They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Run
On the hottest day of the summer Bernadette puts Moira out of the car on Fulton Street, Eamon drives off, and the Don catches her instead of his men; Eamon's text shows he sold her.
At noon on the hottest day of the summer, my fiancé's mother stopped her car in the bus lane and told me to get out.
The bank sign across the road said 104.
The heat advisory had been on the radio since breakfast.
I was in the back seat with my right leg stretched along the cushion, the steel frame on my shin catching the sun through the window.
Two rods ran into the bone above my ankle and two more below my knee.
We were coming home from the clinic, where the surgeon had checked the pin sites and told me the frame would come off in nine days.
Bernadette Hourigan, my future mother-in-law, had been wonderful all morning.
She had carried my crutches in, bought me an iced tea and fixed my sandal strap when it slipped.
She had made me sit on the curb side, behind her, where the leg had room.
My fiancé, Eamon, was driving.
"Look at that, Eamon, they've got the air on in the clinic lot," Bernadette had said ten minutes earlier, laughing, and she had turned my vent toward my leg. "Tell me if you get a chill, sweetheart."
Eamon had squeezed my knee and said, "Nothing will touch you while I'm here, babe."
Now two black SUVs sat nose to tail in the mirror, close enough that I could count the men inside.
Bernadette climbed out of the front seat.
She opened my door from the outside.
"Out you get, sweetheart," she said. "Walk to the corner. They won't hurt a girl in a frame."
I looked at her. "Bernadette, what are you doing?"
"It's only for a minute. Eamon will circle the block."
She took my crutches from the floor and set them against my good leg.
She took my elbow.
Her hand was cool and steady and it did not shake at all.
"Eamon?" I said.
He didn't turn around.
"Just go, Moira," he said. "Please. Please, babe."
I got out because my body didn't know what else to do.
My left sandal hit the asphalt and the heat came straight through the sole.
Bernadette shut the door.
The Buick pulled out into traffic with Eamon's hands tight on the wheel and Bernadette's pearls shining in the front window.
Nobody at the bus stop said a word.
A teenager held up a phone.
Behind me, two SUV doors opened, and a man shouted, "Hey!"
So I ran.
It was not running.
It was a crutch, a hop and a drag of the frame, with every step jolting the rods in my shin.
The pavement was hot enough to burn through the rubber tips of the crutches.
I got thirty feet.
I heard boots slap behind me, fast and easy, in no hurry at all.
"Stop," a man called. "Lady, stop right there."
I did not stop.
My crutch slid on a patch of melted tar and I went down on one knee.
The frame rang against the road.
The pain went white and I made a sound I had never heard myself make.
The boots stopped around me.
Then a second voice, low and even, said, "Step back."
They stepped back.
I looked up through my hair.
A man in a grey suit stood over me with the sun behind him.
He was tall, dark-haired, and he wore a jacket in a hundred and four degrees without a drop of sweat on him.
He didn't look at my face.
He looked at the frame.
His eyes went from the rods to the pin sites, where blood had started to run down my shin, and his jaw went hard.
"Who put her out here?" he said.
Nobody answered.
"She ran," one of the men said. "We just wanted to talk to the Hourigans."
"On that leg." His voice stayed flat. "In this."
He crouched, slid one arm under my back and the other under my knees, and lifted me off the road.
I hit his chest with my fist.
"Put me down."
"In a minute."
"I don't know you."
"I know," he said.
He carried me to the shade of the second SUV, and another man dropped to one knee in front of us and laid his hands on either side of the frame.
"Pins are in," the man said. "One site's bleeding, nothing's pulled. Hold still, sweetheart."
He pressed a square of gauze to my shin and my eyes watered.
"That's Luca," the man in the grey suit said. "He's a medic. And I'm Damiano Corvino."
I knew the name.
Everyone who worked at Hourigan Freight knew the name, and nobody said it above a whisper.
He looked down at the frame again.
"Nine more days," he said quietly.
I had not told him that.
I had told no one but the Hourigans.
I opened my mouth to ask how he knew, and my phone buzzed in my shorts pocket.
It was Eamon.
Mom says it worked. Keep him busy till we're over the bridge.
I read it twice with Damiano Corvino's arms still around me.
"Bad news?" he said.
I held the screen up so he could see it.
His face did not change, but his arms did, and he held me a little closer.
"Get in the car, Ms. Keane," he said.
I thought about the road, the heat, the pavement and the Buick that was not coming back.
So I got in.
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