Read SEIZED, A Romantic Suspense Novella for Free Online

going to get close enough without making him suspicious? Would he make her go out of the room again? He hadn’t bound her hands like the others.
    Get the perp to talk. Get him to trust you. Keep him distracted, but calm.
    Dave’s words resonated in her head from all the times he’d talked about working a hostage situation. He always made it sound so easy. Of course Dave would be calm in a Tsunami. But he was right. Information was what they needed.
    “Paul, why are you doing this? Why kill Dr. Hodges?” she asked.
    “The bastard let her die,” he said, glancing at the dead surgeon with contempt. Then he walked over to the OR table where the patient slowly bled from the open wound in his leg. “They said she’d lost too much blood before they could get to her. How much blood is too much?”
    No one answered.
    “I said , how much blood is too much? How much does this other bastard have to lose, before he’s too far gone to save?” He turned and pointed his gun at the resident surgeon.
    Judy gasped and pressed herself against the wall.
    “God, no,” Karen said, leaning into Bill’s frame.
    Smith flinched, but didn’t cower, looking straight at the gunman. “About forty percent of his total circulating volume.”
    “Translate that into liters or pints, Doc.” Wilkes clicked back on the trigger.
    “Given his height and weight, the fact that he was young and healthy before he was shot and the average human has about five liters of fluid, I’d say about two liters.”
    Lowering the gun, the gunman paced the length of the room in front of the doors. The group let out a collective sigh of relief.
    “How much would you say he’s lost?” Paul asked.
    “That depends on how much he lost at the scene of the shooting and on his transport to the hospital,” Smith answered.
    He stopped and pointed the gun at the group again. “Give me an educated guess.”
    “His blood pressure is low, but stable. Pulse tachycardic, but again, stable,” Bill said, nodding at the anesthesia machine, which continually beeped out the fast heart rate and numbers blinked as the blood pressure fluctuated. “Dr. Hodges had stopped most of the internal bleeding, so he’s probably lost about one to one-and-a-half liters.”
    “Is it a painful way to die? To bleed out?” Wilkes asked, moving closer to the inert patient, the only movement, the rise and fall of his chest. “Is it an easy death or will he suffer? Did my wife suffer when she bled out?”
    “It would depend—” Dr. Smith started to explain.
    “On what?” Wilkes fixed him with narrowed eyes.
    The physician swallowed hard. “Was she conscious or unconscious at the time?”
    “I don’t know. They said she was…alive…when she went into surgery.”
    Pain laced Paul’s voice. Despite his current rampage, the loss of his loved one tore at Judy’s heart. She glanced at her friend and saw a tear running down Karen’s cheek as she understood his pain, too.
    “If she was still alive when she went in, then the anesthesia would’ve kept her from feeling any pain,” Bill spoke up.
    Judy suspected he wanted to ease the gunman’s mind with the truth. She’d seen one person bleed out while conscious in her life and it hadn’t been pretty or easy for anyone, not the patient or the staff.
    Suddenly, the phone on the wall rang, startling everyone, including the gunman, who turned to stare at it a moment as if he’d forgotten why he was in the OR. He blinked when it rang a second time then pointed the gun directly at Judy.
    “Answer it.”
    Careful not to make any sudden move with the barrel of the gun pointed at her, she slowly rose from the floor and walked to the phone. Wilkes hit the speaker phone as she lifted the receiver.
    “OR-4, Judy Edgars speaking.” If it was the SWAT team leader she wanted them to know it was her and hopefully they’d recognize her as Dave’s wife.
    “It’s Lydia, Judy. It’s been twenty minutes and I’m at the OR door like Paul