88

For the second time, Mace felt no pain.

He opened his eyes in time to see Gillespie blown backward, blood spattering his shirt. There were sirens in the distance. And big Bill Masterson, gun in his right hand, appeared from behind Jamie’s 4Runner. He raced over to Jamie and checked her breathing.

“You all right?” he asked Mace.

“Just a flesh wound,” Mace gasped. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, so he couldn’t put pressure on the wound in his left thigh. He was losing blood, but that wasn’t his first concern. “Is she alive?”

Masterson had his hand on Jamie’s neck. “Alive, but I don’t like her pulse.”

Mace James asked as many questions as he could on the way to the hospital, but nobody seemed to know anything. The first ambulance had taken Jamie away. He was in the second. The paramedics told him to calm down and try to relax.

Easy for them to say. He had just seen three men killed with stupefying speed, all within arm’s length. He had been Tasered and had a gun pointed at his head. He had a bullet lodged in his thigh, which still hurt like crazy. He was losing blood fast.

His mind was spinning trying to process all this.

When they hit the emergency entrance at Johns Creek Hospital, there was a flurry of activity, lots of serious faces and urgent orders and people hustling this way and that. He signed consent forms as the pain medication started to kick in. They hooked up IVs and pumped in some blood, preparing him for surgery.

Mace’s questions were still being deflected, but he wasn’t sure he was making sense anymore. The surgeon and anesthesiologist talked for a few minutes, and then the bright lights of the operating room went dark as Mace James drifted into a well-earned sleep.