Page 26 of Patch

So I called her, and she asked two questions, and I knew I’d need to get her. She was ready in fifteen minutes when I’d told her twenty. Came down the metal stairs outside that dry cleaner with a kit in one hand and her hair already coming loose and got in the truck without a word about any of it.

The whole drive and she said maybe six sentences, four of them about the drain. Leo checked her name against the list at the gate like I’d told him to and waved us through. I watched her clock the whole compound on the way in. Not nervous. Counting. Clubhouse, member houses, the gap between the porch light and the dark, where the fence ran. I know that habit because I’d had it for twenty years. I’d just never watched somebody else do it from the passenger seat of my own truck.

Freak was on the couch in the Prospect townhome with his arm in the sling and a beer in his good hand. “Doc’s here,” he announced.

“Put that down,” she said.

“It’s one Goddamn beer.”

“It’s one beer and a course of cephalexin. Put it down.”

He put it down.

She unzipped her kit on the coffee table and everything in it was laid out in the same order it had been laid out in at the clinic. Gauze left, tape middle, scissors right. It looked like it had been packed with a ruler.

Two fingers on his wrist, eyes on her watch. Then the drain bag. She held it up to the light and her face changed about a millimeter. “You’ve been sleeping on that side.”

“Maybe I’ve been having exciting dreams.”

“The drain doesn’t care about your dreams. It cares about gravity and the fact that you weigh one-eighty and all of it’s been parked on a gunshot wound because you won’t sleep on your back.”

“Back sleeping’s for dead men and babies.”

“So’s sepsis. Your call.”

I watched him decide whether to keep going and decide against it, which is a thing I’ve never once in twenty years seen a man do.

She peeled the dressing. The drain site was red and warm and working its way toward something. I know what a wound looks like going bad. I’ve seen a hell of a lot of them, all from about six feet away.

“What’s it say?” Freak asked.

She didn’t answer him. Her hands kept going, slow at the tape edges, slow in the way of somebody who knows exactly what’s underneath and is in no hurry to find it.

“You think the scar reads dangerous or clumsy,” he said. “I’ve got money on clumsy. My whole damn life’s been good ideas carried out by the wrong guy.”

Nobody laughed. She irrigated it, and then she said, “This is going to hurt,” and then she did something to the edges of that drain site with a swab that made him hiss through his teeth and dent the beer can he wasn’t supposed to be holding. “Jesus Christ.”

“I warned you.”

“Warn harder, damn.”

“I’ll work on it.”

In no time at all, it was dressed and taped and she was stripping her gloves.

“Fever over one-oh-one-five, redness spreading more than two fingers past the margin, or cloudy output,” she said. “Any of the three, you call. Not tomorrow. Not when it’s convenient. When you see it.”

“Understood.”

“And you’re on reduced activity until that drain’s out.”

His mouth opened. Closed. “And when it’s out?”

“Then you’re in the clear.”

Then she held out the used dressing, palm up, without looking for a trash can and without asking. Just held it out, the way you hold something that belongs to somebody else.

I got the biohazard bag out from under the sink and held it open. She dropped it in. I tied it off and set it by the door.