Carter Reed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tire Iron
Calla finds Nico Ferraro with a gun on her friend Tori in the hospital garage, swings, and kills him; she calls the one number her brother left her and Carter answers.
At two in the morning, I found a man holding a gun to my best friend's head.
I had just finished a twelve-hour shift in the St. Anselm's emergency room.
My feet hurt, my scrub top was stuck to my back, and all I wanted was my car.
The hospital garage was nearly empty on level three.
Tori's laugh echoed off the concrete before I saw her.
It wasn't a real laugh.
It was the thin, scared one she used on drunks at the bar.
I stopped behind a pillar and listened.
"Nico, come on," she said. "You've had a few. Let me call you a car."
I leaned out and saw Nico Ferraro with Tori backed against the stair rail, one hand in her hair.
The other hand held a black pistol against her temple.
He wore a grey suit that cost more than my car, and he was smiling.
Everyone in South Philly knew that smile, and everyone knew whose son he was.
Tori tended bar at his father's club, the Lantern Room.
For four months, he had been telling her she belonged to him.
"You made me wait," Nico said. "That's rude, Victoria."
"I'm not Victoria. I'm Tori. I'm working a double tomorrow."
"You're not working anywhere I don't own."
There was no time to dig for my phone.
My trunk was fifteen feet away, and in my trunk was the tire iron.
Wyatt had put it there the week I got my license.
He'd said, "Girls should always have a long piece of metal."
I walked, quiet in my work clogs, to the trunk and got it out without a sound.
It was cold and heavy in my hands.
I came around the pillar and said, "Nico."
He turned his head, but he didn't move the gun.
His eyes went over me, scrubs and badge and all, and he laughed.
"A nurse. Great. Go home, sweetheart. This is a private conversation."
"Let her go."
"Or what?" He looked at the tire iron. "You'll fix me up afterward?"
"Calla," Tori whispered. "Go. Please just go."
I did not go.
I took one step closer, and then another.
"There's a camera on every level," I said. "Security is on its way."
It was a lie, but my voice was steady.
Nico's smile slipped by half an inch.
He shoved Tori hard to one side, and she hit the rail and slid down it.
Then he pointed the gun at me.
"Wrong night to be a hero," he said.
I swung before he finished the sentence.
The iron caught his forearm with a crack I felt in my own teeth.
The gun went off.
The sound was enormous, and a bullet chewed a hole in the concrete behind my head.
Nico screamed and the pistol hit the floor and skittered.
He came at me with his good hand, grabbing my parka and slamming me into a car.
I smelled whiskey and cologne.
His fingers closed around my throat, and the garage went white at the edges.
I heard Tori scream my name.
I swung the iron again with everything my shoulder had.
It caught the side of his head, and his hand let go.
He staggered backward, and the rail caught him at the hip.
He went over it without a word.
I heard the fall, three floors of silence and then one flat, wet sound.
I stood there holding the tire iron.
My throat burned, and Tori was crying beside me.
I went to the rail and looked down.
Nico lay on the concrete with his neck at an angle I knew from the trauma bay.
I knew, from the way nothing in him moved, that no one was going to bring him back.
"Is he," Tori said. "Is he..."
"Yes."
"Oh God. Calla. Oh God."
I took her face in both hands, the way I did with scared patients.
"Look at me," I said. "He had a gun on you. He had it on me. You hear me?"
She nodded and shook.
Down below, a car door slammed, and men's voices started shouting in Italian.
Nico never went anywhere alone.
I grabbed his pistol off the floor and dragged Tori down the stairwell on the far side.
I had no plan except to keep moving.
We got into my car, and I drove out through the exit with the lights off.
My hands would not stop shaking.
There was something hard in my parka pocket that had not been there before.
It was a phone, black, with a crack across the screen.
Nico's.
It must have fallen in when he grabbed me.
I did not turn around to throw it back.
On a red light three streets away, I opened my wallet with a trembling hand.
Behind my license was a white card I had carried for two years.
My brother's handwriting.
Three words and a number.
Carter Reed. Only him.
Wyatt had pressed it into my palm months before he died and made me promise.
"If it ever goes bad, Cal," he'd said, "you call him, and you don't call anyone else."
I dialed.
It rang once.
"Where are you?" said a low voice, flat and awake, as if he had been sitting up waiting.
"I don't know you," I said. "I'm Wyatt Swire's sister, and I think I just started a war."
There was a long silence on the line.
Then he said, "Stay where you are. Don't call anyone. Wyatt said you would call someday."
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