The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(5)

“Pressure’s dropping,” the girl said. “There’s blood in the breathing tube.”

Josie heard muffled voices outside the building, and Vie lifted her head, her expression wary.

With her back braced against the wall, her muscles taut and focused, Josie strained to decipher the noises from outside the unit. She reached Otto on his cell phone, not wanting the conversation on the public frequency.

“I hear voices outside the building. DPS arrived?”

“The front parking lot is empty. I just checked with Lou. DPS has two officers on their way, but they’re still thirty minutes out. The voices are coming from the east side of the building. They’re moving toward the back door.” Otto hesitated. “It’s about to get ugly.”

Josie knew Medrano would not have made it through surgery in Juárez. Retaliation in trauma units was common there. It was ranked the deadliest city in the world. Just a month ago, Mexican authorities charged two members of La Bestia for the murder of a high-ranking police commander in Juárez who refused to pay the demanded protection. He took a bullet through his chest as he entered the grocery with his wife. When the bullet failed to kill him, the assassins followed the ambulance to the hospital and killed the officer, the ambulance driver, and three bystanders.

Josie heard a car in the rear of the building, shut her cell phone, and slipped it in her shirt pocket. Within seconds, bullets pelted the back of the building, and glass shattered. The sound echoed down the hallway and filled the operating room. They had shot the back doors open. Voices were shouting, obviously inside the building now, speaking rapid-fire Spanish. Josie’s chest tightened under her vest, and she gritted her teeth, every thought focused on her actions.

“Flat on your stomachs!” she said, waving to the floor.

The surgeon looked wide-eyed at the man on the gurney. “I can’t leave him. He’ll die!”

Josie pointed toward the corner of the room with her gun. “Now! They’ll spray this whole room with bullets if they can’t get in.”

Gunshots echoed down the hall, just outside the trauma room, and Carrie screamed and dropped to her knees. Vie and the surgeon both looked to Josie for an answer. She motioned for them to cover their heads and lie on the floor in the corner.

More shouts from the hallway, then two additional gunshots, single caliber, that sounded like police rounds coming from the front of the building, where Otto was stationed. The three medical personnel lay flat on their stomachs. Josie heard the young nurse crying and Vie praying aloud. The doctor was between both nurses, his hands held protectively over their heads.

Josie crouched in the opposite corner. She had two guns, one on her thigh, cocked and ready for backup, the other trained on the door, both with a bullet in the chamber and a full magazine. The police-issued sidearms were little consolation in combat with automatic weapons that could sweep a room in a matter of seconds.

The trauma room echoed with the pounding of fists on the door and shouts in Spanish, but Josie couldn’t shoot without knowing who stood beyond the wall. With her gun trained on the door, she thought of Otto in the front of the building and hoped he hadn’t been hit. She shoved the image from her mind, forcing herself to keep focus.

The cries of the young nurse on the floor turned to sobs.

Bullets hit the door, ringed the handle, and the door flew open with a kick. Three gunmen screamed as they opened fire on the man lying on the table. Josie fired her pistol, hit one man in the chest, then a second in his upper arm. The first man stumbled backwards into the hallway; the second man fell back against the wall as the third man turned and fled, still yelling as he ran down the hall, spraying the walls with bullets.

She heard the clinic’s back door slam and tires blow gravel through the parking lot. Josie leaped from her crouched position on the floor, yelling at the injured man to drop his weapon. He leaned against the wall, holding the other hand over the bleeding wound, the automatic rifle at his feet.

Josie pushed him to the floor, kneeled on his back. He cried out in pain as she pulled his arms back and snapped handcuffs on him. Stepping into the hallway, she pushed at the gunman lying on his back on the floor. From the chest wound, she was certain he was dead. She put her backup weapon inside the concealed holster under her shirt and carried his AK-47 with her. Otto ran down the hallway to the back entrance as Josie stood, leaving the wounded man moaning on the floor. The two nurses and doctor stared up at her from the floor.

“Anyone hit?” she asked them.

They began to pull themselves up into sitting positions, still too shocked to know if they were hurt. They all appeared fine to her, and she told them to stay down. She glanced at Medrano on the operating table. He was no longer recognizable.

With her back pressed against the wall in the hallway, she moved quickly toward the rear entrance. Otto rushed back inside, sweat dripping down his face, his coloring so red, she worried he might be having a heart attack.

“It’s clear. No one back there, no cars or people in the parking lot or in the yards across the street.”

“You okay?” Josie asked. Her voice echoed in her head as if in a box, and the smell of gunpowder burnt her nose.

Otto wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “Jesus, I thought you were all dead. The staff okay?”

“They got the patient. That’s it.”

The two stood in the silence of the hallway, ears still ringing in pain from the gunfire.