Chapter 5: The Draw

The kitchen was clean.

I ran the oil, the salt, the coffee and the water through the centrifuge twice, and nothing in them was wrong.

I carried the results upstairs at nine the next morning and found Alessio in the basement doorway, waiting.

"Well?" he said.

"Your grandmother's food is safe."

"I could have told you that."

"You didn't know. Nobody's looked."

He followed me down the stairs.

The room was cold and bare. Rocco's men had put in a steel exam table, a lamp and a tray of instruments I had laid out myself.

"If it isn't the kitchen," Alessio said, "then it's what Schultz gave me."

"Yes. The supplement. You took it every night for a month, and your blood is still failing two days after you stopped."

"So it's already in me."

"It's in your marrow. I need to see how much."

He looked at the table, then at me.

"That means a needle in the bone."

"In the back of your hip. Ten minutes, and it hurts."

"Where do you want me?"

"On your stomach, shirt up, belt loose."

He took off the shirt.

I kept my eyes on the tray.

There was a scar high on his left shoulder, round and puckered, and a long white one under his ribs.

I did not ask about either of them. He had not offered.

He lay down on the table with his head turned toward me and his arms folded under his chin.

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