‘I think he wants to be. I think he’s not ready to be in some Elderly Storage Facility. Too bad he’s a diabetic. I friggin’ hate diabetes.’ I do. There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Neither I nor medical science knows how to tell the islet cells to start making insulin again. It’s frustrating.
The radio shrilled, its piercing tone cutting short our conversation.
‘Medic 20, respond to 300 Broadway, Dugan’s Lounge, in the rear parking lot for the man down.’
‘Joy,’ I muttered. ‘20 responding,’ I said into the mic.
‘Drug interaction between alcohol and gravity, you think?’ Nique asked.
‘Probably. It’s six at night so the regulars will have been there long enough to tie one on.’
‘Eh,’ she said, ‘lightweights if they’re already in the parking lot.’
‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘Or real hardcore drinkers vomiting in the alley to clear the decks for round two.’
‘Oh, that’s disgusting.’ She winced. ‘How do you even come up with stuff like that?’
‘That’s just halftime at a Danet family reunion,’ I grinned.
‘There’s more like you at home?’ she asked. ‘You’re not some random fluke to embarrass a decent middle-class Franco-Irish family? It must be that Irish blood. My Mémère told me to watch out for your kind.’
‘Hey, I’m the white sheep.’
I pulled the ambulance down the narrow side street past the bar and into the potholed parking lot. There were many, many bars in Philips Mills. We used to joke that nobody dies of thirst in this town. Each filled a niche, served a certain population. Medics, EMTs, cops and firefighters generally drank at the Harp, which had Guinness on draught, good food and halfway decent live bands on the weekend. Plus the local college students tended to hang there, so there was always some relatively clean, young, freethinking tail, unlike most of the dives in town. Dugan’s fell at the other end of the scale of bars with Mick names. Working class who didn’t work, swilling Bud, Miller High Life or Keystone from bottles, or generous shots of low-end vodka, scotch or bourbon. Food was stale chips and seldom-cleaned bowls of peanuts that half the patrons confused with the ashtrays. No entertainment unless you counted spontaneous disjointed spoken word pieces and fistfights. We actually got called there once at closing time because a guy died and nobody noticed until they tried to throw him out so they could lock up.
Pissed ’em off when we wouldn’t take him, as he was long since cold. The bartender was horrified he had to wait for the Medical Examiner. Actually asked if we could write a note for his loanshark to excuse him for showing up late.
We drove over to a group of raggedly dressed men in a corner of the lot, clustered around a man on the ground. They looked like the usual Dugan’s crowd, shaggy haired, skinny white guys dressed in dingy quilted flannel and blue jeans grey with dirt, ball caps and work boots. Pretty much like the crew at a construction project but not as clean.
A few turned and waved us over. People always feel the need to point to the guy on the ground, like they think we’ll take some random bystander instead. For once, there were no police, firefighters or nurses to get in the way, just a bunch of drunken white trash.
‘You comfortable with this?’ I asked Nique.
‘Coupla drunk scrotes?’ she said. ‘No problem. You?’
‘These are my people,’ I replied. ‘I speak fluent drunk.’
I put the truck in park and hopped down, heading around the back to pull the cot as Nique got the bag out of the side door.
I was at the rear door of the ambulance when I heard the tone of the crowd change. I didn’t exactly hear a scuffle, just a deliberate, concerted movement, which means trouble in any crowd, and more so in a crowd outside Dugan’s.
I took a few quick steps around the truck and saw two men break from the startled mob, unwashed alcoholics falling back in confusion as the pair, dressed the same as the rest but cleaner, better muscled and with a glint of determination in their eyes and knives in their hands, came at me.
At me. Not us. I noticed that part.
The closer of the two was almost on top of me as I rounded the truck. He lunged with his blade, and out of instinct I sidestepped, caught his sleeve and banged his wrist against the side of the ambulance. I put my whole weight into the move, dragging him off balance and slamming him against the truck. I drove a knee into his groin and, still clutching his wrist with my left hand, threw a few short, hard rights into his temple, his neck, his kidney. He went slack and I started toward the second man.
That guy shoved Nique aside and headed toward me, wary, knife held ready, low and close to his body. He knew what he was doing, which was bad. I was unarmed—no time to scramble for his buddy’s weapon. I had to hope I could hold him off, keep the blade out of my vitals until I got a clear shot, or Nique got away, and hope he wouldn’t have any more friends in the crowd.
I looked at Nique to see if she was hurt. I saw no fear or pain in her expression, just the offended shock only possible in a very pretty girl of French descent ignored and rudely pushed aside by a man.
She hit him.
It was a telegraphed punch. Possibly the least cunning fist ever thrown in or near Dugan’s, a place not known for subtle and strategic pugilism. If the guy was halfway competent, which he certainly looked to be, he’d see the blow coming and avoid it or hurt her very badly.
Except he wasn’t looking. He made the mistake of ignoring Nique. Few men do. Underestimate, yes, but ignore, well, that took a certain singleness of purpose. His eyes were on me and only me, so he failed to see the windup or the delivery.
For all its lack of guile, it was one of the most emphatic punches I’d seen in a long time. She cocked not just her arm, but her whole body, and uncoiled in a fluid, vicious snap like the strike of a cobra. Nique was a strong girl, used to lifting overweight patients and hefty gear all day, and she put a step, a twist of the hip, and all the strength of her shoulder, arm and wrist, as well as a large measure of Gallic indignation, behind her blow. It caught him, by careful aim or Divine providence, right in the jugular. Her fist met his neck with the sound a filet mignon makes when the butcher slaps it down on the counter.
The man dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
She looked at me, her face a study in righteous indignation. Her retreat to the truck was quick and efficient but dignified. She was leaving because she chose to, not because she was afraid to stay.
I’d been in enough retreats that I wasn’t concerned with the image I projected. My eyes darted back and forth like a hunted rat, scanning the crowd for threats.
I heard the first man moan and try to crawl, so I hastily applied a size nine combat boot to his solar plexus. As he folded up and retched, I snatched up his knife, brandishing it at the mob as I beat feet around to the driver’s door. The drunks still on their feet seemed as surprised by the events as we were, so I imagine they weren’t directly involved, but you can never be sure how a man’s going to respond to seeing a fight after a bellyful of Keystone and Mad Dog 20/20, so I wanted them to see the knife and take it into consideration.
I got into the ambulance without further violence, dropped the knife in my jacket pocket, and peeled out of the lot.
‘Medic 20 to Operations,’ I called. ‘Be advised, dispatch PD to this location. Patrons attempted to assault crew. We’ll stand by on Broadway.’
‘Received, P 20. You guys OK?’
I looked at Nique. She nodded.
‘We’re OK. Thanks for asking.’
‘P 20, head back to quarters. Police and Ambulance 36 will head over. 36, wait for PD. Do not enter the scene before the Blue Canaries.’
Nique turned toward me, her voice quick and loud, still riding the adrenalin of the encounter, ‘So what the hell was that? I thought these were your people.’
I shrugged, fear and anger draining away, leaving me shaking. ‘Dunno. Maybe they heard you make that Irish crack.’
As we drove away, Nique looked at me. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she commented.
‘What? Damn.’ I saw blood running down my left wrist and over the steering wheel. I inspected my left hand and saw a clean slice across the pad on the pinky side of my palm. I hadn’t noticed in the heat of the moment. I must’ve gotten that when I grabbed my attacker’s knife hand. Now that I saw it, it hurt.
‘Pull over in that parking lot,’ she ordered calmly. ‘I’ll clean it out and wrap it up.’
I pulled off the main street into the lot of a corner bodega, and climbed through to the back of the truck. Nique grabbed a bottle of sterile water from the cabinet, broke the seal and poured it over my cut hand. I flexed my fingers, just to make sure they worked. No tendon damage, which was good.
‘Looks like it went down to the fat pad,’ she observed. ‘You’re gonna need to get that stitched.’ She quickly dressed the wound with a four-by-four pad and some roll gauze. ‘How’s it feel?’
‘Not bad,’ I replied. ‘It didn’t hurt until I saw it.’
‘You should get it looked at anyway. I’ll drive.’ She grabbed a container of bleach wipes from the cabinet. ‘After I clean up the mess you made in the cab.’
‘You sure you’re OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Since I didn’t let them cut me.’
‘Silly of me not to think of that. Where did you learn to throw a punch?’
‘I’ve been doing Tae Bo and Cardio Kickboxing for years,’ she answered. ‘An ass this phenomenal doesn’t just happen.’
That explained why the punch had such nice form but so little guile. I prefer a sneakier and less pretty knee to the groin, myself. Can’t argue with success.
We drove over to the ER where I got my hand stitched and my tetanus shot updated. The doc confirmed that there was no damage to the tendons, gave me a note for a week off, since I shouldn’t be wearing sweat inducing gloves, obsessively washing my hands and lifting fat bastards with that cut on my palm. The stitches would come out in a week.
I would heal a lot sooner, but I didn’t tell him that. If he insisted, I was willing to not work for a week.
Chapter 6
I SLEPT IN THE NEXT DAY. I made a pot of coffee and let my body wake up slowly. After half a cup, I felt confident to make breakfast without hurting myself too badly. Fire and knives are dicey enough without a bandaged hand, but I wasn’t spending a week off eating cold cereal. A man has to have standards.
Peeling and cutting up potatoes and onions for homefries was the only challenging part. Bacon, eggs and toast were easy enough to do one-handed. I blanched the potatoes in water before frying them in some bacon grease from the cup I kept in the fridge. When the homefries were well under way, I placed two more slices of bacon in a second pan. Once they started to crisp up, I moved them to the side and dropped two eggs in the pan, letting them float in the fat. I put a slice of oat nut bread in the toaster. Gotta eat healthy.
When it popped up, I put it on a plate, arranged the bacon, eggs and homefries around it, then poured the excess bacon grease from the pan back into the cup. Never waste bacon fat. I’d learned that long ago, when starvation was a bigger concern for the average person than obesity. And it makes everything taste delicious. Butter flavored cooking spray is humanity’s worst idea since racism.
After eating, I dug out the knife I’d snagged from the scene of the assault. It wasn’t a common lock knife or even a hunting or combat knife, not any that I recognized. It was a knife-fighter’s weapon. The blade was six inches long, broad and single-edged, with a cross guard and a wire-wrapped leather grip. It wasn’t highly polished steel, but dark, with the rippled pattern of watered steel, which I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Along the back edge, near the hilt were some... symbols. Letters, maybe, but not that I recognized. I couldn’t even identify an alphabet.
Was the attack connected to the foreign patient who was asking about me?
I was sure it had to be. Not prove-it-in-court sure, but sure enough. A vaguely familiar accent I couldn’t place, a man looking for me, and then an attack with a knife with writing I didn’t recognize, all in the space of a week.
We don’t get attacked very often. Even gang members don’t generally mess with us. They know we don’t really have any agenda against them, and sooner or later every gangbanger will get shot or cut or one of his buddies will, and none of them wants the ambulance to be hesitant to get to his street. Once in a while a domestic-violence call might suck us in to the chaos, and drugs or alcohol or psychosis can make patients unpredictable enough to prove a threat, but that isn’t what happened at Dugan’s.
Those guys were stone-cold sober. That was a planned ambush.
* * * *
I killed the morning fairly unproductively. I didn’t have enough information to do anything more than make wild guesses.
That afternoon, I gave up and went by the local college and stopped in on the fencing class. I was technically a part-time student, since I took a class a semester, just to keep boredom at bay, and I knew the instructor from the fencing club. He was always happy to have an extra assistant to poke with a foil. I just wanted a distraction from thinking about the attack.
The concentration required to fence generally helped clear my head. It gave me the strategy, concentration and physical exertion, as well as the rush of competition I always enjoyed, without anybody needing to die.
I served as a practice partner for the class, and hung around to spar with Bill, the coach, for a bit. A few other students did the same.
‘Not tired of being hit by now?’ asked Bill, saluting and donning his mask.
‘Just so long as I can hit back,’ I grinned.
We came en garde, and after beating his blade against mine a few times, feeling me out, he lunged. I parried and threw a quick riposte at his chest, but he just managed to stop it, retreating back a step. I followed him with a strong feint, then disengaged under his parry, catching him in the shoulder.
After that, he tightened up his guard, stopping everything I threw and flicking his point out in rapid, deceptive attacks. He quickly racked up a few points on me.
I answered back, scoring one point through guile and another through pure luck, as he tried to beat my blade, missed and advanced, allowing me to pretty much lean forward and lay the point on his chest.
That annoyed him, and he shifted into higher gear, landing two more touches in rapid succession. Bill is a better fencer than I am. I’m not really a fencer at all. I’m a swordsman. For all that I love fencing, it’s just playing tag with blunt swords. My years of training were all geared toward keeping sharp steel out of me and putting it in the other fellow. My instincts are less about lightning flicks of the point and more about firm, decisive attacks and overly secure parries. I’m good enough to beat novices, and hold my own with experienced fencers, but a master can land five touches on me without breaking a sweat.
In a real duel, those five touches would be scratches that would hardly slow me down, let alone stop me shoving a foot of steel through him, but a touch is a touch.
Now that he had me panting, he drove me back, holding his guard close and making swift attacks, steadily advancing. I parried frantically, giving ground, not really launching any offense of my own.
Not seeing any ripostes, he pushed harder. As he came on, instead of retreating with a quick parry, I used a wide Italian lowline parry, sweeping his blade down and out with my guard while keeping my point in line with his body. I stepped into his attack as I blocked, driving my own point against his side.
‘Touché,’ he said, after a pause. He removed his mask. ‘Now what the hell was that?’
‘Counterparry with opposition in tierce,’ I replied, stepping back and returning his salute.
‘You could be really good, you know,’ he sighed as he shook my hand. ‘Your timing is dead on, your instincts are all good, but you parry too wide and hold it too long.’
‘I learned Italian style,’ I shrugged. ‘Ol
d habits are hard to break.’ Which was true enough.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Your name is Danet. Your ancestor codified French swordsmanship and you learned Italian? Nobody fences Italian anymore.’
‘My fencing instructor was old school,’ I replied. ‘He came from a different era.’ Again, true, but not the whole truth.
He shook his head in disbelief, ‘What am I going to do with you?’
‘Use this opportunity to learn how to stop an Italian counterparry.’ I grinned. ‘Look, I’m too old for the Olympics. I work too many hours to travel with a school team. I’m just here to play with swords. No point trying to make me a real fencer.’
I fenced a few students, just to see if ages of painfully acquired dirty tricks could still defeat the speed and strength of youth. Results were mixed. As we eventually cleaned up, I noticed a textbook in one of the students’ bags.
‘There’s a class on ancient languages here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she replied. ‘Professor Deyermond teaches it. It’s really interesting.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘If you’re into that kind of thing, I guess.’
‘Where’s Professor Deyermond’s office?’ I asked.
‘At the library. You can probably still add the class, if you want. It’s not all that full.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll see about it.’
Chapter 7
I MADE MY WAY TO THE LIBRARY directly from the gym. I did shower as a courtesy, despite my eagerness to talk to somebody about the inscription on that dagger, and walked into the building with wet hair, my fencing bag over my shoulder and a sloppy, one-handed, post-shower rebandaging job on my left hand.
Behind the checkout desk sat an attractive redheaded undergrad doing her work study with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for prison chain gangs. Her thumbs flew with blinding speed over the keypad of her cellphone. I asked her where I could find Professor Deyermond.
Without any perceptible loss of thumb speed, she looked up at me and tossed her head to indicate the rear of the building. ‘Back wall,’ she said, going the extra mile.
Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) Page 4
