Mind's Eye by Douglas E. Richards

as he had with her, using La Jolla and San Diego as locations to narrow it down, but he hadn’t had any luck. It had seemed like half of San Diego was named Nick Hall. But even after scanning through them all, he had gotten nowhere. Perhaps he didn’t live there after all. Or he was one of the few people on earth without a Facebook account.
    He called up directions to the nearest hospital, but even as he did so he concluded that taking Megan there would be a mistake. He vaguely remembered that hospitals were required to alert the police whenever they were visited by gunshot victims, and confirmed it on the web moments later.
    After a few minutes deep in thought he arrived at a plan, which he didn’t like at all, but which was the best he could come up with. He had no idea how much time he had, but he had to err on the side of extreme urgency.
    Hall searched cyberspace and located a nearby motel that was dirt cheap and off the beaten path, the Kern River Motor Lodge. He pulled into its gravel lot seven minutes later, having risked racing there at twice the speed limit where traffic would allow and having ignored five red lights.
    He left Megan in the passenger’s seat and entered the tiny shack that was the lobby, asking for a room that would minimize neighbors and maximize privacy. The attendant, an obese middle-aged man with a braided beard, didn’t seem to find the request the slightest bit unusual. Nor that Hall checked in as John Smith, paying in cash. All of which led Hall to believe that the motel did plenty of business with prostitutes serving married men concerned about their anonymity.
    Hall had chosen even better than he had hoped.
    He pulled around to the end of the stubby, L-shaped line of rooms and carried Megan inside. Her eyes fluttered open for a few seconds while he moved her, and she might have tilted her chin the slightest bit in a nod, but he couldn’t be sure.
    The room was small and dark, with nothing but a bathroom, bed, end table, and a small TV that looked to be ten years old. It smelled of mildew.
    Hall lowered Megan gently onto the bed and picked up the phone on the end-table, a relic of a bygone age when everyone didn’t have their own cell phone. It probably hadn’t been used in years.
    He dialed 9-1-1, and his call was answered on the second ring.
    “I’m in room one eighty-seven at the Kern River Motor Lodge,” he said hastily. “My wife was trying to cut open a package and stabbed herself in the leg pretty bad with a pair of scissors. She’s lost a lot of blood and can’t walk.”
    “Is she conscious?”
    “Yes. But send an ambulance as fast as you can. She may need some blood. So make sure the paramedic has O positive with him.”
    Even as he said this he looked it up online and realized this was unnecessary: O positive was the most common type of blood. He was getting facile at using the Internet, like it was just another part of his mind, and mining cyberspace for information was becoming as fast and effortless as calling up a well-known fact from memory.
    “We’ll dispatch an ambulance right away,” the young woman on the phone assured him.
    “Thank you,” said Hall in genuine relief. “And please ask the ambulance to kill the siren when they get close. Our baby and toddler are both sound asleep, and I don’t want to freak them out on top of everything else.”
    Five minutes later two men knocked on his door. An ambulance was parked in front, but without the siren it hadn’t attracted gawkers. Since it was the dinner hour, the motel was largely uninhabited in any case.
    Hall ushered the men in, each holding a canvas medical bag, and they sprang open a collapsible stainless steel gurney in front of them. Megan was on her back on the bed. Hall had elevated her leg on a stack of two pillows.
    “Please just fix her up here,” said Hall. “No need to take her to a hospital.”
    Hall read the mind of the shorter of the two paramedics, a Hispanic, and fished out his name: