if necessary.
    Assuming, of course, that something better than checking phone lists came along.

FOUR
     
    L auren lay on her stomach, head to head with the dead man in the twilight, peering into his wide-open mouth. They were in a shallow culvert by one of the railway lines just out of Central station. She’d worked her elbows into gaps between the rocks but the rest of her felt every sharp corner.
    The man looked to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell for sure with the severe lacerations to his cheeks and forehead. There were more cuts on his scalp. His nose was smashed and caked with blood, and the inside of his mouth and throat were the pale no-longer-pink you saw in the freshly dead. Lauren lifted the tongue with the laryngoscope blade, searching with the light for the white flash of the vocal cords and the dark space between them.
    Joe squatted beside her over the drug box, lifting his collar off the dressing on his neck. The younger half of a crew from Paddington did cardiac compressions, grimacing as he adjusted his knees on the rocks, while the older squinted in the late evening light for a vein on the man’s arms. The air smelled of hot dust and oil and the metal workings of the train which sat ticking on the tracks nearby. Two uniformed police talked anxiously beside it, the dusty knees of their trousers proof of their initial frantic CPR efforts.
    Lauren saw the cords. She took the ET tube from Joe and slid it down the pharynx and into the dark space, inflated the cuff to hold the tube in place, connected the resus bag and started squeezing to blow air into the man’s lungs. Joe stuck the earpieces of his stethoscope into place and held the diaphragm on the man’s left and right chest then over his stomach, making sure the air was going into the lungs and not the gut. He nodded. Lauren handed him the bag and slid the white fabric tape under the man’s neck then looped and tied it around the tube.
    Joe squeezed the resus bag hard and fast. The Paddo para said, ‘I’m in,’ over the man’s arm, and Lauren started setting up vials of adrenaline for him to inject through the cannula into the vein.
    A senior cop came stumbling and swearing along the rocks beside the line. He peered at the dead man then up at the younger officers. ‘What’s the story?’
    ‘We pulled him over for running a light in Redfern,’ the first officer said. ‘He seemed really nervous when we talked to him, and then when we were checking his licence he bolted. We chased him to Redfern station and he jumped onto the train. We followed and almost had him, but then he went out the door between two carriages and tried to climb up on top. Then he fell.’
    ‘What’d Radio give you?’
    ‘His name’s Adrian Nolan, no warrants, no record. He was driving a rental car.’
    The man hadn’t gone under the train’s wheels, but Lauren thought he’d landed on his face and scrambled his brain. Not much anyone could do in those circumstances, but because the police had made an attempt to resuscitate him, and especially because there’d be an investigation into their actions, it was best to carry on with the effort and let the doctors do the whitesheet thing.
    The older cop touched her shoulder. ‘How’s he look?’
    ‘We’ll keep working on him and run him up to St Vinnie’s, but they’ll probably pronounce him the moment we arrive,’ Lauren said.
    The cop nodded. The young one looked like he was going to cry.
    St Vincent’s Hospital’s ambulance bay was busy. The young Paddo paramedic edged the ambulance along the side and Lauren, looking out the side window as she did compressions,