Callie

by Cate Morgan

  Callie awakened on her stomach, bare skin pressed against cool satin sheets and her cheek pillowed in the nest made of her folded arms. Her head pounded dully from too much champagne the night before, and her body ached from too many late nights out. Too much dancing, and, later, loving. Johnny’s energy in both courts was prodigious.

  She knew keeping up with her new lifestyle would soon prove impossible, but she found it equally difficult to deny Johnny anything. Quite frankly, she didn’t want to. And he insisted he enjoyed spoiling her, so she let him. What could be the harm?

  Exhaustion, for one. After nursing all day Johnny sent a car round to collect her for the evening and take her home to change. She would bathe and dress for the evening, and the car would then take her to whatever swanky restaurant Johnny was dining at that particular evening, and then they would hit the speakeasies and jazz clubs until the wee hours. And then Johnny would take her his opulent rooms in the Stevens Hotel, and in the morning the whirlwind would begin again.

  She wondered at the intense attention he paid her. He wanted to know everything about her: where she had been born and grown up (Chicago, of course), who her parents were (Tom and Maggie Trevelyan, both dead in the Great War), why she had turned to nursing (her mother had been one, and her mother before her). She found it a little off-putting—if flattering—to be the target of such questioning. He even asked her—as he plied her with mimosas during their first Sunday brunch in his hotel suite—what she thought of Prohibition.

  “I think,” she said, raising her glass with a smile, “it’s a law of unintended consequences.” And returned to her perusal of Lipstick’s column in The New Yorker. Johnny got copies from yet another associate, and she’d taken to it.

  He was so tickled by her response he toasted her with her own words at a dinner party that very night.

  In comparison she knew little about him. He touted himself a businessman, but Callie strongly suspected he made a significant portion of his seemingly endless income from bootlegging. Of course, in the height of Prohibition, who wasn’t? There were a reputed five thousand speakeasies in Chicago alone, many of them private residences.

  This seemed to amuse Johnny endlessly. “Nothing pays the way to Hell,” he said once, when Al Capone had made the papers yet again, “quite like good intentions.”

  “Paves,” Callie corrected, lighting a cigarette. “Paves the way the Hell.”

  “That, too.”

  A tumult sounded outside the bedroom door. Callie rubbed the grit from her eyes and sat up, drawing the sheet over her naked breasts, and waited.

  Johnny entered the bedroom. His stunning blue eyes that seemed to see straight into her deepest desires slid from her bed-mussed hair to the string of pearls he’d gifted her with the previous night, still roped around her neck, and he smiled. “Dinner may be delayed this evening.”

  Callie reached for her cigarette case—silver, and from Tiffany’s. “Oh? What’s the problem?”

  “There’s been a shooting.”

  Callie stilled, ice water trickling through her veins instead of blood. She shut the case and whipped the sheets away so she could slide from the bed. “Who’s hurt?”

  “Two men employed by a business associate. He couldn’t call anyone else. No police, no hospitals.”

  In other words, a bootlegger. Or, it occurred to her, something far worse. Chills pervaded her once more, and she forcibly shook them off. Criminal or not, she was a healer—and someone needed her help.

  She threw on a thin robe and knotted her matted hair into a makeshift bun anchored by its own weight. “Take me there.”

  Her first impression when she entered the sitting room was one of noise. Second, was of blood mixed with gunpowder.

  It was a scene she knew all too well. Prohibition in Chicago had brought the Beer Wars, and with it, an unprecedented amount of violence as the Irish and Italians strove to pry one another from Chicago—complete with open shootouts on Michigan Avenue. Despite all this, arrests were few and far between, and hardly ever stuck. What few police weren’t on the open take were more than willing to let the gangs kill each other off. Never mind innocent bystanders.

  One man lolled in a wing chair between swigs of whiskey as his leg bled like a sieve. The second was stretched out on Johnny’s couch, pale as the corpse he seemed to be. In addition, there was an awful lot of shouting going on between the two victims and two unharmed cohorts.

  Callie went to the man on the couch first, reasoning anyone well enough to guzzle fine whiskey could afford to wait a bit. He turned on his side, coughing blood.“I need a bucket of ice, and wash cloths from the bathroom, please,” she instructed the room in general. A few moments later the front door of the suite opened and closed as one of the other men went to find ice. She turned her attention to Johnny. “Without access to X-ray, it’ll be impossible to see if he’s got internal bleeding,”

  “Do what you can.” His expression was avid as he watched her work. She got the impression he was searching for something. But then the phone rang and he turned away to answer it. “Ah, Mr. Capone. I wondered when you’d be calling.”

  Capone? As in Al Capone, media darling and friendly neighborhood gangster? Callie filled a wash cloth with ice and pressed it against her patient’s ribs. “Hold this here,” she told the man who brought her the ice. “Ten minutes on, ten minutes off until he’s breathing normally, but get me if he passes out. Got it?” She didn’t wait for an answer but turned her attention to the gunshot victim. “Let’s see it.”

  He took another healthy swig of whiskey and fumbled with his belt before shoving his pants down around his legs. His upper right thigh was a mess. “You gonna dig it out?”

  “I am.” She turned to the two heavies still upright. “Help me get him up onto the dining table. This won’t be pretty.”

  Meanwhile, Johnny was assuring Mr. Capone all was in hand--to little avail, it seemed. “My young lady is handling things superbly. No hospitals needed at this juncture.”

  Johnny was then forced to hold the receiver away from his ear by several feet at the gangster’s response. “What? You got that god damned Irish moll of yours cutting into my men? Get her out of there!”

  Callie and the fourth heavy struggled to get the gunshot victim onto the dining table, who landed with a thud and a groan. “He thinks Moran set us up on this job,” he said.

  Callie flushed with anger. She supposed she was a moll, and Irish to boot. But first and foremost, she was a healer. She also possessed a fearsome temper.

  She charged over to Johnny and snatched the phone from his hand. “Mr. Capone? The ‘god damned Irish moll’ here. Consider yourself informed that I’m also a nurse, and a damned good one at that. Therefore I will, with or without your permission, treat the injuries of your men regardless of how they were acquired. Because that is what I do.” She slammed the receiver back into Johnny’s grasp with a glare and returned to her patient.

  Callie whipped the leather belt from the man’s belt loops in one smooth pull and used it as a tourniquet around the injured leg. “Give me a sharp knife, a lighter, and alcohol. Now.”

  The heavy handed over a switch blade, while Johnny brought her his butane lighter. The patient thrust what remained of the whiskey her in hand. She dumped half over his leg, the rest over the knife blade before setting it on fire. “Give him a towel to bite down on.”

  “Can you get it?” Johnny asked with interest, having hung up on the still spitting and cursing Mr. Capone. He leaned over to watch her work, careful not to block her light.

  “Yes.” Callie placed her hand on the man’s bare leg, closing her eyes as she as her head swam a little from lack of sleep. But she’d told Al Capone the truth: she was a damned good nurse, and she’d cut her teeth on car accidents, stabbings, and gunshot wounds over the last few years. She mused that if Capone wanted someone to blame his men finding themselves in her care, he could flip the bird in the nearest mirror. “Hold him steady, no matter what.”r />
  It wasn’t pretty, as she sliced open the meaty part of his leg. But with a minimum of fuss otherwise, she had the crushed bullet in her bloody, triumphant fingers. It was been one of her cleanest extractions.

  “Well done, my love!” Johnny crowed. “How do you feel?”

  Her dizziness increased as she wrapped clean towels around the wound. “Tired.” Her head swam again, full tilt as the bright light of the chandelier overhead filled her vision. She swayed on her feet.

  Johnny caught her. “Back to bed with you, I think.”

  “I should clean up first,” she said, looking down at the blood on her robe and over her hands. “I’m a mess…” The light in her eyes seemed to fill her body to bursting. What was happening to her? She checked her forehead to see if she had a fever—she was burning up. “Johnny?”

  “I’ve got you.” He swept her up into his arms.

  She passed out.

  THREE

  Several weeks later a large gift box arrived for her at Johnny’s. He was at a breakfast meeting when it arrived, and she assumed—it being Valentine’s Day—the box had come from him. She didn’t recognize the silver-gray emblem on a deep purple field, and noted the expensive quality of the silk ribbon tying it all together.

  Callie opened the card first, and grinned at the untidy, florid scrawl within:

  “For the god damned Irish moll--you're quite a broad.