Page 54 of Patch

The charger hit the floor. She was through the side door before the charger stopped bouncing. The bell jingled. Her footsteps on gravel. Running. Fast. The panicked sprint of someone who had never been told to run before and was doing it on instruction alone.

I was two steps behind her.

My hand found the door handle. Pulled. Cold air hit my face. The parking lot spread in front of me. Gravel, three vehicles, the security light on its pole buzzing, throwing enough yellow to see shapes and not enough to read plates.

Headlights swept the lot.

Gerry’s battered Subaru pulled in from the county road. Slow. Deliberate. Slow enough to say a man had driven here on purpose at an hour when he had no reason to be here, which meant he had manufactured a reason.

I couldn’t reach him.

He was thirty yards to the front door. I was fifteen to my car. The side exit put me on the wrong side of the building. If I shouted, they would hear. If I did nothing, he would walk through that door into whatever was waiting.

He walked through the door.

He walked directly into the two men.

What followed wasn’t a negotiation.

There was a sound. Hard. Wet. The crack of something organic meeting something that wasn’t. I heard it through the open side door. Did not see all of it. Saw enough. Gerry on the floor of the waiting room between the plastic chairs and the rack of flea-prevention pamphlets.

My legs felt weak. I’d been in a room with a dying animal maybe four hundred times. I knew what the body did, and I knew what to do with my hands. I’d never once needed somebody to tell me to breathe.

I stood in the doorway with cold air on my face and couldn’t make myself move. The part of my brain that runs the count was saying airway, bleeding, position about a man who didn’t have an airway anymore. Then it stopped saying anything at all.

He wasn’t a villain. He was a tired man who took one payment and then couldn’t stop, and it didn’t matter. Villain or not, he was on the floor and the dark thing was spreading and the two men were turning toward the side door where I stood with cold air on my face and six years of my life crumbling behind me.

My car waited fifteen yards away. The key fob was in my jacket pocket. My hand found it. Pressed. The headlights flashed once. The locks clicked.

I ran.

Not shot. Not taken. Just running across gravel with the clinic at my back. Six years of that building. The steel tables. The autoclave that ran hot and had to be watched. The cabinet with the lock that wanted a thumb on the bottom edge. The log on the shelf under the counter with my initials down every page of it.

I was never going to be inside it again and I knew that while I was still running.

The car door opened. I got in. Key in the ignition. The engine turned over. I put it in reverse without looking back. Gravel spun under the tires. The headlights swept across the front of the building. Empty waiting room, dark treatment area, the side door still standing open where I had left it.

Gerry was still on the floor. I knew that without seeing it. The knowledge of something you’ve already decided not to go back for.

I pulled onto the county road. Both hands on the wheel. The speedometer climbed. Forty. Fifty. The trees pressed close on either side. My headlights did nothing but push against the black.

* * *

The compound gate swung open before I reached it. Leo stood at the post, radio in hand, and he didn’t check the list. Just nodded and pushed the chain-link wide. The club had protocols for everything except a woman driving too fast with both hands locked at ten and two.

I parked beside the clubhouse steps. Cut the engine. Sat for three seconds with the steering wheel under my palms and Gerry’s blood on the tile playing behind my eyes. Then I got out. The night air hit my face. Cold. October had arrived for good.

My dark blonde hair was half out of its tie. The right sleeve of my scrub top had a smear of parking-lot grime where I’d caught myself against the Civic’s fender during the run. I didn’t brush it off. Didn’t check my reflection in the clubhouse window. Just crossed the gravel with my boots making more sound than they should have and pushed through the front door.

Patch was already at the table. Phone out. Keys in hand. Posture squared the way it squared when he had a problem and a set of variables to work through. His reading glasses sat beside the phone. His cut was on. The silver at his temples caught the overhead light. He looked up when I came in. His eyes did the thing they did. Catalogued. My hair. The grime on my sleeve. The set of my shoulders that said something had happened and I wasn’t ready to name it.

I stood in the doorway.

Read the room. The phone. The keys. The operational focus in every line of him. A man who was sitting at a table waiting for the next piece to land.

I crossed the room. “Gerry’s dead.”

Nothing moved on him. Not his hands. Not his face. Not one thing.