He's just lying—" "Dispatch just put out a citywide alert on the commissioner's orders." Lawson shoved past Cobb, sprinting back to the cruiser. He yanked open the rear door. Matthew looked up, his eyes burning with a mix of fury and desperate exhaustion. "Let me out," he commanded, his voice deadly quiet.
Lawson's hands trembled violently as he fumbled with the handcuff keys. "Doctor—Dr. Ryan, I am so sorry. We didn't know." He didn't listen. The cuffs clicked and fell away.
Matthew didn't wait for an apology. He shoved his way out of the cruiser, his wet scrubs clinging to his skin, his wrists bruised and bleeding slightly from the tight steel. He looked at Cobb, who was now standing completely paralyzed in the middle of the flooded street, his flashlight pointing uselessly at the ground. Matthew pointed a finger at the senior officer. "You are going to leave my car right here.
You are going to get into your cruiser and you are going to drive me to Brighton Memorial Hospital with your sirens blaring. If you do not get me there in three minutes, Richard Hayes will not just take your badge, Cobb. He will bury you. Get in the car." The authority in Matthew's voice was absolute.
Cobb, stripped of his power and paralyzed by impending doom, silently obeyed. Matthew threw himself into the passenger seat of the police cruiser. Lawson jumped in the back. Cobb slammed his foot on the accelerator. The cruiser's tires spun, screeching against the wet pavement before catching traction and rocketing forward.
2:54 a.m. The police car tore through the city streets at 90 miles an hour, flying through red lights, the siren wailing into the stormy night. Matthew gripped the door handle, his jaw clenched, mentally running through the surgical steps. Aortic crossclamp, cardiopulmonary bypass. Anastomosis. He had to compartmentalize the trauma of the last 20 minutes.
He had to steady his hands. "Call the ER desk," Matthew barked at Lawson over the deafening siren. "Tell Dr. Jenkins I am three minutes out. Tell them to prep the donor heart and have the scrub nurses waiting at the ambulance bay." "Yes, sir," Lawson stammered, grabbing the radio.
As the glowing red sign of Brighton Memorial's emergency department pierced through the rain, Matthew unbuckled his seat belt. The cruiser hadn't even come to a complete stop when he kicked the door open. Matthew sprinted through the sliding glass doors of Brighton Memorial's ER, leaving a trail of rainwater and stunned nurses in his wake. He completely bypassed the main reception desk, throwing open the emergency stairwell and taking the steps two at a time to the surgical floor. At the scrub station outside O4, Dr. Sarah Jenkins was waiting.