by CJ Lyons
He gazed into my eyes, effortlessly read the lie there, and brushed my hip with his palm, an open invitation. “Right. Just checking. Call me.”
Then he was gone again. I turned back to the job at hand, ignoring Ryder’s amused look.
“So you and Voorsanger…” Ryder said as I finished stapling his laceration.
“Were married. Once. A long time ago.” It wasn’t a secret. “You do know I’m medical director of the Advocacy Center?”
“Actually, you never introduced yourself.”
I covered my chagrin by hastily clearing away the suture tray. Had I really not introduced myself? I snapped my gloves off and turned back to him. My chest and neck flushed with embarrassment. I’m not used to tripping up over little things like simple manners. It’s usually bigger things that get to me. Like my fight with the HMO that had deteriorated into a shouting match and still left Mrs. Kowacz stranded in my ER instead of in hospice care where she belonged. “I apologize, Detective.”
He pushed out of the chair and turned to me with a full-wattage smile. “No problem. Let’s start over. I’m Matthew Ryder.”
I took his outstretched hand and shook it. His hand was large enough to swallow mine whole, but he didn’t squeeze too hard. Instead, it was a brief, firm contact. “Angela Rossi.”
“Nice to meet you, Angela Rossi. If what Voorsanger said was true,” he jerked his head at the curtain Jacob had disappeared through, “and your shift is over, then how about joining me for dinner?”
I hesitated. Something I hardly ever do. Usually I’m the first to leap into a situation, trusting my instincts and my ability to tap-dance my way out of problems. But even I know better than to date patients or co-workers. Ryder fell under both categories. Still, something in me wanted to take him up on his offer. And I hesitated.
Hesitation is never a good thing in the ER. Moments of doubt are when patients die. Things happen at lightning speed during those moments, things you can never take back again.
Before I could answer Ryder, the curtain was thrown aside, and two security guards rushed in, carrying a woman’s body between them. “She was dumped out of a car, bleeding everywhere,” one said breathlessly as they heaved her onto the gurney. “Christ, doc, do something!”
Ryder jumped back, startled. I slammed the code alarm and reached for the woman’s head, checking her airway while controlling her C-spine. She was pale, her complexion almost matching the gray hair matted to her scalp. “Hand me that oxygen mask.”
He placed the non-rebreather mask onto the woman’s face as I wrenched her shirt open, exposing two gunshot wounds to her chest. A nurse jogged in to see what was going on, took one look, and shouted for someone to call a trauma code. She grabbed the monitor leads while I jammed a 14-gauge angiocath into the woman’s arm and hooked it up to a bag of saline, no pump or anything, just let it pour in.
“Sats are dropping,” Shari, the nurse, said once the pulse ox was hooked up.
“Bag her. Heart sounds are muffled. I have to needle her.”
Before I could try to drain the blood collecting around her heart, the monitors alarmed. “No pulse!”
“Chest compressions.” Damn it. This woman needed to be in an OR. Now. Instead, she was on a bed in a suture room with no surgeon in sight.
“Ryder, hand me that bundle, the one labeled vascular.” He spun around and rummaged through the shelf behind him, finally reaching the sterile vascular set.
“What are you going to do?” He handed me the instrument tray.
I wrenched the sterile sheets open, exposing an array of clamps, sutures, needle drivers, scissors, and a scalpel. “I’m cracking her chest.”
Shari’s hands stuttered in their rhythm and I saw the question in her eyes, but she knew we had no choice. She scooped up a bottle of Betadine and flooded the left side of the woman’s chest with the brown surgical soap as I snapped on a pair of sterile gloves. Ryder took over chest compressions without being told.
“Damn it, where is everyone?” I asked, holding the knife poised for a skin incision. I really, really didn’t want to do this: It was a last-ditch effort, doomed to failure, but the woman was already dead. It wasn’t like I could make her any deader.
“That MVA coded up in the ICU. They were rushing him back to the OR,” Shari answered.
“Hold compressions.” Ryder eased back, his face dripping sweat onto my semi-sterile field. Least of my worries—or my patient’s. I sliced through my patient’s flesh. I had to put some muscle into it, pushing my way through the tough connective tissue that held the rib cage together.
“Pull that apart and hold it.” I used Shari as a rib spreader. Sliding my hand between the ribs, I pushed the spongy lung tissue aside.
I held my patient’s heart in my hand. It felt boggy, like a half-filled water balloon. Pericardial tamponade. Fluid built up around her heart, strangling it so it couldn’t beat. From the amount of blood, there was probably a major vessel torn as well. One thing at a time. First, I clamped the aorta.
Next, I needed to release the tamponade. Cutting a simple flap in the membrane covering the heart would do the trick.
Except for one thing. I knew what I had to do. In fact, I could see the steps of the operation to create the pericardial flap and then repair any holes in her heart or blood vessels. I could see it all like a dizzying complex series of textbook pages flipping through my vision in 3-D Technicolor.
But I could not move. My body was locked into place, rigid, unresponsive to my brain’s frantic commands.
“I know her,” Ryder was saying. His voice sounded normal, as if there were nothing wrong. “It’s Sister Patrice. She works over at St. Timothy’s.”
“She’s a nun?” Shari said.
In my head I was cursing. Screaming. This woman was dying under my hands, but Ryder and Shari were too distracted to notice I was frozen, unable to move or function. Panic surged through me. Had I gone crazy? Was this really happening? How could they not see me standing here like a zombie, my patient dying right in front of me?
Then I realized it wasn’t only my voice I heard. There was music. Gorgeous, angelic chords so crystal clear they made my heart ache. Women singing. Ave Maria. The notes swirled around me, lifting me up beyond my body. Soaring and dizzy, I was looking down on the scene below me. Yet at the same time, I was tethered to the earth, totally paralyzed.
Panic and disorientation flooded me even as the music seeped into every cell of my body, bringing a sense of harmony and peace. The paradoxes tugged at my senses, leaving me reeling.
Then everything stopped, the world as frozen as I was.
I forgive you.
Who said that? It was a woman’s voice, each word sparking golden notes shining bright and perfumed with honey, but I couldn’t move or respond.
Help the girl. Save the girl.
The voice dropped to an urgent whisper, becoming bruised indigo blows against my flesh, strained with pain, copper-heavy with blood. A dying gasp—inside my head.
This was no time for a detour into The Twilight Zone. I was this woman’s last chance. Her only chance.
Anger sliced through my panic. Rage, fury, whatever it was, it burned hot. A fire raging inside me, out of control. My vision blurred, I couldn’t blink, couldn’t focus, couldn’t speak. Hell, the things I couldn’t do were infinite. Starting with saving my patient.
A shudder roiled through my body, and suddenly, I could move again. My hand spasmed, squeezing the woman’s heart, but no one knew except me. In fact, Ryder and Shari didn’t seem to have noticed that anything was wrong.
But I knew. Something was terribly wrong.
Shoving my fears and questions aside, I grabbed the scissors and sliced a window in the pericardium. I milked a blood clot out, did internal compressions, waiting for the heart to fill and start to beat on its own.
It never did.
CHAPTER TWO
Devon Price had spent the drive from Philly barricading his memories. From the
Town Car’s backseat, he watched as mountains turned to concrete and brick, ribbons of fog and rain obscuring derelicts and despair.
The Town Car slid to a stop. Devon stepped outside and glanced up at the weathered seven-story concrete slab with its 1970’s utilitarian design. His childhood home, Cambria’s notorious gang-ridden housing development, the Kingston Tower.
All the hopes and fears and pain and guilt that had driven him away hit like a sucker punch. Except he wasn’t a sucker. Not anymore.
Reining in his emotions, he took a breath. Despite the rain, the air stank of urine and unwashed bodies. “Some homecoming.”
He didn’t wait for his driver, Harold, to bring the umbrella, forcing the larger man to jog through the rain after him. Devon ignored the puddles of icy water and kept his focus on the walkway and stoop that guarded the Tower’s entrance.
“Become the change,” he muttered, taking in the Tower’s graffiti-covered concrete walls, the scattered trash, the broken windows patched with cardboard, plastic, and plywood.
Still, it was a definite improvement over when he was a kid and junkies shot up on the Tower’s stoop, creating an obstacle course to negotiate on the way to and from school. Devon had grown up here with the other invisibles, the wished-they-had-work, less-than-poor. Kingston Tower. His playground, his school, his prison.
When he left Cambria eleven years ago, he’d vowed to never return. He’d broken that promise. Had to.
She’d called.
A pair of shiftless gangbangers huddled in the entranceway, eyeing Devon and the Town Car with suspicion. Tyree’s crew. He’d noted them when the car pulled up to the curb—there had been three of them to start with.
“Word’s gone ahead. There’ll be a welcoming committee,” he told Harold as the taller man opened the umbrella and held it over Devon’s head. “Fair warning. Tyree will not be inviting us to Thanksgiving dinner.” He’d be lucky if the gang leader didn’t greet him with a MAC-10 on full auto.
Devon glanced at the car, wondering if it was a mistake leaving it here. Back in Philly, the black Town Car had become his trademark, differentiating Devon from the dealers with their white Escalades and the runners with their jacked-up rice burners. Thanks to his partnership with the Russians, Devon had moved beyond the street gangs. He now controlled his own operation, his own people, his own destiny.
At least he had until she’d called. Bringing him west through the Pennsylvania industrial wasteland, switchbacking over mountains and through his past until he’d finally arrived back where he’d begun. Cambria City. The Tower.
The prodigal returned home. No, that guy was greeted with feasting and parties. No one would be throwing a party for Devon, although some wouldn’t mind throwing him a funeral.
More like Hamlet. Except that hadn’t turned out so hot. Devon stared at the Tower, squaring his shoulders, stretching the Italian silk of his suit. Hamlet was a whiny-ass pussy. Not a street fighter like Devon.
“Everything’s ready,” Harold assured him. Devon’s second-in-command had a mind like a CPA, always calculating, collecting details, inside the body of a WWE wrestler.
“Remember, no guns.”
“The men have their instructions.” Harold nodded to the SUV pulling up behind them. A Yukon hybrid. Dima and Alexi had scoffed when Devon wrangled his way to the top of the waiting list at the dealership. Russians. They’d pinch a penny until it cried then waste a thousand on imported vodka. As thoughtless and greedy as the gangbangers but twice as ruthless.
Harold stepped forward as three more from Tyree’s crew appeared from the shadows in front of the building’s entrance, flanking the two already at the door, lining up on either side of the crumbling concrete stoop. Devon waved Harold back and faced the men. Time to run the gauntlet once again.
“Tyree says go up to his penthouse,” one of the original two said, holding the glass door to the Tower open.
Devon waited, his gaze targeting each member of his welcoming committee. They were a ragged bunch, even by Cambria standards. Unlike Philly gangs, these bangers crossed racial boundaries. Cambria was like that—progressive, leading the country in poverty for all. Tyree had gotten one thing right: silly to squabble about ethnic divisions when you could band together and rule. At least that was the line of bull he’d used when Devon was a kid. An equal opportunity exploiter.
The men—boys, really—lined up, some with fists ready, others assuming cocky postures modeled after hip-hop vids. The requisite gold caps and bling revealed their relative rank and worth to the Royales, Tyree’s gang. A variety of handguns, stuck into the waistbands of low-rider, too-baggy pants. Eyes cold, hard, bleak, and empty.
Despite their posturing, these punks wouldn’t have lasted a minute on any Philly street corner. Less than that going up against the Russians. Devon made certain his smile made it to his eyes as he strode past them, Harold on his heels. The doorman blocked their way, arms crossed in front of his chest.
“Just the Runt,” he said, nodding to Devon, using the label that had followed Devon throughout his childhood, back when he had worshipped Tyree and been a wannabe. Devon hated the name. So innocuous. As if Devon was powerless.
We’ll see about that. Devon paused to take the umbrella from Harold and folded it closed as he crossed the threshold. Didn’t want anyone getting seriously hurt. Not until he saw what Tyree’s intentions were.
Harold didn’t slow as he grabbed the punk by his jacket lapels and lifted him to the side. “Where he goes, I go. And it’s Mr. Price to you, bitch.”
They kept walking, ignoring the sound of a slide being pulled on a semiautomatic. Devon didn’t bother to look back, although he appreciated Harold’s bulk between him and the punk. Behind him, he heard someone muttering to let it go—what was a skinny-ass runt and one fat white guy against Tyree’s army?
Army? Devon rolled his eyes. He’d seen better organized Cub Scout troops. As he crossed the lobby, he did notice a difference. Despite the outside appearance of the Tower, inside, things were decidedly better. There was still graffiti, but no garbage, no junkies passed out in the corners, the floor could pass for clean.
Was this the work of Tyree’s so-called army? Or had the women of the Tower finally been able to make a difference in their environment? He hoped it was the latter. After all, that’s what his mother had devoted her life to. Before Daniel Kingston, owner of the Tower and most of the souls who resided within its concrete walls, had destroyed her.
Devon grabbed hold of the old anger and used it to bolster his resolve. Last thing he needed was for anyone, especially Tyree, to see exactly how difficult it was coming back here. Too many betrayals—too many people he’d betrayed.
Maybe this was a mistake. Eleven years was a long time. She would have changed, built a life without him. Stupid to return here, trying to reclaim a fantasy.
But she’d called. How could he not come for her?
Two more “soldiers” waited at the elevator. One to guard the door and the other to join them inside and punch the button to the seventh floor. The elevator had also changed. Used to be it worked only sporadically and was a great place to get jumped. Urine, feces, and used condoms had once littered the floor, and blood had seeped into the cracks in the fake wood-paneled walls.
Now it had walls of mirrors, shag carpet on the floor, and smelled of Pure 50 cologne.
“Surprised Tyree didn’t add some Muzak,” Devon said.
The punk manning the buttons nodded. “Had it rigged up. Man, it rocked, shook the whole damn building. But the speakers blew.” He shrugged. “Whatcha gonna do?”
“All the elevators like this now?”
“Hell no. This the only one running. Tyree’s private ride. You’re lucky he didn’t make you walk up the stairs like everyone else.”
“He has the entire seventh floor as his, ah, penthouse?”
“Oh yeah. For him and some of his top dogs, we have rooms up there. The ho’s as well. Gotta put them somewhere we can keep
an eye on them.”
Devon restrained himself. He couldn’t abide drugs or prostitution. The Russians had mistaken that for a weakness—at first. Until he showed them how to turn a higher profit for less risk. His financial savvy was the only thing worthwhile that he’d inherited from his father. “How about Tyree’s sister? She get to stay up in the penthouse?”
“Nah, man. Sister’d have none of it.” The punk turned to look at Devon for the first time. “You really gonna buy this place from old man Kingston?”
“That’s the plan.” It was a hastily constructed lie, a convenient excuse to cover the real reason for his visit home. If Tyree knew the truth, that Jess had called Devon, he’d kill them both.
While he’d cruised the block, taking stock of the situation, Devon couldn’t help but notice that every storefront had either a going out of business or a for sale sign on its door. Real estate prices what they were, Daniel Kingston had to be taking a huge loss. Devon had cash to burn—well, launder, technically. What better way to solve everyone’s problems than to buy not only the Tower but also the rest of the block?
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea’s sheer audacious poetry. He’d have to make the offer anonymously. Mr. Daniel Came Over On The Mayflower Kingston would never sully the family name by selling to a former resident, most especially Devon. And even though Tyree and his Royales ran the Tower as their turf, Devon was certain Daniel Kingston’s lily-white ass still controlled Tyree. No way in hell would things have changed so much that Daniel would have ever relinquished his hold on the Tower.
Devon had carved a niche for himself in the Russians’ sphere of influence. Surely it was time to declare his independence. Return home and finally make good on the dreams his mother and the women who’d raised him had had for him.
They had wanted him to become their champion. Had told him he had the power to make a difference in the Tower—their world.
Before Tyree had run him out of town with a death price on his head.
Back then, when Devon was seventeen, he’d been a reader, a lover, not a fighter. A runt.
