Free Countdown by Susan Rogers Cooper

having taken the day off for his father-in-law’s funeral. And there she’d been, sitting on the steps to the trailer, cradling her swollen ankle. Maybe it wasn’t love at first sight, but it was definitely lust at first sight. Then he’d seen the ring on her left hand and got himself in check. But on the ride to the hospital, with her lying on the gurney right behind him as he drove, they got to talking and, although she’d never said anything directly against her husband, he’d got the vibe that she hadn’t accidentally fallen down the steps. He’d hated Darrell Blanton ever since, and now … and now …
    Drew was driving the ambulance, and tried to push that thought out of his mind as he felt the tears starting. Not only was it not manly – in Drew’s opinion – for a man to cry, it could cause an accident, and he already had injured people in the back of the ambulance. But still and all, he wasn’t paying that much attention and almost ran into the back of the rescue van. Slamming on his brakes, he could see beyond the van and ascertain the problem. Two firefighters were heading toward a Toyota Celica resting upside down in their lane of the highway.
    Drew reached behind him for their emergency bag and jumped out of the ambulance, Jasper two feet ahead of him.
    There was a young man in the driver’s seat of the Toyota, hanging upside down and not moving. Drew felt for a pulse and found one beating strong.
    ‘He’s alive,’ he told the firefighters. ‘We need to cut the seatbelt. First, though, Jasper, bring the backboard.’
    Grumbling under his breath, Jasper headed for the ambulance while one of the firefighters went to the rescue van for clippers to cut the belt. When they both got back to the Toyota, Jasper laid the backboard down as close to the kid as they could get, while the firefighter clipped the seatbelt.
    Drew and Jasper both had hold of the boy’s head and shoulders, and were able to gently release him onto the backboard.
    ‘Now what?’ Jasper asked Drew. ‘We go back with what we got or keep going?’
    That, as far as Drew was concerned, was the $64,000 question. With this guy in the back the ambulance would be pretty much full. Did he take this kid back to Longbranch to the hospital, or hope that the clinic in Bishop was still there and could take care of him? In the end he decided that they needed to get the unconscious young man and the firefighter with the broken arm to the Longbranch hospital. Checking out the head injury of the female firefighter, he discovered that the cut had stopped bleeding and the woman insisted she had no headache or any other residual effects. Her eyes looked clear, which suggested no concussion.
    ‘OK,’ Drew said, removing the pencil flashlight from her pupils, ‘I guess you’re good to go.’ He looked at one of the firefighters standing by. ‘OK with y’all if she goes with you?’
    ‘Ah, hell, man, she’s senior,’ the firefighter said. ‘I got no say in that A-tall.’
    The woman stood up. ‘So I’m outta here,’ she said.
    ‘I reckon so,’ Drew said and smiled at her. She gave him a mock salute and led the other two firefighters back to the rescue van.
    ‘Ideas!’ I said to the men standing around with their thumbs up their butts. ‘Come on, y’all. Ideas!’
    ‘We could sneak up there, then bust the door down and take the Blantons down,’ Emmett Hopkins suggested, his forehead sweaty, although the air conditioning in the Longbranch Inn kept the restaurant permanently chilly.
    ‘I considered that,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid Eunice would shoot one of the hostages.’
    ‘Not if we shoot her first!’ Emmett said, his face turning red with the tension and stress of the occasion. Emmett Hopkins, former police chief of Longbranch, Oklahoma, current head deputy of the Prophesy County, Oklahoma sheriff’s department and one of the most level-headed men I’ve ever known, was about to lose it, and I was afraid that if Emmett lost