CALEN PALMER’S POLICE-ISSUED Ford Explorer veered sharply to the left, barely missing the large chunk of concrete, twisted rebar and other detritus strewn across the road. As he straightened the steering wheel, a blur of motion had him hitting the brakes hard.
The SUV skidded sideways on the dust-slicked road, shuddering to rest just inches from a wide-eyed woman. Her face and clothes were streaked with grime and blood, and she clutched a small bundle to her chest.
At the soft whine behind him, Cal looked over his shoulder. “It’s okay, Scout. You’re okay, pal,” he told his canine partner while he opened the driver’s door.
“Earthquake! We got an earthquake!” someone yelled. As if he didn’t know that already. But people were panicked and the guy must have been reacting to the San Diego Police Department markings on his vehicle.
Voices erupted all around as he ran to the woman.
He felt the surge of adrenaline. It was a baby she was holding. And the blanket was saturated with blood.
“How badly are you hurt?” he asked, as he gauged the severity of the cuts on the woman’s forehead and her right forearm, and checked her pupils for dilation.
“I... I’m okay,” she choked out through her sobs. “My baby. Lila...” She cast a terrified glance at the child she cradled against her.
“Let me see.” Cal eased back the blanket and scrutinized the tiny, scrunched-up face, the furiously working little mouth and the tightly fisted hands. The baby was alive. He did a quick, careful check. There were no obvious signs of trauma. The blood on the blanket was the woman’s, not the child’s.
“Your daughter appears to be fine,” he assured her. She didn’t respond, and he hoped she wasn’t going into shock. He had to leave. People’s lives depended on him and Scout, but he had to do what he could for the woman and her child.
A siren wailed, and Cal looked over at the ambulance barreling toward the intersection of University and West Washington. Dispatch had told him the triage area was set up in the parking lot of a nearby mall.
“Listen to me.” He shook the woman gently. “Listen, okay?” Finally, her gaze met his. “See where that ambulance is headed?” She nodded. “Go there. The hospital’s sent medical personnel. It’s not far. Maybe a five-minute walk. Have a doctor look at your baby. They’ll need to stitch up your arm, too.”
She stared at him, tears welling in her eyes.
“Do you understand?”
She nodded again, and was about to move away, but Cal glanced at the baby again and put a hand on her uninjured arm. “Wait a minute.”
He sprinted over to his truck, opened the passenger-side door and pulled a cotton sweatshirt from his duffel. Using a pocket knife, he tore off a sleeve as he ran back to the woman, and tied it around her arm as a makeshift bandage. He then quickly helped her remove the soiled blanket from her child and replaced it with the clean sweatshirt. The woman rested her forehead against her child’s, and murmured a thank-you. Cal tucked the cloth more snugly around the small form, and nudged the woman in the direction of the triage area. “Now go. Lila’ll be okay,” he said, and prayed he was right.
Jumping back into his vehicle, Cal continued to the incident command location he’d been given by dispatch. He veered around a crushed concrete column, toppled on its side. It was blocking part of the roadway, its upper half shattered, the exposed rebar bent and tangled. He knew the amount of force it took for concrete to fail, which didn’t bode well for what he’d see closer to the epicenter.
Cal was the newest member of the San Diego Police Department’s K-9 Unit, and wasn’t it just his luck that although San Diego was one of the California cities least prone to earthquakes, it had been hit by a massive one. He’d heard that the quake was 7.6 on the Richter scale. He could see the devastation all around him as he approached Incident Command. An elevated section of the highway had collapsed, and portions of the road surface had heaved and buckled. A rippled concrete parapet wall leaned precariously over the roadway. Two low-rise buildings and a parking garage had also collapsed.
Cal pulled into the cordoned-off area that had been designated as Incident Command, and parked behind another SDPD vehicle.
Cops, firefighters, paramedics and panicked civilians were everywhere.
Cal recognized Riker, another officer with the department. He was in a huddle with a tall, plain-clothed man and a firefighter. Cal surmised that the man in plain clothes was the incident commander. He left Scout in the vehicle and went to join them. Introductions were made; he’d been right about the third man. His name was Williams and he was in charge.
“It looks bad,” Cal remarked. “Do we have any idea of the numbers yet?”
Williams shook his head. “Too soon to tell how many injuries and fatalities we’ll have. The fact that it’s late on a Friday afternoon might work to our advantage.” He jerked his head toward the collapsed structures. “They housed offices mostly. Let’s hope a lot of the workers cut out early.”
Cal scrutinized the buildings. One had collapsed in on itself. Most of the floor appeared to be intact, if skewed. Best-case scenario, the people inside had time to find shelter near the load-bearing walls and would have survived. The condition of the other building was far worse. A couple of the lower floors had crashed down on top of each other. There couldn’t have been much room for people left inside.
Cal heard Scout’s muffled bark and knew his partner was anxious to get to work. He was always impressed by how intuitive police dogs were, sensing when they were needed. “Is it safe to go in?” Cal asked the commander. He’d done lots of search-and-rescues in the five months he’d been in San Diego and in his decade on the job with the Lincoln Police Department in Nebraska before then, but he’d never had to deal with an earthquake before. Sadly, there was a first time for everything.
“I think they’re clearing it now.” The firefighter motioned to a group of men near the entrance to one of the buildings. “But there’s always the possibility of aftershocks.” He glanced over at Cal’s SUV, clearly marked as part of the K-9 Unit. “You plan to go in?”
Cal studied the buildings, considered the risks involved. He thought about Haley and forced the image of his little girl with her blonde ringlets out of his mind. She wouldn’t know if he lived or died. He shrugged. “It’s why we’re here. It’s what Scout and I do.”
The commander gestured to one of the men by the building “We’ve got the all clear.”
“Thanks.” Cal