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across his forehead. Her bloody glove left a red smear on his cold skin. She could see out the windscreen that they were only minutes from St Vincent’s and she hoped they’d reach it before he arrested. She exchanged the almost-empty fluid bag for a full one and went for the pump chamber again. Kennedy’s eyes closed and he sighed. Thinking it was his last breath, she shot a glance at the monitor at the same time as she grabbed for his neck to feel his carotid pulse.
    The rhythm on the monitor continued, and his pulse still fluttered under her fingers. Kennedy opened his eyes. ‘See. You think I’m a goner too.’
    She took his hand and held it. ‘We’ll be at the hospital any minute. You just have to hang in there.’
    He looked up at the ambulance roof. ‘Write something else for me?’
    ‘You love her, I know.’
    He shook his head, a feeble movement. ‘It’s for the police. I know who stabbed me.’
    Lauren grabbed the paper and pen in her free hand.
    Kennedy’s hand squeezed her fingers. ‘His name is Thomas Werner.’
    Lauren felt like she’d been stabbed too. She stared at Kennedy in horror.
    ‘Write it,’ he gasped.
    ‘You’re sure it was him?’
    ‘Thomas Werner,’ he said, his voice getting louder. ‘Thomas Werner stabbed me!’
    Lauren saw Joe look up at them in the mirror. ‘Thomas Werner, I got it.’
    ‘I saw his face. Right there, against me, in the street. I know him.’ Tears ran from Kennedy’s eyes. ‘God help me, I know him.’
    Lauren scribbled on the paper. It was bloodstained from her gloves. She was shaking and blinking back tears.
Thomas Werner, oh Jesus.
    ‘How do you know him?’ she said.
    Kennedy wept. ‘I’m not a good man.’
    She scrawled this down too. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘The things I did,’ he said. He closed his eyes. He yawned, a sign of his falling blood pressure. She squeezed the pump chamber desperately, and saw through the windscreen the brightly lit
Emergency
sign.
    ‘Almost there, James.’
    He didn’t answer.
    ‘James!’ She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. He murmured once. On the monitor his heart rate was up to a hundred and ninety. She shook him again and shouted his name. She felt the ambulance jolt over the kerb into the bay outside Emergency. She palpated his external jugular, thinking about the time it’d take to have a go for a line there, whether the benefit of getting it outweighed the delay before going into Emergency. It didn’t, and as soon as Joe pulled up she was disconnecting the monitor leads, ripping off the BP cuff and kicking open the back door.
    Inside the resus room they lifted Kennedy onto the hospital bed and Lauren gave her handover to the doctor who scrawled notes and yelled instructions to his staff as she spoke.
    ‘Last obs were pulse one-ninety, beep seventy,’ Lauren concluded.
    ‘Hurry with that tube!’ The doctor turned back to her. ‘Got an ID?’
    ‘Here.’ A nurse held up the wallet she’d pulled from Kennedy’s pants’ pocket. The doctor rushed off and the nurse said to Lauren, ‘You want to copy down his details?’
    Lauren looked about for Joe. She needed to know how much he’d heard. ‘I’ll be back for them in a moment.’ She hurried from the resus room. Joe had looked in the mirror when Kennedy was shouting about Thomas, but that didn’t mean he’d heard the exact words. The siren was loud in the cabin, and his mind would have been on the road, not on the back of the truck.
    Joe wasn’t in the corridors or the staffroom. Lauren picked up her pace. The crumpled dressing packet was in her pocket. Nobody else had seen it. If he hadn’t heard what Kennedy said, what was she going to do?
    She was practically running as she went through the doors to the ambulance bay. ‘Joe?’
    ‘Here.’ He was standing with a police officer. ‘That was some job.’
    ‘You think he’ll die?’ the police officer asked.
    ‘Possibly,’ Lauren said.
    ‘More like probably,’ Joe put in.
    ‘But