Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  Quin repressed the slightly hysterical desire to laugh. For a man who was reputed to be the next best thing to a drug lord, Ramirez’s fear was absurd. “No, it’s not going to hurt. Much. You’ve left it so long, you’ve probably killed the nerves. You’re lucky you didn’t end up with an ulcer—or septicemia.”

  Quin uncapped the disinfectant and soaked a swab. She hovered over the boil, reluctant to start. Despite the fact that she hadn’t yet touched him, Ramirez flinched.

  Quin jerked back, almost dropping the swab.

  “Hurry it up,” he snarled, “before I decide I’m crazy for allowing a woman to put a knife in my back.”

  “Then stay still,” she snapped.

  Ramirez swore beneath his breath, then planted his forearms on the back of the chair and leaned forward so that the skin over the boil stretched tight.

  Taking a deep breath, Quin cleaned the area, picked up the scalpel and set a hand on his bare shoulder to steady him in case he flinched again. The last thing she needed was to stab herself in the hand with the scalpel—or, worse, stab Ramirez in the wrong place.

  Automatically, as her palm settled against taut muscle, she began to heal. The warm flow reached her palm, flowed into Ramirez, and abruptly, she hesitated. She had never thought about who the healing went to before. Always it had been for people in need, but most of those people had been what she would term “good.” They had usually come to the mission for help and weren’t running from the law with a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other. If she’d taken the time to make a conscious choice, she wouldn’t have healed Ramirez in that way, but it seemed that the healing energy didn’t discriminate.

  Taking another breath, she allowed the flow to continue and turned her attention to the swelling distorting Ramirez’s back. She had watched Hannah lance boils, but never one this big. The trick was to stretch the skin, then slice once, deep enough that the wound would drain properly, but if she sliced Ramirez too deeply, chances were he would turn around and shoot her. If she sliced him too shallowly, she wouldn’t get all the infection out, and he would come looking for her. Either way, the equation didn’t work in her favor.

  Gripping the scalpel and schooling herself not to squeeze her eyes closed at the crucial moment, she plunged it into the shiny tip of the boil. Liquid splattered the back of her hand, and Ramirez swore, jerking away from the pain. The muscles of his back spasmed, ejecting more pus and blood along with a glutinous lump, which oozed over the lip of the wound and slid down his back like a large, greenish slug.

  Gritting her teeth to control her instant gag reflex, Quin set the scalpel down and reached for the swabs she’d set out. The back of her hand might be coated, but thanks to the latex gloves, nothing had actually touched her skin.

  Minutes later, she applied a loose dressing over the still weeping cut, peeled off the gloves and handed Ramirez a bag that contained spare dressings. “Change the dressing every day. The wound will seep, but that’s what it’s supposed to do.” She dug into a pocket of the case and brought out a precious foil pack of flucloxacillin. Take two of these a day, and that should fix it.”

  Ramirez took the dressings and the antibiotics, then gingerly shrugged into his shirt.

  Quin’s gaze darted to Luis, where he was still standing sandwiched between two of Ramirez’s men, watching her like a hawk.

  At a sharp head jerk from Ramirez, the two men stepped away from Luis, and he warily made his way toward her.

  Quin quickly repacked the medical kit, disposing of the gloves and soiled swabs by shoving them in a plastic bag, bile burning in the back of her throat at the gooey mess.

  “Hey,” Ramirez said, his gaze catching hers, the goading gleam absent. “Thanks.” He watched as she packed the case, and she had the odd impression that he was at a loss as to what to say next.

  His palm settled on the case as she snapped it closed, preventing her from lifting it off the table. His dark gaze bored into hers. “What did you do?” he demanded. “With your hands?”

  One of the men muttered a crude aside. There was a rough shout of laughter from further back in the ranks, but Ramirez didn’t smile.

  Quin kept her expression impassive. She was surprised Ramirez had been aware of the healing. Some people felt it, some didn’t. Ramirez didn’t strike her as the sensitive type. “I just lanced the boil.”

  One of the men told Ramirez to let her go, and she recognized the man whose broken arm she’d strapped two years ago. Another gestured sharply toward the door, his urgency to leave unmistakable.

  Ramirez swore beneath his breath and finally stepped back.

  The second he released his hold on the bag, Quin straightened, gripping the case, more than happy to step closer to Luis.

  For a fractured moment Ramirez continued to stare at her, and she sensed that, despite his curiosity over the healing and the danger he was in, he was reluctant to give up his power play.

  Adrenaline surged as the tension increased. She could feel him teetering on the edge of a decision. Grimly, she waited him out, sensing that to move first was to lose.

  Taking a deep breath, she stared Ramirez in the eye. “You know, you should still see Lopez…just in case.”

  Ramirez gave a snort of laughter. “You know what, cara, I like you.”

  A shudder went down her spine. Ramirez liking her was the last thing she wanted.

  He tossed the antibiotics in his hand, still grinning as he swaggered toward the door. “Better go see your next patient, doc. Although you might have trouble fixing that one.”

  As the last member of Ramirez’s motley gang melted out of the warehouse, Luis ground out an oath and took a step forward.

  Quin caught at his arm, dragging him back. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He glared at her, face pale, jaw taut. “They might rip off the truck.”

  “And if they do, how are you going to stop them? I see they took your gun. Not that it would be much good even if you still had it.”

  He shrugged her hand off. “You thought it was pretty good earlier on.”

  “That was a mistake.” A potentially lethal one. “I’m sorry, Luis, I could have gotten you killed.”

  “Yeah, well, with that gang, just breathing could have gotten us both killed.” He stared out at the car park, which was now bare of everything but their truck, dust whipping off the ground in sheets. “The sadistic son of a bitch.”

  Quin gripped the back of the chair Ramirez had used, reaction setting in. Now that he and his men really had gone, she felt as if she’d been run over by a train. Her legs were wobbly, and her hands were shaking.

  Bad as the encounter had been, they had been lucky—incredibly lucky. If Ramirez and his men hadn’t been worried that Lopez, or any other of the townspeople, had called in the military, he might have continued with his cat-and-mouse game. She and Luis could have been killed—or worse.

  Luis touched her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Quin’s fingers tightened on her medical bag as her gaze skimmed the shadows and settled on a row of doors. “Wait. Just a minute.”

  She hadn’t gone through that debacle with Ramirez just to walk away without at least looking at the hurt stranger. Ramirez had said she would have trouble fixing him, which meant he was here—and still alive.

  Luis shook his head as if even the words she’d spoken were incomprehensible. “A minute?” he repeated harshly. “You want a minute? You’ve got thirty seconds, then we’re leaving. If I have to drag you out of here, I will.”

  Thirteen

  Tension gripped Quin as she checked first one door, then another, and finally stepped into a dim, airless room.

  She blinked, for a moment transported back in time to a small, dark cabin with a porthole letting in light, and then reality reasserted itself. There was no porthole, just a grimy window cracked at one corner. This room was altogether larger and dirtier—the floor thick with dust—and there were no metal lockers or bunks, just t
wo scuffed wooden desks that had been pushed together to form a crude bed for the patient.

  Her heart pounded as she stepped further into the room and studied what little she could see of him. He was wrapped in a blue tarpaulin—a corpse shrouded for burial, except for one small detail: his head was visible.

  A white bandage was wound around his forehead, and a thick growth of dark beard obscured the lower part of his face. For a moment she was convinced it wasn’t him, and something in her plummeted; then she noticed the saline drip attached to his arm.

  All the small hairs at her nape lifted as she walked toward him, gaze glued to the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Common sense told her it couldn’t be the same man she’d dreamt about—twice—but, so far, every detail was the same except for the beard. But then, a week had passed since she’d dreamed of healing him, in which case the beard made absolute sense. Unless one of the crew members on board the Volodya had taken the time and trouble to shave him, of course his beard would have grown.

  Disorientation gripped her as she peeled off the tarpaulin and the layer of blankets beneath to reveal a bandage swathing one shoulder and part of his chest. She peeled the blankets below his hips. Beneath a pair of plain drawstring track pants, the thick pad of a bandage wrapping his thigh was plainly visible. The medical details aside, it was the small scar on the man’s temple that set the seal on what was happening. The detail was too perfect to be denied. She had seen that scar, and she had seen him before—twice. But craziness or coincidence aside, the fact that the saline bag was empty underlined that the how and why of his existence didn’t matter; whoever he was, he needed help, and he needed it now.

  Dimly, she became aware of Luis beside her.

  “Hold this.” As she handed him the medical bag, memories of long summer evenings spent listening to Father Ignatius, his voice ancient and cracked as he wove mesmerizing tales of miracles and redemption, surfaced. Sick as the stranger was, conventional medicine would have to wait.

  Closing her eyes briefly, she whispered a prayer, then placed her hands on the stranger’s chest. Heat arced, the flow so fierce it made her head spin. For long moments the heat continued to flood through her into the almost lifeless husk lying in the shadows of the dusty office; then, as abruptly as it had begun, the healing stopped.

  Outwardly, there was nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had happened, but she felt the strange inner knowledge she’d come to trust settle inside her. He wouldn’t die now. He had stabilized.

  A small touch on her shoulder had her turning.

  Luis’s jaw was tight. “It’s time.”

  “We can’t leave him.”

  “And we can’t take him with us. He doesn’t have any passport or papers. I’ve checked.”

  Quin frowned, her focus still firmly centered on the sick stranger. The legalities, for the moment, were all but incomprehensible to her. “We’re taking him. We’ll worry about a passport later. We can put him in the back of the truck.”

  Luis eyes slitted. “He’s rat bait. He’ll be stinking by the time we hit the pass.”

  Quin’s temper flashed. “If I have to, I’ll drag him myself. You can watch, or help.” Methodically she removed the shunt in the man’s wrist, slid her hands beneath his shoulders, hooked her arms under him and pulled upward.

  “Don’t do that!” Luis snapped, exasperated. “You’re too skinny. You’ll break your spine.”

  Gritting her teeth, Quin managed to lift the man’s shoulders and head, but it felt as if she was hauling on a sack of wet cement. Lean as he was, he was still too heavy for her to shift. She eased him flat. “Then you’ll have two cripples on your hands.”

  “No, I won’t,” Luis said coldly. “I’ll have one. You.”

  Quin held his gaze. “Help me.”

  For long seconds he didn’t move, and for a moment she thought she’d pushed too far and lost his support. Luis was hot-blooded and excitable, his existence almost as precarious as one of Ramirez’s outlaws, but always before he’d been loyal; it was a shock to think he might desert her now.

  He let out a breath. “What is it about this guy? Anyone would think he was special, when he’s just some sad gringo who happened to get himself in a fight. I oughta walk—”

  “But you won’t.” She grinned, relief and something perilously close to joy bubbling up inside her. “Get his feet.”

  His brows jerked together. “You get his feet. I’ll take his shoulders.”

  She moved quickly to obey.

  “Mother of God,” he murmured as he took the stranger’s weight, “he weighs a ton. The crocs are gonna be happy. Dinnertime coming right up.”

  Quin gripped the man beneath his knees, trying to secure her hold on the slippery tarpaulin. “The crocs won’t get him.” The words came out more vehemently than she’d meant, and Luis spared her a curious glance.

  She didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain the stranger would live. He was still unconscious, but Quin didn’t care. He was going to live, and she felt almost giddily happy.

  She didn’t know what she would do with him when he did wake up. He could be a murderer, a drug runner—a terrorist. From what she’d seen, two of the wounds, at least, looked like bullet wounds. After being abandoned by a shipload of hardened sailors, who usually looked after their own, the chance that he was a good man was so slim as to be almost nonexistent, but Quin couldn’t not help him.

  Luis grunted and swore as they eased the stranger free of the desk.

  They didn’t get him more than a few feet before Luis gave the order to set him down on the floor. “This isn’t going to work. We’ll have to drag him. The tarpaulin will slide on the concrete. He’s got enough blankets around him to act as a cushion.”

  Quin studied the door to the dusty office, which opened directly onto the warehouse. “Back the truck in. That way, we only need to move him a few meters.”

  “There’s no way I’m backing the truck into the warehouse. We shouldn’t have come here in the first place. We drag him, or we leave him.”

  Quin looked at the set of Luis’s jaw and decided he wouldn’t budge, but she wasn’t happy.

  “Okay then, we drag him.” It would be a smoother way to shift him, and, given his head wound, they couldn’t afford any unnecessary jolts.

  Minutes later, they emerged through the warehouse door into the glare of full sunlight. The sea breeze had turned into a stiff wind, whipping at the waves and creating a fine, hazy mist that obscured the distant, jagged line of the mountains.

  It took long minutes to rearrange the load on the back of the truck to make room for their passenger, and create a makeshift bed out of blankets and clothes. As they worked, Luis cursed nonstop, looking over his shoulder every few seconds to check that Ramirez and his gang weren’t sneaking up on them, or, almost as bad, if Lopez and the militar had arrived and caught them red-handed trying to assist an illegal immigrant.

  The next hurdle was lifting the unconscious man onto the bed of the truck without hurting him. They found that while lifting the stranger off the desk and lowering him to the floor of the warehouse office had been difficult, trying to elevate him was impossible. In the end, they resorted to stacking boxes of tinned goods to form a crude set of steps.

  Hooking his hands beneath the stranger’s shoulders, Luis once again took the brunt of the man’s weight as they negotiated the stacked boxes.

  Once their patient was settled, they began repacking the supplies around him, wedging him in tightly, only leaving space for Quin to sit so she could support his head. Head wounds were tricky things, and she had no way of knowing how serious this one was. Without cushioned support, the bumpy ride would likely finish him off.

  Quin wedged the medical bag next to where she would be sitting, climbed over the supplies and watched as Luis picked up the end of the rope that was used to tie the tarp down. “You were right. Eventually we’re going to need a passport for him.”

  Luis’s expressi
on was incredulous. “Huh! I’m finally right. Now I suppose you expect me to come up with a passport?”

  “Not you, but you must know someone.”

  He dropped the rope and jabbed his chest. “Why must I know someone? You think I’m a criminal or something?”

  “You knew Ramirez.”

  “So did you.”

  Quin wasn’t about to be fobbed off. “I’ve only seen him. You know him.”

  His jaw clamped. “I do now.”

  “Well, all right then. But, you’ve got contacts.”

  “I might know someone, who might know someone else who could help you, but…”

  “It’s going to cost, I know—”

  “Yes, it’s going to cost, and I don’t even know if it can be done.”

  “Then I’ll ask someone else.”

  “Cristo. You would. Look, I’ll make some inquiries, but I don’t know…”

  “Try.”

  He stared at her in frustration, then jerked his head, indicating that she should take her seat. “I don’t know why you’re going to all this trouble for a stranger. You should turn him in. It’s not as if you can afford to support him. Last time I heard, the mission was flat broke.”

  Quin clambered to the rear of the truck, careful not to bump their passenger. “Then you heard wrong.”

  Her jaw tightened grimly. She was lying through her teeth, and Luis knew it. They were broke—for the moment—and she didn’t know what to do about it. They had barely been able to pay for their supplies, and she could only chop so much wood and grow so many vegetables in a day. The mission was large and sprawling, with draughty, high-ceilinged rooms that were hard to heat in winter. The mechanics of their daily existence aside, the buildings themselves were crumbling; the plaster cracked and decaying, the roof tiles gradually disintegrating. The process was slow but inevitable, which didn’t change the fact that it would break Hannah’s and Olivia’s hearts to give up the mission. “The mission doesn’t turn away people who need help. He’s a good man.”

  Luis jerked the rope through an eyelet in the tarp. “From where I’m standing, all I can see is that he’s a man.”