Free A Cold-Blooded Business by Dana Stabenow Page B

fluently. "You can run but you can't hide." He went to a wall phone, dialed zero and listened. When he came back to the table he said, "Sorry, gotta go, got an emergency at CC2." He paused, tray in hand, and looked at Kate. "You up on your skills?"
    Her fork stopped in midair. "I'm still rated in CPR, and I remember all the pressure points."
    He grinned. "Good enough. Want to come with?" She looked down at her steak and back up at him mutely. He grinned again. "Plenty more where that came from. The night shift'll be happy to cook some up for us when we get back."
    "In that case, you bet."
    Toni pouted, almost as well as Belle. "Abandoned, deserted, forlorn, bereft." Dale sat up straight in her chair, a little indignant. Toni ignored her and sent a dazzling smile over to the next table. Four burly men trampled each other in her direction, one of them actually overturning his chair.
    Kate was appalled when Jerry dumped all that food in the trash before setting his tray in the dishwasher's window. She herself managed to gulp down a glass and a half of milk before her tray was ripped ruthlessly from her hands. "What's going on?" she asked, trotting behind Jerry as they crossed the arctic walkway to the fire safety module. "I assume we're going on some kind of a run?"
    "You assume correctly. Drug overdose at Arctic Construction." Kate's ears grew points. "He's locked himself in his room and won't come out.
    He says he has a knife and that he'll kill anybody who tries to come in after him. He's already cut one guy, his roommate, and Lil's got him under sedation in her ambulance." The walkway ended in a large, two-story garage with offices to the sides. The garage contained one ambulance, space for another, a ladder truck and a water truck parked on the first floor. Jerry crashed down the steps two at a time, the metal staircase shaking beneath his weight, and ducked into his office long enough to grab one parka for himself and chuck another at Kate.
    The garage door was rolling up and Jerry was backing the ambulance out of the fire station before Kate gathered her wits together enough to break into a gallop and tumble in through the passenger side door. She felt as if the William Tell Overture should be playing somewhere in the background.
    Construction Camp Two had been built by RPetco to house construction crews for the length of their contract. It was twelve miles west of the Base Camp on the Backbone and the snow had begun to fall, with attendant winds bellowing encouragement, so it was a sweating, swearing forty-five minutes before Jerry could pull onto the gravel pad that housed the camp. A yellow grader, sounding a loud and indignant beep, materialized out of the gale like something out of Aliens and backed around the ambulance, leaving great mounds of snow curling in its wake.
    The operator, peering grimly through the windshield, dropped the enormous steel blade with a muffled crunch inches from their front bumper and started another pass. Jerry parked at the camp's bull rail next to the other ambulance, and they waded through drifts up to their thighs, ducking their heads against the wind that blew icy trickles up their noses and down their necks. Jerry inhaled the wrong way and sneezed violently as they shoved through the front door. Kate dug a handful of snow out of her collar and stamped her boots. "Hey, Lil," she said to the dark-haired woman bending over a gurney. "Long time no see."
    "Kate! What the hell are you doing here?" She looked past Kate to Jerry.
    "The other guy's still in his room. Sam'll show you." She bent back over her patient.
    "Nice to see you, too," Kate said mildly.
    "Come on," the security guard standing to one side said, and double-timed it down a hallway, Jerry and Kate on his heels. They turned a corner and found another six guards and one man not in uniform standing outside a closed door.
    "Kate, this is the camp supervisor, Tom Parry. Tom, Kate, she's riding with me for the evening. He in