I jumped from the car before the engine had even shuddered to a halt, leaving the driver’s door swinging into the highway draft.
When I reached her, she was dying.
Her skin was the color of curdled almond milk, slick with the cold, oily perspiration of cardiogenic shock. Her pulse at the carotid was an irregular, thready flutter—one hundred and sixty beats a minute, skipping every third contraction.
“Ma’am!” I shouted over the roar of an eighteen-wheeler tearing past three feet from my heels: “Can you hear me?! Don’t move!”
She couldn’t speak. Her vocal cords were locked in a laryngospasm.
Her right hand—veined, spotted with liver marks, but bearing a three-inch circular gold signet ring displaying an anchor crossed by an oak leaf—shot out with sudden, terrifying hydraulic leverage.
Her fingers clamped around my right forearm.
Not a weak, pleading grasp.
An iron, mechanical vise that dug through my suit sleeve, the gold ring biting straight into the bone of my ulna with enough linear force to leave purple hematomas beneath my skin.
