Hollis grabbed a waterproof first aid kit from the table and unlatched it to take out a roll of clean gauze, winding it rapidly around his hand to make another pad.
“The damn wound’s still bleeding,” he said. “I’ve tried taping it shut, but no.”
“I’ll look. You start talking sense. Did you do this?”
“Hell no. The man’s a friend of mine.”
I knelt down beside the wounded man. His airway and breathing both checked out normal, and his pulse was steady. Pupil reaction when I lifted his eyelids looked fine, too. I didn’t see any sign of an injury to his head.
“How long’s he been out?” I said.
“Almost since I found him. He was more asleep than awake. I managed to get him up and walk with him onto the boat, but then he went out completely. That’s when I took off his coat and saw how much he was bleeding. Scared the hell out of me.”
I set the man’s arm carefully to one side. The cloth pad turned out to be two of Hollis’s undershirts, folded and held to the man’s abdomen by strips of athletic tape, which I peeled away. Underneath, more tape and wads of gauze made a red clotted lump. A sharp smell and yellow streaks on the skin underneath were evidence that Hollis had done what he could with iodine as antiseptic. As I looked, a drop of blood escaped the sodden bandage and fell onto the settee’s blue upholstery.
“His name’s Jaak,” Hollis said, “a sailor on the Finnish freighter Stellar Jewel. I sailed out on the Sound earlier this afternoon to meet him. Just a bit of information and a sample product to show me, nothing major. He was supposed to borrow a boat and meet me in Smith Cove. Instead I found one of the freighter’s launches drifting near shore, with Jaak lying inside. Out cold. It took all I had to drag him aboard.”
Pulling back the bandage with a finger, I saw a long seeping cut across Jaak’s side, with a wider puncture at one end. A blade had stuttered along the hard ribs until it found the softer flesh below.
“Stab wound,” I said.
“That much I know.”
“So why aren’t we talking to paramedics right now?”
“Because the man’s got no sailor’s card on him, no visa to be onshore. If I take him to a hospital he’ll be reported as illegally entering the country. At the very least he loses his job, and maybe the poor fool spends some time in jail here and in Helsinki to boot. But if we can get him back to the Stellar Jewel in one piece, his mates can cover for him. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, I’m sure that he needs surgery. Soon. Look here.” Hollis stepped forward, and I showed him a purplish blotch where blood was pooling below the puncture, blurring the skin down almost to Jaak’s kidneys.
“He’s hemorrhaging inside,” I said, grabbing latex gloves from Hollis’s kit. “We have to staunch the bleeding as much as we can. I need clean sponges. And duct tape.”
“Tape’s with the tools here,” Hollis said, removing a small tackle box from shelves in the galley. “I think I’ve some new sponges in the cleaning supplies.”
“Tear them up into pieces. About the size of a marble. Wash your hands well first.”
He hurried to comply.
“I can patch him, but field medicine doesn’t cover sewing up whatever’s sliced inside.” Keeping light pressure on the wound, I used my other hand and my teeth to tear off strips of duct tape, setting each one aside. I couldn’t figure why Jaak was unconscious. He wasn’t especially pale, and his pulse was solid. Not so much blood loss that a man his size should pass out. “He needs a doctor.”
“I have an alternative to visiting an E.R.” Hollis nodded. “I was about to give up on the idea, but then you arrived. Evidence of a grand design.” He brought me a cereal bowl filled with small ragged chunks of orange sponge.
“Hold the towel there,” I said to Hollis, indicating below the wound. “This will be messy.”
When I took pressure off, the stab wound opened again. Blood flowed down Jaak’s stomach, even as I swiftly began packing the puncture with pieces of sponge. The orange bits immediately swelled and grew saturated with blood. I pressed each of them gently into Jaak’s body, counting on the swollen weight of the massed sponges to slow his internal bleeding. Six pieces, seven, and then the wound would take no more.
I pinched the two halves of the puncture together and used the last chunks of sponge to mop most of the blood from his skin. The last of the gauze went on next. It would keep the wound clean of duct tape residue. I layered the strips of tape in Xs, counting on them to keep the skin over Jaak’s ribs from pulling apart. If the injured sailor was going to have surgery within the next couple of hours, I didn’t want to attempt suturing the wound and risk tearing his lacerated skin further. My makeshift bandage would stem the flow. If it held.
Hollis climbed to the helm on the flybridge above the cabin and started the Francesca’s engines. A moment later his VHF radio began blaring the same weather broadcast I’d heard only an hour before. I looked out the cabin window. Between the rain clouds and the dusk, the sky was already a step beyond black. Wind buffeted the masts outside, making their halyards clang like muffled gongs.
“Hollis,” I called.
“I know, I know. But we only need to sail as far as Vashon Island.”
“In a gale.”
“If you don’t want to get involved—”
“Come on.” Hollis and I had known each other long enough that the question was insulting. “What’s on Vashon?”
“A physician called Claybeck, in a lovely beachfront home with its own dock.”
“Tell the doctor to get ready,” I said, peeling off the gloves. Jaak’s blood had changed the latex from sky blue to deep violet.
“Thanks,” Hollis said. “I’ll cast off.”
“I’ll cast off. You get us moving. The faster we get across the Sound, the less chance we’ll all finish this day by drowning.”
Four
It took an hour to cross the furious Sound to Vashon Island. A full sixty minutes, as each ten-foot swell coming from the north lifted the Francesca like a bubble to speed beneath us, leaving the boat heeling precariously to starboard as it fell into the trough behind. Hollis did what he could to follow a course that kept the stern at an angle to the current. Allowing the looming walls of water to slam straight into the transom might have swamped us.
“How’s he doing?” Hollis shouted from the flybridge above. I caught the gist more than his actual words, smothered as they were by the laboring of the diesels and the latest wave’s reverberating boom against the hull.
I felt Jaak’s throat for his pulse while keeping a tight grip on the rope I’d used to lash the unconscious man to the settee. One hand for yourself, one hand for the ship, always. Especially when the weather was trying its hardest to toss you on your head.
“The same,” I yelled back. I checked Jaak’s pupils one more time. No dilation. His leg had twitched against the rolling of the boat a moment before, so I was halfway sure the sailor wasn’t about to slip into a coma. But there was no way to know how much blood he might be losing inside. Small blessing that he was out cold. The boat’s rocking was almost painful even without a knife wound in your gut.