Neither officer looked at the bystanders. Neither officer issued a verbal challenge, asked a single diagnostic question, or paused for half a second to observe the clinical mechanics of what Adrian’s hands were doing.
"...eleven, twelve, thirteen—" Adrian was looking straight down at the woman's sternum, focusing on maintaining his two-inch depth, when a dark shadow fell across the pavement beside him.
Adrian glanced up just as Greg Lawson planted his boots less than thirty inches from Adrian’s face, extended his right arm, and depressed the trigger of the OC canister.
Chapter 5: Fire and Iron
A pressurized, amber-orange stream of liquid fire hit Adrian squarely across the bridge of his nose, his open eyes, his mouth, and his forehead.
Because Adrian had been breathing heavily through his mouth while counting compressions out loud, he inhaled an aerosolized mist of the chemical agent directly into his pharynx and trachea at the exact instant the oily resin coated his corneas.
The pain was not gradual; it was an instantaneous, blinding detonation behind his eyeballs. It felt as though someone had thrown a cup of boiling battery acid and crushed glass directly into his face. His eyelids slammed shut in a violent blepharospasm, refusing to open as the capsaicin bonded instantly to the pain receptors of his mucous membranes. His throat constricted in a terrifying laryngeal spasm, cutting off his air mid-breath.
Adrian screamed—a raw, strangled sound of pure shock and agony—as his hands instinctively flew up from the woman’s chest to claw at his burning eyes. Blinded and disoriented, he lost his balance and tumbled backward off the side of the woman, his hips and elbows crashing hard onto the unforgiving macadam of the trail.
Before he could even curl onto his side to cough out the chemical burning his lungs, two hundred pounds of tactical gear and fury hit him like a freight train.
Daniel Cruz lunged forward, releasing his grip on his holstered pistol to grab Adrian by the collar of his sweat-soaked compression shirt and the meat of his left shoulder. With a violent, twisting heave, Cruz wrenched Adrian over and slammed him face-first onto the rough asphalt four feet away from the unconscious woman.
The impact drove the remaining air out of Adrian’s lungs. The side of his face—already screaming in agony from the chemical burns of the pepper spray—scraped hard across the grit and pebbles of the pavement. Cruz dropped his right knee squarely into the center of Adrian’s upper back, right between his shoulder blades, pinning his chest to the ground with crushing weight, while Lawson stepped in and stomped his boot down near Adrian’s ribs, grabbing his right arm and wrenching it backward at an unnatural angle.
Through the roaring white noise of pain, blindness, and suffocation, one single, overriding terror pierced Adrian’s mind.
The patient.
Nobody was compressing her chest. Every second he lay pinned on the asphalt, the blood pressure he had spent four agonizing minutes building up inside her cerebral arteries was dropping back to zero. Her brain was starving right next to him.
"She’s—she’s having a heart attack!" Adrian choked out, his voice raspy, breaking, and thick with mucus and tears as he fought to draw air through his swollen airway against the weight of Cruz’s knee on his spine. "Stop! Please! She needs CPR! I’m a doctor! She has no pulse!"
Above him, Greg Lawson grabbed Adrian’s left wrist, yanking it back to meet the right with brutal force. Lawson wasn't even breathing hard; his voice dropped down from above, ice-cold, sneering, and utterly devoid of doubt.
"Shut up," Lawson spat, pressing his knee down onto the back of Adrian’s thigh as he reached for his handcuffs. "It’s always your kind committing these crimes in broad daylight."
A wave of horror, colder than the burning on his skin, washed through Adrian at the words. He wasn't dealing with a chaotic misunderstanding that would be cleared up in two seconds; he was dealing with two armed men who had looked at his dark skin and erased his humanity before they even stepped out of their car.
"Listen to me!" Adrian gasped desperately, his face pressed against the hot asphalt, tears and nasal discharge pooling beneath his cheek as his eyes burned like hot coals. "Check her pulse! She’s in cardiac arrest! I’m an ER doctor at City General! Somebody has to do compressions or she’s going to die right there!"
Daniel Cruz let out a harsh, barking laugh from right above Adrian’s neck, the sound dripping with performative mockery.
"Yeah, right," Cruz scoffed, twisting Adrian’s left arm higher up his shoulder blade until the rotator cuff popped with a sharp spike of pain. "A doctor. Sure you are, pal. Save the fairy tales for the judge."
Click-click-click-click.
Lawson ratcheted the steel handcuffs around Adrian’s wrists, squeezing the metal teeth down several notches past the point of contact until they bit deeply into the radial nerves and tendons of Adrian’s wrists, cutting off circulation to his hands. He didn't double-lock them; he intentionally left them ratcheted tight enough to bruise the bone.
Then Lawson leaned down low, bringing his face within inches of Adrian’s burning ear so his breath brushed against the side of Adrian’s neck. His voice was low, smug, and absolute.
"You’re going to jail for a long time, piece of shit."
Around them, the small crowd of joggers erupted in panicked, overlapping protests, though none of them dared step within ten feet of two amped-up officers whose hands were still hovering near their utility belts.
"What are you doing to him?!" the man in the yellow windbreaker yelled, holding his phone out as if to show the 911 call screen. "He was doing CPR! We watched her collapse!"
"Step back! All of you, step back off the pavement right now or you’ll be arrested for obstruction!" Cruz barked, standing up from Adrian’s back and sweeping his hand toward the bystanders in a threatening arc. "Clear the scene! This is an active crime scene!"
Adrian lay pinned on his stomach on the sun-baked asphalt, his hands locked in steel behind his back, his eyes welded shut by blinding chemical fire, every breath feeling like he was inhaling ground cayenne pepper and shards of glass. Blind though he was, his mind could picture the exact geometry of the tragedy unfolding thirty-six inches away from his head.