The Surgeon Got a Blade and I Got a Clipboard, So I Decided Who Lives novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Hold

Shannon bargains with the crew boss for his dying brother in front of the waiting room, calls the order a monster will take them in, and reaches Rank Two holding the boy alive, until the crew boss warns that his uncle the Bondsman wants the pharmacy.

I'd had guns pointed at me in that bay before.

I'd never had one pointed at me by a man with a band on his wrist.

His said Enforcer, Rank One.

He was maybe twenty-four, in a white T-shirt gone brown with blood, and his hands were steady.

"Pharmacy," he said again. "Downstairs. You got the key."

"I don't have the key. Pharmacy has the key."

"Then you're going to walk me to pharmacy."

Behind him, the back door of the SUV hung open.

A boy lay across the back seat with his eyes half shut.

He was sixteen at most, with the same chin as the man holding the gun.

There was red over him, and a dark spot at the top of his left thigh.

"That's your brother," I said.

The gun didn't move, but his eyes did.

"Crab got him on Collington," he said. "Took a piece of his leg."

"He's got about twenty minutes."

"Then hurry up and give me the pills."

"The pills won't help him. I will."

The waiting room doors had slid open behind me.

The people from last night were standing in them, the man with the walker and the mothers with their kids.

A guy in a Ravens jacket stood behind them with a shopping cart he never let out of his sight.

Thirty-some people, all watching a nurse argue with four guns.

Calvin had set his stretcher brake and stepped to my side.

"Kilbane," he said quietly. "Pick a different hill."

"This is the hill."

I looked at the crew boss.

"Here's the deal. Your guns go in that man's shopping cart. The pharmacy stays shut. I take your brother right now, and he lives."

He laughed, and his crew laughed with him.

"Lady, you got a nurse class. I heard about you on the way in. They gave you a clipboard."

"They did."

"So what's the clipboard say about me?"

I looked up at the parking garage across the bay.

There was a crab on the edge of its roof, three stories up, gray against the morning.

It was green all over, without a scratch on it, and it was watching the blood on the SUV's back seat.

"It says that thing on the garage is coming down in about ten seconds," I said.

Every gun turned to the garage.

"It'll go for your guy by the SUV door first, because he's standing in your brother's blood."

The young man by the door looked down at his sneakers.

"Then you, because you're closest to the car."

"Then nobody, because the lieutenant is going to kill it."

Calvin sighed and took off his reading glasses.

"I'm going to kill it?"

"You're going to kill it."

The crab came off the roof.

It landed on the SUV's hood and went straight for the young man by the door.

He fell backward over the curb, and it turned for the crew boss next, just the way I'd said.

Calvin stepped in between.

His band flared, and he put his fist through its shell.

The crab folded around his arm and stopped moving.

Calvin shook crab off his sleeve and put his glasses back on.

"I hate when you're right," he said.

"Then you must hate me a lot."

I didn't wait for the crew boss to decide.

I climbed into the back of the SUV and put both hands on his brother's thigh, high, where the dark spot was.

The boy's red flickered toward black under my palms.

"No," I said. "Not in my bay."

Something hot went from my hands up my arms.

[Rank Two. Hold.]

The pain hit me a second later.

It was the boy's pain, in my own left leg, like somebody had poured gasoline into the bone.

I bit down on my lip and didn't let go.

The color over him stopped sliding.

It stayed red, and it stayed red, and it didn't get any darker.

"Get the attending," I told Calvin through my teeth. "Tell him Bay Two, and tell him I'm coming in attached."

They lifted the boy out of the SUV onto Calvin's stretcher with my hands still on him.

I walked beside it all the way to Bay Two, bent over, holding on.

The attending took one look and said, "Don't let go of him."

"I'm not planning to."

I held on for forty minutes while he worked.

When he finally said, "Okay, Shannon," I took my hands away, and my legs folded.

The boy's color was yellow.

Calvin caught me under the arms and set me on a stool.

"You're shaking," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You're gray."

"I'm forty-one. That's my color."

When I came back out to the bay, the crew boss was standing by the shopping cart.

Every walk-in from last night was still in the doorway, watching him.

He looked at them, and then at me.

Then he took the clip out of his gun and dropped both in the cart.

His three men did the same, one after another, while thirty people watched.

The man in the Ravens jacket wheeled the cart inside without a word.

"He's going to keep the leg," I said. "He'll need a week here."

The crew boss nodded.

"Thank you," he said, and it cost him something to say it.

Then he got back in the SUV with blood still drying on its back seat.

"I'd lock up that pharmacy better," he said. "My uncle bonds out half of East Baltimore. He sent me for those pills."

"Tell your uncle the pharmacy's closed."

"You don't tell the Bondsman things are closed," he said. "He's going to come get it himself."

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