The Immortal Hunter(13)

"You are shot," she said with dismay. "Why are you driving? You should-Have you bound the wound or anything?"

It didn't look to her as if he had. His short-sleeved buttoned shirt was black so she couldn't tell if there was blood on it, but the cloth lay flat on his upper chest without any bulk to suggest a bandage beneath. Dani reached out to pull the shirt away from his skin to check. What she found was a hole in his shoulder with dried blood crusted around it... and a whole lot of naked male chest. Forcing herself to ignore the naked male bit, Dani concentrated on the wound. It looked like the bullet had gone through the muscle below his shoulder blade, missing any bones. That was good news at least. There should have been more blood from the wound, though, and Dani could only think that he'd done at least something to stop the bleeding. But it really needed to be cleaned, the bullet removed, and bandaging applied.

"Stop that," Decker muttered, knocking her hand away so that the shirt fell back into place. "I'm driving here."

"Yes, well, you shouldn't be," she said firmly. "Stop the vehicle so I can have a look at it. Your friend here can drive."

"Justin," the friend said, reminding her of his name.

Dani ignored him and tugged on Decker's shirt. "Pull over."

"No. I'm fine. The bullet just grazed me."

Dani snorted. "It didn't just graze you, it went through your subscapularis."

"His sub what?" Justin asked with amazement.

"His subscapularis," Dani repeated, and when he looked blank, explained, "It's a muscle that starts under the shoulder blade and runs to the front of the upper arm. It rotates the arm inward."

Justin's eyebrows had risen up his forehead in amazement, and he now asked, "What are you, a doctor or something?"

"Yes." She turned back to Decker. "Pull over so I can tend your shoulder."

He merely shook his head. "We need to get to where we can get cell reception. We need backup and we need to track the SUV. Remember your sister?"

Dani bit her lip, torn between insisting he stop and keeping her mouth shut. On one side of the argument, he was injured. Gunshot wounds were nothing to mess with, and untreated could result in infection and even septic shock, which had a fifty percent chance of killing the victim. On the other side of the argument was her sister, who was still in the clutches of one of the men who had kidnapped them and who might even now be suffering hellish abuse.

"I've got a signal," Justin said suddenly, saving her from having to make a decision.

"Good," Dani said with relief as Justin held the phone up, his gaze concentrated on the screen. She turned to Decker and pointed out, "Now you can stop and let me look at your shoulder while he makes the call to track your vehicle and tell us where it is."

"How strong is the signal?" Decker asked, ignoring her.

"One bar," Justin answered. "But we're getting there."

Decker nodded.

"You might want to speed up," Justin suggested. "You're not going to get away without her tending to the gunshot. She's a doctor. That being the case, it may be better to let her see it sooner rather than later."

Dani frowned at the meaningful way he said the words. It felt like there was a silent message in there. If so, she didn't understand it. Decker seemed to, however, since he put his foot down and urged the van to a swifter speed. It made the ride much bumpier, and Dani found herself bouncing backward on the metal floor. When her foot knocked into something, she caught at both men's seats to steady herself, and glanced over her shoulder to see what she'd bumped into. Her eyes slid over lumpy shapes covered with some sort of tarp.

"What-?" she began, and then snapped her mouth closed after nearly biting off her own tongue as they hit a rut in the road. Rather than risk losing her tongue, Dani decided to find out for herself what lay beneath the tarp, and reached back to lift the closest edge. The old van's small overhead light cast shadows across the small pile of bodies revealed, but she had no problem recognizing the men who had kidnapped her and Stephanie. She was slower to understand what was sticking out of the chests of the ones that she could see and presumably the others too. It looked like lengths of a thick branch had been punched through their chests where their hearts would be.

"Two bars," Justin announced, and Dani glanced to the front to see that his head was still bent over the phone, watching the screen. He hadn't noticed her checking out the bodies in the back. She let the tarp drop back into place and shifted back to where she'd originally been, her mind in chaos as she tried to sort out the meaning behind what lay under the tarp.

The sight of the bodies didn't upset her; Dani had seen a lot of dead bodies while in medical school and she knew they'd been shot and most likely killed in the shootout in the clearing. It was the branches through their chests that had her mind running around inside her head like a small dog chasing its tail. What had been done to those bodies was not standard police procedure. Dani doubted defiling a corpse was standard procedure for an organization like CSIS either, and it suddenly occurred to her that she really had no idea who these men were except for what Decker had told her. She'd seen no badges or identification of any kind.

For all she knew, they could be a couple of nutcases as dangerous as the first six men.