Joe reaches into his bag and produces a sealed sandwich baggie filled with a couple of dozen large oval-shaped pills. “One tablet every twelve hours until they’re gone.”
“They look like horse pills,” Gina says.
“They are,” Joe says. “But they are good for people, too, I think. Eight hundred milligrams of sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim.”
I take the bag and set it on the sewing table.
“I need to flush the wound now.” He looks at Gina and frowns. “Going to hurt, probably.”
“Of course it is,” she mutters.
“I’ll make it quick.” He picks up the syringe. “The good news is that the bullet didn’t hit bone or the joint. You are very lucky.”
Paper rattles as he unwraps the syringe and attaches a length of clear irrigation tubing to the needle hub.
Gina eyes the device with suspicion. “Please tell me you’re not going to stick that thing in my shoulder.”
“I’m going to fill the syringe with sterile saline solution, insert the irrigation tube into the wound, and flush away any foreign particles.”
“For God’s sake.” Raising her uninjured arm, she lowers her head and presses her fingers against the bridge of her nose.
“That same God was watching over you when this happened,” Joe says as he eases the plunger from the syringe, filling the barrel with the clear solution. He looks at me. “I think she’d be wise to remember that.”
I’ve got to hand it to Gina; she handles the procedure well. Over the next half hour, Joe flushes both wounds, front and back. It’s a messy, painful procedure. He then stitches the larger exit wound, leaving a drain tube in place. Finally, both wounds are bandaged. Throughout, Gina doesn’t utter a sound. Her expression remains impassive. If it weren’t for the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the damp hair at the back of her neck, I wouldn’t have been able to tell she was in pain. By the time Joe fashions the makeshift sling for her, she’s begun to shiver.
“Any special instructions?” I ask.
“Start those antibiotics now. Stay warm. Get some extra sleep. Drink a lot of water.”
“Drink a lot of something,” she says on a sigh.
I go to Gina and help her ease the turtleneck over her shoulder. “You did good,” I say.
Shrugging, the Amish man tilts his head to make eye contact with Gina and smiles. “She was nearly as good a patient as that horse.”
CHAPTER 6
They met in the parking lot of the diner in Franklinton. The food was an atrocity for the most part, made edible only by the concentration of fat and a generous amount of salt. The clientele was dodgy—par for the course in this part of Columbus—but mostly kept to themselves. The owner, a Ukrainian guy who had several aliases and could never quite explain where he came from or how long he’d been here, appreciated it when the cops came by for lunch or dinner or stopped in for coffee. Their presence, he said, kept the riffraff away. The waitresses felt safer walking to their cars or the bus stop at closing time. The sight of a city-issue Crown Vic with all the trimmings warded off even the most determined homeless who liked to sleep out by the dumpster at the back of the building. According to the owner’s wife, Mila, thanks to Columbus’s finest, the place hadn’t been robbed for going on two years now.
Damon Bertrand had been coming to this little hole in the wall the entirety of his career, which would span thirty years this month. During that time, the ownership of the diner had changed hands eight times. The name had changed at least six times. Once, the place had closed for two weeks without explanation and without so much as a sign on the door. In the course of a welfare check, the police discovered the owner’s body in the kitchen. He’d hanged himself with an electrical cord attached to the deep fryer.
Despite the seediness of the neighborhood and the dubious nature of the establishment and its patrons—or maybe because of those things—Bertrand would continue to frequent the diner. A bottomless cup of coffee was hot and bitter and free of charge if you had a badge. The pancake-and-scrambled-eggs breakfast was decent enough—mainly because even the most inept cook couldn’t screw up bacon. He thought maybe it was the one thing he’d miss when he retired.
The big silver Suburban rolled up next to his unmarked Crown Vic, headlights on, wipers waging a losing war against the snow. He watched the driver leave the cab, pull up his collar against the cold, and trot across the space between their vehicles. The door swung open, a swirl of snow blowing in.
“Hell of a day to be out.” Ken Mercer shook snow from his coat, his expression sour, as he slid onto the passenger seat.
“Welcome to Ohio in January,” Bertrand muttered.
“Yeah, well, one of these days I’m going to move to fucking Miami.”
The two men sat in silence for a moment, giving the rise of tension a moment to settle. Bertrand had known Ken Mercer for going on sixteen years now. He was a good guy, a good cop, and had recently been promoted to detective in the Narcotics Bureau. A husband and father of four, he coached Little League in the summer, counseled inner-city kids every other Saturday, and took part in the Division of Police fundraiser for juvenile cancer every Christmas. But Mercer also had a fondness for nice clothes, a small herd of kids to put through college, and a wife whose tastes he couldn’t afford. At just forty-two years of age, he’d already been with the department for twenty years. Like Bertrand, he was a lifer.
They’d ridden together back when Mercer was a rookie. They were like-minded and had bonded the way cops do. For years, they’d enjoyed weekend barbecues with spouses and kids, Friday-night beers at the cop bar over on Sullivant, and the occasional weekend at the fishing cabin on Lake Erie. It was the kind of relationship that suited Bertrand to a T. Simple. Beneficial. And easy to walk away from when you were through. He figured they had another year or two, until he retired, anyway.
Cursing beneath his breath, Mercer reached down and turned up the heat. “You get a line on Colorosa?”
“I got nothing and it wasn’t for lack of trying.” Bertrand looked at his passenger and frowned. “Last night was an epic fail.”
Mercer shrugged. “That raid was textbook. We—”
“Colorosa isn’t some dumb-shit drug dealer.”
“She knew we were coming.”
“No one talked to her, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Bertrand made the statement with conviction, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure who he could trust these days. “How’d we miss the pickup truck?”
Mercer sighed. “She must have figured we’d come for her. She was ready for us. Had a plan.”
“You search the place?”
“We tore that place apart. The house. The yard. Garage. We even searched the neighbor’s place. It wasn’t there.”
“She’s got it with her.” The thought made Bertrand frown. “Now we have people sniffing around things we don’t want sniffed. We need to find her. Get this cleaned up. No loose ends.”
“Blood we found at the scene hers?”
“Not back from the lab yet.”
“If she’s hit and goes to a hospital or clinic, we’ll know about it,” Mercer said.