Chapter 2 - The Suture Line
Dr. Luc Pelletier did not ask questions. In his line of work, questions were liabilities that bled off billable hours and invited subpoenas. He set his leather field bag onto the mahogany low table, pushed aside an antique decanter of rye without looking at it, and cut Wren Calloway’s soaked wool trousers from hip to knee with heavy trauma shears.
The fabric fell away with a wet, tearing sound.
Cormac Vale stood at the head of the leather sofa. His fingers remained braced against Wren’s collarbone, anchoring her to the cushions. Through the soaked silk of her blouse, her skin felt like river mud in January—leached of heat, slippery with shock. Her pulse fluttered against his thumb: rapid, thin, like a moth trapped in a mason jar.
“Through-and-through,” Pelletier muttered, snapping on latex gloves. The rubber snapped sharply against his wrist. “Low-caliber. Nine millimeter or a thirty-two. Missed the femoral artery by less than half an inch. She’s lucky.”
“She isn’t lucky,” Cormac said. His voice was flat, level, stripped of cadence. “She calculated the trajectory.”
Pelletier glanced up, his rheumy eyes narrowing behind bifocals, then looked down again. “Well, whatever math she did, she’s lost nearly two pints. If she’d spent five more minutes hailing a cab in the downpour, you’d be buying a pine box instead of antiseptic.”
The doctor drew a syringe of lidocaine from an amber vial. When the needle bit into the raw, ragged perimeter of the entry wound, Wren gasped. It was not a scream. It was an involuntary hitch in her diaphragm, her spine arching off the leather as her heels dug into the sofa cushions.
Her left hand shot out blindly, clawing for purchase.
Cormac caught it.
Her fingers locked around his palm. Her nails were short, square-cut, practical—the hands of an engineer who drafted by hand and handled rebar on job sites—and they bit into the meat of his thumb with terrifying strength. She was shivering violently now, teeth chattering so hard he could hear the enamel click.
“Steady,” Cormac said. He did not pull away. He tightened his grip until his bones met hers, offering her a solid axis against which she could brace. “Look at me, Wren.”
Her eyelids fluttered, heavy, wet with sweat and rain. Her eyes—slate-gray, usually sharp enough to find a shear failure in twenty feet of poured concrete—struggled to align on his face.
“The... the drive,” she whispered. Her lips were gray.
“It’s on the floor,” he said. “Safe.”
“Delacroix... they took her, Cormac.” A tear leaked from the corner of her eye, cutting a pale track through the soot and dried blood on her temple. “They went to the apartment before I could get her out. They took Sable.”
Pelletier began irrigating the wound. Wren’s entire frame stiffened; she let out a choked sound, her knuckles turning bone-white in Cormac’s grip.
Cormac did not look at the wound. He looked into her eyes, keeping his face entirely immobile. A storm was assembling behind his ribs, dark and methodical, but he gave her none of it. She needed a foundation, not a fire.
“Where did they take her?” he asked.
“The dry docks,” she breathed, fighting the anesthesia as Pelletier began the deep-tissue closure. “Algiers Point. Berth nine. Julian Delacroix... he said if the audit reached the federal registrar, she goes into the river in a drum of quick-set.”
“Julian said that?”
“He was... he was waiting behind my stairwell. He shot me when I ran.” Her head rolled back against the armrest, her pupils expanding as the local block took hold and the exhaustion pulled her under. “He said you wouldn't back a dead engineer’s marker. He said you were a ledger man. Just... numbers.”
Cormac’s thumb traced the tense tendon in her wrist. “He doesn't know how I keep my books.”
Her grip loosened. The tension washed out of her fingers one by one until her limp hand lay curled in his open palm. Pelletier worked quickly, the curved needle dipping and looping through shredded muscle, the thread whistling faintly with each pass.
Teague returned through the heavy double doors, moving with the silence common to men who had spent their twenties in forward reconnaissance units. He held a black umbrella that was dripping onto a rubber mat, and a plastic evidence bag containing Wren’s rain-soaked purse.
“Two cars idling at the corner of Magazine and Julia,” Teague said without preamble. “Unmarked Ford Tauruses. City registration, but the plates are cold. Delacroix’s private muscle.”
“Did they see her come up?” Cormac asked.
“She came through the loading bay off the alley,” Teague replied. “Left a smear on the service gate. If they have a spotter on the fire escape, they know she’s in the block. They haven't breached. They know who owns the building.”
Pelletier tied off the final stitch, snipped the nylon, and smoothed a sterile dressing over the wound. “She needs fluids. Half a liter of saline now, another before sunrise. She cannot walk on that leg for seventy-two hours minimum, or she’ll tear the fascial repair.”
“She won't walk,” Cormac said. He released Wren’s hand, smoothed the soaked hair back from her forehead with an efficiency that surprised even himself, and stood up.
He walked to the window. Outside, Magazine Street was slick as an oil spill under the streetlamps. Two blocks down, the yellow parking lights of a sedan flickered through the sheet of falling rain.
“Teague,” Cormac said.
“Sir.”
“Bring the car around to the freight elevator. We move her to the Garden District house. Pelletier travels with her.” Cormac picked up the brass compass from his desk, turned it once in his palm, and set it down precisely parallel to the blotter’s edge. “Then take six men to Berth Nine. Don't breach. Don't engage. Just pin Julian Delacroix inside that perimeter until I arrive.”
Teague hesitated. In eleven years, he had hesitated perhaps three times. “You're going to Berth Nine yourself?”
May you like
“Julian Delacroix shot a woman under my contract,” Cormac said softly. His eyes reflected the yellow glare of the streetlamps below. “If I don't answer that with iron, the city will think I've started taking payments in IOUs.”
***
