Military Man. Marie Ferrarella

approached the bed, studying the face of the man he’d hoped had regained consciousness by now. The transporter, a man for whom the term “average” might have been coined if describing his hair, height and appearance, now sported a pasty complexion. He looked like a man who’d been on the brink of death and was even now still very much tottering on the edge. His fate, despite the noble efforts of a team of surgeons who’d kept him under for five hours, working feverishly in hopes of negating the damage that had been done by the stab wounds, had not yet been decided.

      They could lose him at any minute.

      Collin willed the victim’s eyes to open.

      They didn’t.

      Feeling unusually frustrated, he looked at the machine that monitored the patient’s vital signs. His pulse, blood pressure and respiration gauges were all making the appropriate, comforting beeping noises. Across the screen colorful wavy lines snaked their way from one end to the other, sometimes uniformly, sometimes jaggedly, with a regularity that provided the information that the man was still hanging on. Still fighting.

      He should have been dead. Like his partner. And yet, he wasn’t.

      Collin picked up the chart that was already full and glanced over it. He knew enough medical terminology to get by as long as it didn’t get too involved.

      “Human spirit’s an incredible thing,” he commented, flipping the pages back again. “According to this—” he indicated the chart that he replaced at the foot of the driver’s bed “—this man should have been dead. The knife obviously had a long blade. It went through his back and was inches shy of his lungs. If it had been just a little over, he would have already been six feet in the ground.”

      Emmett studied the man in silence for a moment, looking beyond the inert figure. Visualizing the scene that might have taken place in the transport vehicle. Had they hit a ditch, causing the driver to lose control of the bus? There’d been no blowout, so that wasn’t the cause of the change of fortune within the vehicle.

      What had happened inside the van to turn the prisoner into the jailer?

      Without fully realizing it, he voiced his thoughts out loud. “Wonder if he turned and made a run for it at the last second, not like the guy in the coroner’s office who was caught by surprise.”

      Collin hadn’t made up his mind yet; there wasn’t enough evidence to spin a theory. “Well, something’s different about him, or else he’d be in a steel drawer, right next to his buddy.” He rolled the last word around in his mouth. “Think they were friends?” He raised his eyes to Emmett, answering his own question when his cousin made no response. “I guess that depends on if they worked together on a regular basis. Most people usually develop some kind of relationship if they work together.” Unless they were in his line of work, he added silently. In the field, there was never enough time to do anything except think about staying alive.

      “I don’t,” Emmett retorted crisply.

      “I said ‘most.’” He laughed shortly. “You’re not like most people, Emmett. Most people, if they get fed up with their job, take a vacation. They don’t take a powder and retreat from the world the way you did.”

      As Collin spoke, his tone deceptively light, he continued studying the unconscious man in the bed. Trying to see himself in his skin. Had he felt panic at the last moment? Had he looked down the blade of the knife as it had gone in? Seen his partner die? He wondered if there was a way he could get inside the transport vehicle and look around. “You were that type that Thoreau used to write about, the one who marches to a different drummer.”