Chapter 4 - The Safe House on Tenth
The brownstone on Tenth Avenue looked like twenty others between Thirty-Fourth and Fortieth—dark brick, soot-stained cornices, and heavy oak double doors that had been painted black so many times the grain had disappeared under a skin of lead paint.
Nora hauled Dante up the three stone steps, her shoulder jammed firmly under his good arm, her boots leaving wet, red-tinged prints on the frozen granite.
"The lock," Dante muttered, his head lolling against her shoulder. "Third key on the brass ring in my left pocket."
Nora fished the heavy ring out of his coat, her fingers shaking so badly she dropped it twice against the iron keyhole before the latch finally clicked with a deep, oily thunk. She kicked the door open, dragged him inside into a narrow vestibule that smelled faintly of beeswax and stale pipe tobacco, and let him slide down onto a horsehair settee that looked like it had been salvaged from an estate sale in 1950.
"Don't touch the light," Dante groaned, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow and rapid. "Desk in the corner. Bottom drawer. The brown bottle with the red label."
Nora didn't ask questions. She crossed the dim, high-ceilinged room—furnished with heavy mahogany shelves crowded with leather-bound ledgers and old maritime charts—and found the desk. The drawer was unlocked. Inside sat a bottle of Meyers' rum, a roll of sterile gauze that looked like it had been bought during the Carter administration, and a heavy, professional surgical kit in a hinged tin box.
She brought them back to the settee, ripped the cork out of the rum with her teeth, and splashed a generous amount over her hands and the blade of a small, curved scalpel she found inside the tin.
"This is going to hurt," she said, kneeling beside him.
"I’ve had worse," Dante rasped. "My first wife cooked Italian."
Despite the grim joke, Nora could see the gray pallor spreading from his neck up into his temples. He was going into shock. The blood loss from the grazed rib and the internal leakage was catching up with him, and the makeshift bandage had soaked through to the horsehair beneath him.
"Shirt off," she ordered, her voice dropping into that cool, unyielding register that brooked no argument.
She sliced the remains of his ruined wool overcoat and linen shirt away with two clean strokes of the scalpel, exposing a torso covered in old, overlapping scars—bullet holes, knife tracks, and the broad, pale track of an old bypass surgery. Right between the eighth and ninth ribs, the flesh was bruised purple-black, with a small, ugly hole where the slug had torn its way through muscle and settled near the descending aorta.
"It’s too deep for field extraction," Nora said, her hands steadying as she pressed her fingers lightly around the entry wound. "If I go in without a retractor, I’ll nick the vessel. You’ll bleed out on this couch in forty seconds."
Dante opened his eyes. They were remarkably clear, though the pupils were dilated to pinpricks. "Then use the clamp in the middle tray."
"I don't have an OR nurse, Dante. I don't have suction. I don't even have a clean towel that wasn't sitting in a damp basement."
"You have two hands and a nursing degree from a school that cost more than my first car," he said, his voice dropping into a harsh, steady rhythm. "Cut the muscle, find the lead, pull it out. If I die here on the horsehair, you walk out the front door with twenty thousand dollars in cash from the bottom desk drawer. It’s behind the false back."
Nora stared at him—really stared at him—for three long seconds.
"You're a bastard, you know that?" she whispered.
"I've been told," Dante muttered, closing his eyes again. "Get on with it. Tony’s going to realize that box didn't have batteries in about twenty minutes."
Nora picked up the scalpel. Her hands didn't shake. The years in the simulation labs, the late nights hunched over pig tissue in the anatomy annex, the cold, clinical detachment she’d thought she lost the day her mother died—it all came rushing back, flooding her veins with an ice-cold focus that burned away the fear, the cold, and the memory of the river.
May you like
"Hold still," she said.
The first cut was silent.
