I reached out to grab her, but I was too late.
Keiko dropped to the pavement with a moan that made my heart buck. I couldn’t believe what had happened, and I couldn’t understand it. Had Keiko suffered a stroke?
Yuki screamed, then crouched beside her mother, slapping her cheeks, crying out, “Mommy, Mommy, wake up.”
“Yuki, let me in there for a second. Keiko. Keiko, can you hear me?”
My heart was thudding hard as I placed my fingers to Keiko’s carotid artery, tracked her pulse against the second hand of my watch.
She was breathing, but her pulse was so weak, I could barely feel it.
I grabbed the Nextel at my waist and called Dispatch.
“Lieutenant Boxer, badge number twenty-seven twenty-one,” I barked into the phone. “Get an EMS unit to Maiden Lane and Grant. Make it now!”
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 4
SAN FRANCISCO MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL is huge — like a city in itself. Once a public hospital, it had been privatized a few years back, but it still took more than its share of indigents and overflow from other hospitals, treating in excess of a hundred thousand patients a year.
At that moment, Keiko Castellano was inside one of the curtained stalls that ringed the perimeter of the vast, frantic emergency room.
As I sat beside Yuki in the waiting room, I could feel her terror and fear for her mother’s life.
And I flashed on the last time I’d been inside an emergency room. I remembered the doctors’ ghostlike hands touching my body, the loud throbbing of my heart, and wondering if I was going to get out alive.
I’d been off duty that night but went on a stakeout anyway, not thinking that one minute it would be a routine job, and the next minute I’d be down. The same was true for my friend and former partner, Inspector Warren Jacobi. We’d both taken two slugs in that desolate alley. He was unconscious and I was bleeding out on the street when somehow I found the strength to return fire.